Salary Stories: I Was Afraid Of Asking For An Outlandish Number & I Still Kick Myself For It
In our series Salary Stories, women with long-term career experience open up about the most intimate details of their jobs: compensation. It’s an honest look at how real people navigate the complicated world of negotiating, raises, promotions and job loss, with the hope it will give young women more insight into how to advocate for themselves — and maybe take a few risks along the way.
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Age: 32 Location: Birmingham, United Kingdom Current industry and job title: In-house legal, corporate counsel Current salary: £74,000 Number of years employed since school or university: Eight
Starting salary: £25,000 in 2013 Biggest salary jump: £27,000 to £43,000 in 2015 Biggest salary drop: None. My salary has not reduced since I started working. Biggest negotiation regret? When I transitioned from working in private practice (i.e. in a law firm) to an in-house counsel role, my jumping-off point for salary negotiations was my current salary. Typically, in-house roles do not pay as much as private practice roles (although this in itself depends on what level of your career you are at and what specific specialism and geographic area you practise in) so I was really focused on not taking a salary cut at that point. I thought that achieving the same or a slightly higher salary would be the best I could hope for, especially since the move was prompted by other factors than remuneration. What I should have done is carried out my own benchmarking. I’ve since learned that there are really reliable benchmarking resources available for lawyers, and even though with the benefit of those resources I see that my current salary is good for my career level (so I think ultimately I ended up at roughly the right number), I can’t believe looking back that I didn’t try harder to measure my worth against the industry norm. It’s important not to be blindsided by your own reasons for wanting a change of role; bear in mind that you are offering something to your future employer too and you should approach that negotiation as the commercial transaction it is, and arm yourself with the intel available to you. After my interview, my current boss said, “How much do I have to offer you?” I kick myself every day for not starting higher than I did but I was afraid of asking for something too outlandish and I really wanted the job. Knowledge would really have been power in that situation.
Best salary advice: I know the prevailing view of recruitment professionals can be negative – and I’ve come across my fair share who contribute to that – but I really do recommend finding a quality recruiter you trust. In my experience, you can intuit quite quickly whether a recruiter is good quality by (a) the roles they have on their books at any given time and (b) probing a bit into who else they have placed in new roles and how recently, and more widely who their industry contacts are. They do tend to have great intel into remuneration data for your level and role, especially the less obvious aspects of remuneration such as car allowances and life insurance (which can be harder to assess independently since we don’t often think about it). The recruiter will also advocate on your behalf and can be a good channel for raising slightly more awkward questions – mine was able to find out information about my new employer’s maternity policy without needing to specify that I was behind the question.
I started my career in 2013 as a trainee solicitor on £25,000. In 2014, my salary was automatically increased from £25,000 to £27,500 as I moved from being a first-year trainee solicitor to a second-year trainee solicitor. This was a standardised raise for all trainees at my firm and is normal across the industry. My job didn’t really change at all, except that I had a year of experience so I was (hopefully) a bit better at it.In September 2015, I qualified as a solicitor. This elicited a large salary increase to £43k, as is normal in the industry, and reflects the (often terrifying) jump in responsibility which comes along with qualification. Plus, the firm is entitled to charge your time at a much higher rate once qualified, so the salary increase makes sense. I stayed with the same law firm post-qualification and the salary offered for NQ lawyers was standard across the whole firm, with only some geographic variances. There was no scope for negotiation at this point. I should mention that I have spent my entire career outside of London – my salary would have been much, much higher at all levels had I been located in London.My firm reviewed all salaries annually and this (£47.5k) was the raise I was offered after my first year as a qualified lawyer. I was told at the time that the firm applied a blanket percentage uplift for everyone at my level of qualification. I wasn’t minded to question it at the time – in truth, I was still enjoying the freedoms brought by the pretty big salary uplift from trainee to NQ, so this felt like an added bonus for me.This raise to £50k was the result of the next annual pay review and looking back I realise how paltry it was, given that I worked in an extremely demanding specialism, regularly clocking up 100 hours a week or more at work. At the time I didn’t question this at all, I remember being grateful for it! Looking back, I think I simply didn’t realise it was an option to question how pay increase decisions are made or to negotiate for more. I didn’t grow up in a family with money so I think I was still a bit shell-shocked by the kind of salary I was able to earn. I considered myself to be really fortunate – and I still do – but I think I could have benefited from being a little less naive.This was another annual pay review and I received £56k. The stepping-stone approach to salary uplifts is common in the private practice legal industry (absent an economic event which might lead to pay freezes or something like that) as each lawyer becomes more experienced and their time can be charged out at a higher rate year on year. Like the previous year, I didn’t think to question my uplift but I remember being happy with it as it was more than the previous two years’ increases and I was starting to see the compounding effect of percentage uplifts. At this point in my career, I’ll admit that I wasn’t always very focused on whether my salary was enough to truly compensate for the demands of my job. I was (and still am) very career-driven and focused on doing a good job, and at this point I earned more than enough for everything I needed and more, so I was still very much in the mindset of accepting the status quo.At my next yearly review I got quite a significant salary increase to £67k, which in hindsight reflected the fact that my work dynamic was slowly but surely starting to change. I had become disillusioned with the fact that I was doing complex technical work over long hours and getting good feedback but was still earning less as a four-year qualified lawyer than a newly qualified lawyer in our London office. I felt truly undervalued. In reality, I had already started to consider transitioning to an in-house role and I suspect my bosses were aware of this, hence the large salary uplift that year. It remains a real shame that employers suddenly find very deep pockets when the risk of losing a good employee becomes real rather than theoretical, but it seems to happen everywhere. This is all the more reason why employees should negotiate their annual salary uplifts. I moved to an in-house counsel role in 2020. £68,500 was the salary I asked for, after my new employer very openly asked me how much I wanted in order to agree to come and work for them. I had been consistently told by recruiters and friends in the same industry that my salary was high for my career level (after the jump in 2019) and so I was concerned that, in transitioning to an in-house role, I’d have to take a cut (reflective of the fact that certain elements of the job are perceived to be less demanding). As I mentioned, I failed to properly research benchmarking resources and so I asked for only a small uplift to my existing salary at the time.I was really surprised to receive an uplift to £74k this year, due to the economic fallout of the pandemic. I’m really pleased because based on the benchmarking resources that I now have to hand, this is a good and fair salary for my role. Perhaps I could have negotiated more when I made the move to this role but I think my salary has ultimately ended up at the right place.
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