Benchmark legal roles by title, not level
In enterprise legal departments, job title often drives comp more than job level. It’s a talent boundary between professional services and corporate where the translation from title hierarchies to job architectures is messy.
When surveys only report data by job level they can inadvertently hide real market patterns.
So we popped the hood on Compa to normalize legal comp data by title.
Legal titles do not mix well with job levels
We analyzed 18 months of accepted legal job offers in Compa and bucketed them into four job title categories — Associate, Counsel, Senior / Lead, and Assistant. These offers exclude other legal jobs like paralegals and legal ops.
The title spread by level is telling:
Associate Counsel amazingly ranges from P2 (Intermediate) all the way to E1 (VP)
Counsel has the most offers and it’s the least descriptive title, but concentrates in P3/P4
Senior / Lead Counsel concentrates in P4/P5. “Senior” and “Lead” do not correlate to P4 and P5 respectively, as you might expect
Assistant Counsel is distinctly the most senior, with 86% of offers appearing in P5/P6 or M5 (Sir Dir) / E1 (VP)
Legal comp by title and level
Given this wide variance, resulting pay data looks entirely different when normalizing by title as opposed to level:
The base salary spreads are wide in each level, but when you look by title you can identify tighter spreads, like the pink (Senior / Lead) clustering in P4 and the purple (Assistant) clustering in P5.
You can also consider how title distorts market percentile. This table below is the percent rank by level of the median offer by title:
Here’s how the distortion plays out: you’re trying to hire a Lead General Counsel which you’ve aligned to P4 (like many companies), a median of $220k. But the median Lead comp is $245k, the 75th percentile of P4.
You will get pressure to pay way above median because 60% of companies hire Lead General Counsels at P5 and P6!
And when you bump it up to a P5 it will seem well below midpoint at the 39th percentile.
Only possible with Compa
Compa matches data using both job architectures (profiles and levels) and offer metadata, like job titles and descriptions.
This “multi-source” matching makes it possible to find lurking variables like job title on the offer that may have richer explanatory power.
Speaking of insights…
Compa recently hired Jonathan, a true comp nerd with a decade of experience working in executive & equity consulting and in-house at scaling tech companies.
He leads up our new Compensation Insights team focused exclusively on researching market trends, publishing insights, and providing guidance to our customers, all using Compa.
Jonathan led this research and co-wrote this newsletter post with me.
I’m thrilled to have him onboard — welcome, Jonathan!
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