The BigLaw Paydays For Taylor Wessing Partner
Taylor Wessing’s highest-earning partner managed to haul in a whopping £200,000 a week in the latest financial year — that’s roughly the same as a Premier League striker on a good bonus season. It highlights just how ludicrous top-end pay has become in London’s legal market.
According to Law Society Gazette, the top-paid LLP member at Taylor Wessing managed to net that £200k-a-week haul as profits were dished out across the partnership. That kind of pay packet makes even the notorious Cravath scale seem almost modest.
Sure, mid-market firms can cry “but we’re all about work-life balance,” but when your top partner’s annual take amounts to north of £10m, it’s hard not to feel the sting of disparity. In fact, recent reporting in Financial News London suggests Taylor Wessing’s highest individual payout this year was around £10.4m, up from roughly £7.75m previously — testament to how much rainmakers still matter in a squeezed market.
Big Law isn’t the only place where partner pay is climbing. Other UK firms’ partners are seeing six-figure gains too, but few hit the dizzying heights seen here.
Compensation at firms up and down the City ladder has been on the up, with firms like Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer reporting top pay packets rising by hundreds of thousands amid a broader pay surge.
Meanwhile, Taylor Wessing itself has been on an upward trajectory. UK profit per equity partner (PEP) has broken through the £1m mark as the firm edges towards ambitious growth targets, putting it comfortably in the very respectable but still well below the Magic Circle tier on average; one partner’s haul is not “the norm” but it sure turns heads.
And all of this comes as the firm preps for a big strategic leap – a transatlantic merger with Winston & Strawn — expected to reshape its economics and pay scale even further when it formally becomes Winston Taylor later this year.
LawFuel Buffer: London remains a pay battleground. Even as firms chase cross-border scale and efficiencies, the upside for top producers is still mega — and the wider field keeps arguing about salary inflation, lateral hires and partner dilution.
