Ropes & Gray LLP Supplemental Retirement Shares Plan

Ropes & Gray LLP Supplemental Retirement Shares Plan

The Ropes & Gray LLP Supplemental Retirement Shares Plan is a non-qualified deferred compensation and retirement vehicle maintained by the Boston-founded global law firm. It sits outside the Employee Retirement Income Security Act framework, serving eligible partners and senior professionals with supplemental benefits beyond standard 401(k) limits. The plan's design reflects the partnership model that has sustained the firm since its 1865 founding — linking long-term capital accumulation to the institution's own financial health, while deploying capital into diversified external investment strategies selected by the firm's internal fiduciary committee. The plan allocates across traditional and alternative asset classes, including public equities, fixed income, private equity commingled funds, direct co-investments, real assets and hedge fund strategies. Ropes & Gray's status as premier counsel to the private capital industry — advising firms with trillions in aggregate assets under management — gives the in-house investment team unusual visibility into manager selection. The geographic scope mirrors the law firm's own footprint, spanning North America, Europe and Asia. Mandates are executed entirely through external managers; there is no internal direct-investing team beyond plan oversight. Total plan assets are not publicly disclosed. The Ropes & Gray partnership has not released participant counts or deployment figures. The plan's scale is presumed material given the near 1,500-lawyer partnership, which includes some of the highest-compensated legal professionals globally. The plan operates alongside the firm's standard benefits architecture. In recent periods, as tracked through publicly available retirement plan documentation, the plan continued its commitment pacing into private markets vehicles with periodic rebalancing across its liquid portfolio sleeve. What distinguishes this entity structurally from typical corporate retirement plans is its embedded relationship with the world's largest private capital legal practice. The investment committee sits inside the same institution that structures the very funds it allocates to, creating a rare feedback loop between legal structuring expertise and fiduciary asset deployment — a configuration virtually unseen among comparable law firm plans.