Big Firms in Texas Freezing Salaries

You may have heard by now that several large Texas-based law firms have frozen 2009 salaries at 2008 levels. Fulbright and Jaworski and Haynes and Boone are the first of the big Texas firms to freeze associate salaries but they are in good company. Firms nation-wide have instituted salary freezes in the past several months, including Godwin Procter, Alston & Bird, Perkins Coie, Shulte Roth and Zabel, Latham and Watkins, Orrick, Dickstein Shapiro, Sheppard Mullin, Venable, Bryan Cave, Arnold and Porter and Steptoe and Johnson. Firms that have instituted salary freezes that have offices located in Texas but are based elsewhere include Morgan Lewis, Hogan and Hartson, DLA, Squire Sanders, Sonnenschein, Sutherland, McDermott Will and Emery and Sidley Austin. Fulbright has frozen salaries through the first quarter of 2009, unlike most firms which have instituted an indefinite freeze.