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Barden’s legal talent advisory & recruitment practice provides tailored and bespoke advice to countless clients on salary market trends, salary benchmarking and budgeting for specific roles. The objective is to more easily capture the nuances and the wide variety of factors that contribute to what someone’s salary is or should be. General salary guides tend to be inherently reductive or too broad, as it’s near impossible to encompass all those different variables without it becoming too complex or hard to navigate of a document, which would defeat the purpose.
Our aim here is to find the right balance, by focusing on the factors that more often influence someone’s salary, without trying to be overly exhaustive.
With that in mind, being led by job titles is often a futile exercise. A Senior Legal Counsel in a global company and with responsibility for different markets, might earn a higher salary than a General Counsel in a local small-medium sized business. Even between companies of similar size or in the same sector, the same job title can mean very different positions. A job title is nothing without context.
Similarly, simply looking at the years of post-qualification experience (PQE) doesn’t necessarily point to a specific salary level. However, we do generally note that the earlier years in a lawyer’s career tend to be more predictable when it comes to the salary starting point and its progression. After around the 5 years’ PQE mark, it typically becomes less useful to look at years of experience as a determining factor. Both in private practice and in-house, it’s common at this stage to see salaries potentially plateau and becoming less connected to PQE, being instead more linked to someone’s performance, the nature of the role, its responsibilities and geographical scope, as well as other aspects such as the organisation’s size and sector.
While there continues to be somewhat of a gap in salary between Dublin and other regions in Ireland, the advent of remote or hybrid working, with more people in the regions potentially having unprecedented access to Dublin based roles, has led to the narrowing of such gap. Nevertheless, most roles outside of Dublin would typically pay at the lower end of the ranges shown below.
#1 Salary Guide (Base)
#2 Demand vs Supply
Here are some data points about the qualified lawyer talent pool in Ireland this quarter:
In Barden, we understand that each team, role, and requirement is unique. If you would like a bespoke commentary on how these data points relate to you or your team, please get in touch with Bernardo Pina (Bernardo.pina@barden.ie) or Kiara Daly (kiara.daly@barden.ie), our Legal Talent Advisory & Recruitment team here in Barden. We’re where leaders go, before they start looking for talent.
(This information is accurate as per January 2024 and will be updated periodically. Data sources include Barden Proprietary Data, LinkedIn Analytics and other 3rd party data sources. If you have a request and would like real-time information to inform your hiring decisions contact Bernardo Pina at bernardo.pina@barden.ie or Kiara Daly at kiara.daly@barden.ie).