Leaving BigLaw: Pay, Benefits, and Planning Your Next Move

A guide to the money and logistics of leaving a large firm: separating salary from bonus, equity and benefits, what research on women leaving large firms does and doesn’t show, and planning questions to bring to the right professionals.

Two documents on the kitchen table

Connie is an illustrative composite, not a real client or a real lawyer. She’s 52, an income partner in a litigation group, and it’s a gray Saturday in late January. She’s at her kitchen table with two PDFs open side by side on her laptop. On the left is her firm’s compensation letter for the year. On the right is an offer from a company whose general counsel she’s known for a decade. The coffee next to her has gone cold twice, and she’s reheated it once.

The base salary on the right is lower than her draw on the left. She knew that before she opened it. What she didn’t expect was how hard it would be to tell whether the offer is actually worse. The firm letter has a draw, a year-end amount that depends on things she doesn’t control, and a line about her capital account. The offer has a base salary, a target bonus described as discretionary, an equity grant that vests over several years, and a benefits summary she hasn’t read yet. They aren’t the same kind of number, and she’s been trying to compare them as if they were.

“I bill for a living,” she says to her sister on the phone later. “I can price anyone else’s risk. I just can’t seem to price my own.”

If you’re weighing a move out of a large firm, this article is about the money and logistics side of that decision: what the pay question is really asking, what research on women leaving large firms can and can’t tell you, where lawyers tend to go, how to think about benefits, and how to find a number you can plan around. It isn’t about whether you should leave. My piece on whether to leave BigLaw takes that question on directly.

One note before we start. I’m a therapist, not a financial planner, tax professional or employment lawyer. Nothing here is personalized financial, tax or legal advice. The examples are illustrations of the kinds of questions to ask, and the right answers for you will depend on your own documents and the professionals you hire to read them.

This article is educational and developmental in nature. It isn’t a substitute for individualized care from a licensed clinician, and reading it doesn’t establish a therapist-client relationship. If you’re in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, in the United States call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Outside the US, visit findahelpline.com for local crisis resources.

What the pay question is really asking

“Will I take a pay cut?” sounds like one question. It’s usually several. Some of them are about money. Some of them are about what the money has come to mean.

The first step is separating the pieces. Compensation in and out of large firms can come in very different forms, and they don’t carry the same certainty:

• Base salary or draw: the part you can usually count on, paid on a schedule.
• Bonuses: sometimes formula-driven, often discretionary. A “target” bonus is a target, not a promise, and the terms usually say what happens if you leave before it’s paid.
• Equity or partnership economics: stock grants that vest over time, or, for partners, distributions and a capital account governed by the partnership agreement.
• Benefits: health coverage, retirement plan contributions, insurance, and other items that have real value but rarely show up in the number you compare.

Comparing a firm letter to an offer letter only works once each of those is written down in the same terms, with a note about how certain it is. Cash you’ll almost certainly receive isn’t the same as a discretionary bonus, and neither is the same as equity that depends on a company’s future. That doesn’t make the uncertain parts worthless. It means they belong in a different column.

The second step is noticing the part of the question that isn’t arithmetic. If you’ve spent years watching a number go up as proof that the sacrifice was worth it, a lower number can feel like a verdict, even when it covers everything you need. If that’s familiar, my piece on the golden handcuffs of a job that pays this well is written for finance, but a lot of it will translate.

What research on women leaving large firms can and can’t tell you

The two studies discussed here speak to why women leave large firms and where lawyers go next, not to what a particular move would do to your own finances, and it’s worth being clear about which is which.

In 2019 the American Bar Association and ALM Intelligence released a report called Walking Out the Door, written by Roberta D. Liebenberg and Stephanie A. Scharf, about experienced women lawyers in private practice. The ABA’s report page describes barriers the women surveyed reported, including limited access to business development opportunities, being perceived as less committed to their careers, and being denied promotion.

That’s useful for one reason: it suggests that if you’re thinking about leaving, the reasons you’re weighing are probably not unusual. Here’s what it can’t do. It describes senior women in large firms at one point in time, and the ABA report page is a summary, not the full study. It doesn’t tell you what those women earned afterward, whether they were glad they left, or what you should do.

A second source looks at where lawyers go. After the JD III, from the American Bar Foundation, follows a national group of lawyers over the first dozen or so years of their careers. It reports that both women and men “have continued to exit private law firms,” and that “the most frequent destination for those leaving private law firms is to enter a business organization, either as inside counsel or in a position that does not entail law practice.” It also reports that the earnings gap between women and men in that group had grown over time.

That study isn’t limited to large firms, and it follows one generation of lawyers, so it can’t tell you what the market looks like this year. What it does show is that leaving private practice is common, and that business roles, legal and non-legal, are a well-worn path.

Where lawyers go, and what can change about pay

The common destinations include in-house legal roles, government, public interest and legal services organizations, smaller or boutique firms, and roles in business that use legal training without being law practice. Each can change pay in a different direction, and the honest answer to “will I take a pay cut?” is that it depends on which path, which employer, and which parts of your current package you’re comparing.

Some changes are easy to predict. NALP, the association for legal career professionals, reports that public service attorney salaries remain “considerably below private sector salaries.” If you’re considering government or public interest work, it’s reasonable to plan for a meaningful drop in cash pay.

Other changes are harder to predict. In-house packages can include bonuses and equity that may be worth a great deal or very little, depending on the company. A smaller firm may pay less but offer more control over hours. A non-legal business role may start lower and grow differently. None of these comes with a guarantee, and anyone who tells you that you can leave without a pay cut is guessing about a package they haven’t seen.

What you can do is make the comparison specific. For each option, write down the base pay, the variable pay and how it’s decided, what vests and when, and what the benefits are worth to you. Then look at the range, not a single number.

