Its not just about greed. The firm's foundation is based on a practice that doest pay well, i.e. tax practice.

Understand how budgeting works in a company. In every company, budgets gets allocated to each department. The marketing, sales and finance department gets the lion's share and the corporate law teams deal with them. Thats why they are able to give big quotes and those departments are able to meet them.

But the tax work in any company is usually accounts or compliance team. They get pennies in the name of budget. So they engage lawyers for tax team paying pennies.

The foundation of LKS is based on tax work. Hence they have always been used to ask for pennies. If a partner wants to get big and ask for money showing their value, they are made to cower down to the client.

One glaring fact about compensation that they hide from new joinees until they join.

They have a system called "Factor System". Your monthly salary is not fixed.

The compensation that your contract says, a percentage portion of it is dependent on monthly recoveries. So suppose your salary is 1 lakh, you may only get 80,000 in a month and rest 20000 will depend on how much you were actually able to collect (credited with the firm) in that month out of your expected monthly collection. If you manage 100% only then you get that 20000 but if you dont, you never see that money.

Also they keep that target so high that barring 1 or 2 teams (cyclically) no one meets that collection.

So as a thumb rule, everyone has to discount their on-paper compensation by 20-50%. Yeah that variable percentage of 'factor' keeps increasing with increase in level. Though they dont charge factor system on first years, but its upto them to decide. Also its depressing when you burn the midnight oil to churn out deliverables (you will need to) and then you dont even get your full pay coz the client has not made the payment yet. Oh you may think that we should just charge advance billing. Guess what, seniors hate to do that coz clients are so old and that would be insulting to ask.

Therefore it is expected that apart from being a lawyer in a big firm, you have to be a collection agent. You are expected to call and remind clients to make payments. In the politest of manners, again and again. Every week you would have to allocate some hours for it. Time that could be spent on doing actual work.

And they only tell you all this on the date of joining, when you are too late to make any informed decision.

In my view, the factor system is the most nauseating thing that exists here and only here. I have not come to know of any other firm that does this. Firms usually keep the monthly compensation fixed and only year-end bonuses depend on actual collections (which makes total sense).

No. They don't. An Assistant Professor in a public university in this country gets paid about 85k gross as a fresher. The tax is also much higher compared to a law firm associate because of the presumptive income clause. The increment for an AP is about 3k every year, which is minuscule compared to the difference between A0 and A1 salaries. However, an AP has to work not more than 5 hours a day max, 5 days a week, at a public university, compared to 10 hours a day, 6 days a week (often Sundays too) for an associate. So these are very different jobs and shouldn't be compared. The work satisfaction for an AP is arguably higher, at least in the beginning, assuming that they have joined academics because they want to teach and research, whereas an associate is hardly going to be entrusted with anything interesting or innovative in the first 3-4 years.