Legal industry managers expect pay for lawyers, other industry professionals to rise: report

As legal industry hiring managers grapple with issues like retention and finding qualified candidates, many say they are highly confident that compensation will rise for legal professionals in 2025, according to employment agency Robert Half.  

That information comes via Robert Half’s legal salaries and hiring trends report – one of several industry-specific dispatches from the agency’s 2025 Canada Salary Guide released this week. According to the report, 97 percent of polled hiring managers expect pay for legal jobs in corporate legal departments and law firms to increase next year.  

This accompanies the agency's findings that 86 percent of the legal employers polled are concerned about retention. These employers are also worried about finding qualified candidates (80 percent), skills gaps (79 percent), and hiring quickly enough to secure top talent (77 percent).  

“In this day and age, it’s quite commonplace for lawyers to move around a handful of times throughout their careers – it's not like how it used to be,” Robert Half vice president Stacy Manton told Canadian Lawyer on Tuesday.  

Employers are “definitely turning their minds to how they can best retain who they have and how they can best secure talent that's outside of their firm at the moment when they do hire for certain jobs,” Manton says.

Robert Half polled 139 legal hiring managers and 100 other legal professionals in June.  

Respondents told the agency that certain job skills commanded a premium in the current legal market. The highest-ranking skills were leadership and management experience (49 percent), compliance and risk management (35 percent), AI and automation (33 percent), research and information analytics (31 percent), and data analytics (30 percent).  

Manton says he’s observed several strategies legal employers use to nab the best candidates. Because they know that top candidates are likely interviewing with multiple employers, many hiring managers are doing their best to accommodate candidates’ interview schedules and speed up hiring timelines.

For top boutique firms, “they're trying as much as possible to make their pay competitive with the large full-service firms,” Manton says.

“It is definitely a … trend where lawyers are leaving top boutiques in order to go to full-service firms. And one of the features of a full-service firm is typically they do pay more,” Manton says.  

“Some of them are actually matching the first year pay of what a large, full-service firm would pay, and some of these firms didn't do that in the past,” he adds.  

According to the Robert Half survey, lawyers with more than 10 years of experience typically earn between $198,500 and $278,250 annually. Lawyers with four to nine years of experience earn between $121,250 and $227,500, while those with two to three years of experience netting pay between $91,250 and $158,500.  

Meanwhile, lawyers in their first year on the job are earning between $80,000 and $120,250.  

Manton says those numbers will likely increase as employers continue to find the legal market challenging.  

“The survey demonstrates that compensation in the legal industry is rising, that competition amongst firms in order to attract and retain the best candidates is definitely at its height,” he says.