Sullivan & Cromwell is used to being an outlier, even by Big Law standards. The firm already maintained a black box partner compensation system, it continues with a single-tier partnership, and it doesn’t regularly announce lateral partner additions.
But change has come relatively quickly in Big Law, pushing firms to adapt their business models in compensation structures, the amount of money presented to top lateral partners, the frequency of those moves and the ever-increasing presence of the nonequity tier.
