It’s that time of year again in Australia: performance reviews, pay rises, and the annual guessing game over who gets a bonus and why. Across the Pacific, BigLaw doesn't guess.

Just recently, top US law firm Milbank kicked off the latest base salary round, lifting pay by US$10k for first to fourth-years and US$20k for fifth to eighth-years, resetting the market scale to US$235k-$455k.

McDermott Will & Schulte matched it immediately. Within days, Quinn Emanuel, Katten and others had fallen in line too.

That’s the “Cravath effect” in action. One bellwether firm moves, the rest follow, because they’re all chasing the same small pool of top grads.

The Cravath effect applies to bonuses as well.

Cravath set the most recent year-end scale on 18 November 2025, running from US$20k for junior associates to US$115k for the class of 2019 and above. That was on top of special bonuses of $6k-$25k that Milbank had already paid out in September, resulting in a combined total of up to US$140k. Milbank matched Cravath’s year-end bonus numbers that same week, and Paul Hastings and McDermott Will & Schulte confirmed they’d match too within 48 hours.

Let’s turn to bonus eligibility. Cravath itself pays bonuses without any billable-hour or similar criteria, meaning associates get the full amount regardless of hours logged.

But beyond Cravath, eligibility is typically tied directly to hours. For example, Morrison Foerster, Cooley and Akin all require associates to hit 1,950 hours before they qualify. US firms are also increasingly layering premiums on top for high billers. Dechert has previously offered 30-40% on top of normal bonuses for hitting 2,200 to 2,400 billable hours.

There’s no Australian bellwether firm like Cravath or Milbank. No leaked memo, and no scorecard.

Instead, top-tier pay and bonuses are held tightly within firms, set internally and rarely publicised the way they are in the US.

According to a 2025 College of Law survey, only around one in three legal professionals are bonus-eligible overall, with an average payout of A$15,247. Where bonuses are paid, they’re typically 12-15% of base pay, per Mahlab data, but scarce at entry-level lawyers and concentrated among senior performers.

The US has dozens of similarly elite, ultra-profitable firms chasing the same graduate pool, a market where a public matching scale takes pay off the table as a competitive variable. Australia’s tighter Big Six/Eight oligopoly faces less pressure to publish anything comparable.

Australia has moved on the legal side. The 2022 Secure Jobs, Better Pay Act banned pay-secrecy clauses from June 2023, giving employees the right to discuss pay. But the same government guidance confirms employers still aren’t required to disclose it.

Aussie lawyers can now legally talk about their pay. Whether they’ll ever have the market information to know what they’re talking about is an open question.