Regarding fee sharing for law clerks turned first year lawyers?

Question

When you're a law clerk who has passed the bar, did your employer acknowledge your efforts and give you a cut of the attorney fees for the work you put in before passing? In other words, did you receive a fair share of the pie (i.e. 10% of the 1/3 award) for the work you performed while still a clerk, or did your attorney "cut" only begin on cases you brought/started working on after your bar passage?

I am not talking about fee sharing with a non-attorney, but with an employee that was a non-attorney, but now is an attorney at the time a case is resolved (and attorney fees are to be taken from the settlement/award). Thanks!

Answer 1

We were told that our pay would be our surprisingly high salary plus 10% of any new client amount we brought in, providing that amount exceeded $25,000 in the aggregate for any calendar year...and that was from day one as a summer.

Answer 2

I was paid hourly for work I did before hearing that I'd passed.

The fee-splitting prohibitions are applicable in any of the states that have adopted them from the ABA Model Rules, but each state draws the line differently based on local interpretations.

It raises a complicated question of whether the prohibition applies when the work is done (pre-attorney) or when the case is settled (post-licensure). Unless my state had already issued an advisory or definitive interpretation, I would play it on the safe side and just have the law clerk paid hourly.

Now, there's nothing that says a law clerk cannot get well-paid for hourly work, or even that the hourly rate cannot be retroactively changed for the period between graduation and licensure. So, theoretically, the law clerk could be paid roughly the equivalent of whatever percentage they would have earned as an attorney, but where the actual pay is computed based on hourly multiple.