Benefits: the part of the package people forget to price

Benefits are easy to overlook when you’re comparing offers, and they’re often where the timing of a move matters most. Two areas deserve particular attention: health coverage and retirement accounts.

COBRA isn’t the only option. HealthCare.gov explains that losing qualifying health coverage can open a Special Enrollment Period for a Marketplace plan, and it lists the window as when you’ve lost coverage “in the past 60 days” or expect to lose it “in the next 60 days.” A new employer’s plan may also have its own waiting period. The practical point is to know the dates before you set your last day, so a gap doesn’t surprise you.

Retirement accounts need attention too. The IRS explains that most payments from a retirement plan can be “rolled over” into another plan or IRA within 60 days, or moved directly by the plan to another plan or IRA, and that taxes can be withheld if you don’t choose a direct rollover. Which option makes sense for you is a question for a tax or financial professional. The point here is simply that there are choices, and some of them have deadlines.

A few other questions are worth writing down and bringing to the right person: what happens to any unvested bonus or equity if you leave on a particular date, how a partnership agreement handles your capital account, whether insurance coverage through the firm can be continued, and what notice terms apply. Your own documents, and your own lawyer or advisor, are the only reliable sources for those answers.

Finding a number you can plan around

Jody is a second illustrative composite. She’s 47, senior counsel in a transactional group, and it’s a Tuesday evening in early fall. She’s on the couch with her laptop balanced on a pillow, a spreadsheet open that she started three weeks ago and keeps renaming. The current version is called “real number v4.” Her dog is asleep against her leg. She’s been avoiding the last tab, the one labeled “what we actually spend.”

What Jody is doing is a version of an exercise many people find useful before a move. It isn’t a financial plan, and it’s no substitute for one. It’s a way to turn a vague fear into specific questions:

• What do we actually spend? Not the budget you intend to keep, but the one your accounts show over a recent stretch of months.
• Which costs are fixed, and which could change? Housing, childcare, tuition and debt payments behave differently from travel, dining and the costs that crept up alongside your pay.
• What does the transition itself cost? A gap between jobs, health coverage in between, and any bonus or equity you’d leave behind.
• What’s the lowest income that would cover what matters? Not the income that would feel impressive. The one that would feel safe.
• How long could savings bridge a gap? And how would it feel to spend some of them on this?

When Jody finally opens the last tab, the number isn’t comfortable, but it isn’t catastrophic either. It’s a number she can take to a fee-only financial planner and a tax professional, and ask real questions about. That’s the point of the exercise. It doesn’t tell her whether to leave. It tells her what she’s actually deciding between.

For some people, this is where the work gets emotional. Looking closely at spending can bring up shame, old family messages about money, or the fear that you’re the kind of person who can’t manage without a big salary. Those reactions are common, and they’re worth noticing rather than pushing through. They’re also a good reason to have someone other than a spreadsheet to talk to.

Both/And: the money bought real safety, and it can keep you from asking what you want

It’s tempting to tell one of two stories about a large-firm salary. In one, the money is the reason you can’t leave, and anyone who says otherwise hasn’t seen your mortgage. In the other, the money is a trap you should have walked away from long ago. Neither story is fair to you.

The money may have paid off loans, bought a home, covered care for a parent or tuition for a child, and given you a kind of security many people never have. That’s real, and it deserves respect. And the same money can make it hard to ask what you want next, because every answer gets measured against a number that was built for a different life. Both of those can be true at once.

Connie, a few weeks after that Saturday, is a small example of holding both. She hasn’t decided. But she’s rewritten her comparison so that each package is broken into what’s likely, what’s possible, and what’s uncertain, and she’s added a line she’d never included before: what each option would cost her in time. It isn’t a financial line. She’s kept it anyway.

The Systemic Lens: why the numbers are built this way

When leaving a large firm feels impossible, it’s easy to decide the problem is your own lack of discipline or nerve. That misses how much of the difficulty is designed into the structure.

Large-firm pay tends to reward hours, availability and bringing in business, and Walking Out the Door lists caretaking commitments, stress, the emphasis on marketing or originating business, and billable hours among the top reasons women gave for leaving. Those are features of how the work is organized, not personal failings. When a structure pays most for the things that are hardest to combine with caregiving and a sustainable life, some people will eventually decide the trade isn’t worth it, and that decision can be a clear-eyed one.

The structure also shapes the exit. Discretionary bonuses paid after a certain date, equity that vests over years, and benefits tied to employment all make the timing of a move costly. None of that is secret, and none of it is a moral judgment on you. It’s the terrain the decision sits on. Naming it can make it easier to plan around rather than blame yourself for.

The inner side of a money decision

Even a careful financial plan can stall if the part of you that equates income with worth hasn’t been heard. That’s often where the harder work is, and it’s covered more fully elsewhere on this site. If your identity feels bound up with the title, my pieces on the identity crisis of leaving BigLaw and rebuilding identity after BigLaw go further. If you’re trying to decide what kind of support you need for the transition, coaching vs. therapy after a BigLaw exit lays out the difference.

For some women, the pull to stay has older roots. The proverbial foundation of how you think about money, safety and worth was often laid long before your first offer letter. Therapy can help you look at that history if it’s relevant, without asking you to make any particular career decision. And if the pressure itself is the main problem right now, my piece on BigLaw burnout covers that separately.

Taking the next step with clear numbers

You don’t have to decide today whether to leave. You can start by making the numbers specific: what you’re paid and how certain each part is, what each option would pay and how certain that is, what the benefits and deadlines are, and what you actually need. Clear numbers won’t make the decision for you. They can make it yours.

If you’re weighing this now, it’s reasonable to get help with both sides of it: professionals who can read your documents and your finances, and someone who can help you sort out what the money has come to mean.

Warmly,
Annie.