Legal Services Compensation Data & Salary Benchmarking

Law firms can benchmark legal and business roles using current compensation data for relevant industries, organization size, and labor market. ERI’s Salary Assessor supports attorney compensation benchmarking with real-time market data by job and location, helping firms establish competitive hiring ranges while managing labor costs.

How it works:

1. Review the position: Evaluate its responsibilities, scope, and complexity.
2. Select a benchmark: Identify a comparable ERI role for the appropriate industry and labor market.
3. Establish the range: Apply current compensation data to hiring ranges and other pay decisions.

Law firms can apply market data more consistently by defining how their compensation philosophy rewards performance, career progression, and contribution to firm. ERI helps firms evaluate external benchmarks within that internal framework to support compensation planning for associates, partners, and leadership. Firms can also benchmark the business roles needed to operate the practice, from accounting and technology to administration.

Law firms can evaluate pay equity by comparing compensation between selected protected groups while accounting for relevant employee and job-related variables. As pay transparency requirements expand, law firms need a clear way to evaluate whether similar employees are being paid equitably. ERI’s Pay Equity feature allows compensation teams to compare selected protected groups using base pay, incentives, or total compensation. Firms can apply relevant control variables, such as job title, location, seniority, or performance, to better understand potential disparities. These insights can inform pay equity audits and more consistent compensation decisions for legal and business roles.

Law firms can establish appropriate location-based pay by comparing local labor costs and geographic wage differentials for each office or remote-work location. ERI’s Geographic Assessor helps teams adjust legal compensation data for different labor markets using three types of analysis:

• Base-market comparison: Compare each office or remote-work location with a selected base market.
• Salary-level analysis: Evaluate how geographic wage differentials vary by salary level.
• Industry customization: Customize cost-of-labor differentials for the relevant industry sector.

Law firms can standardize legal and business job levels by evaluating responsibilities, scope, and complexity rather than relying solely on internal job titles. ERI’s Internal Job Builder helps teams define internal roles, responsibilities, and qualifications. Compensation teams can match jobs up to 10 times faster with AI Job Matching, which uses the entered job title and job description to suggest relevant ERI roles. AI Evaluate provides a match rating and explains the reasoning behind each suggestion, helping teams compare internal job duties with ERI role descriptions before selecting a benchmark. This creates a more consistent foundation for job leveling, pay grades, and market-based compensation decisions.

Law firms can address pay compression by reviewing internal salary relationships against current market data and identifying where salary adjustments may be appropriate. Competitive offers for new hires and market-based increases can unintentionally narrow pay differences between newer employees and experienced attorneys, managers, or firm leaders. ERI supports a structured evaluation process:

1. Identify compression: Locate narrow or inconsistent salary differences between job titles.
2. Compare market data: Evaluate affected positions against current external benchmarks to determine where pay may have fallen out of alignment.
3. Plan adjustments: Prioritize salary changes that recognize differences in experience and responsibility while accounting for the firm’s compensation budget.
4. Communicate total rewards: Generate personalized Total Rewards Statements showing the combined value of salary, incentives, benefits, and retirement contributions.