I spoke to a lawyer this week who is being paid $35,000 below market.
Not because she underperformed.
Not because she lacked technical ability.
Not because the firm didn’t value her.
In many ways, this was exactly the kind of associate firms want to retain.
Reliable. Commercial. Well-liked internally. Hitting targets. Doing the work without complaint.
And yet, over time, she quietly drifted further and further behind the market.
The reality is that this rarely happens overnight.
It happens gradually. Review cycle by review cycle. Small decisions that feel manageable in the moment but compound significantly over the course of several years.
In her first year, she accepted the salary increase she was given without much pushback. In the second year, the same thing happened. By the third, despite hitting every billable target and continuing to progress strongly, she was told there was no approval to bring her compensation in line with the wider market.
Again, she accepted it.
Like many lawyers, she assumed the work would speak for itself eventually. That the firm would recognise her value in time. That things would naturally correct over the next cycle.
They didn’t.
Now, several years later, she finds herself in a position many associates underestimate until they experience it firsthand: trying to negotiate her way back to market from too far behind.
And that is where the dynamic fundamentally changes.
At a certain point, a lawyer is no longer asking for a standard pay rise. They are effectively asking the firm to correct years of underpayment in a single adjustment. Most firms are not structured to make those kinds of corrections internally, even when they acknowledge the discrepancy exists.
That is often why these situations end in a resignation rather than a resolution.
What makes this particularly interesting is that there often isn’t a clear villain in the story.
This was not a lawyer desperate to leave. She genuinely liked her firm. She respected the people around her, enjoyed the work and felt supported in many aspects of the role. The platform itself was strong.
But eventually, compensation becomes impossible to separate from the wider conversation around value.
There comes a point where the gap between effort and reward becomes too visible to ignore. Where peers at competing firms are earning materially more for comparable work. Where long hours, increasing responsibility and rising expectations no longer feel proportionate to the number on the payslip.
At that stage, even lawyers who never intended to leave start looking externally.
And firms are often surprised when they do.
In the legal industry, there is still a tendency to assume compensation concerns are primarily driven by greed or short-term thinking. In reality, many lawyers stay under market for years because they are loyal, conflict-averse or optimistic that things will improve organically.
But compensation gaps become harder to fix the longer they are left unaddressed.
A lawyer who is slightly below market in year one can often recover relatively easily. By year three or four, the gap is usually far more structural. Bonuses, percentage increases and internal salary bands all begin reinforcing the disparity rather than correcting it.
That is why these conversations matter earlier than many associates realise.
Not because money is the only thing that matters. Most lawyers know it isn’t.
But because once someone falls materially behind market, the path back becomes increasingly difficult without changing firms altogether.
And increasingly, we are seeing good firms lose good lawyers not because the work was wrong, the culture was toxic or the opportunities disappeared, but because the numbers stopped making sense.
