Pay increases keep lawyers in-house

Recruitment: Report highlights share options and packages used by industry employers to attract and retain solicitorsCommerce and industry employers are using generous share options and pay rises of up to 40% in the battle to recruit and retain solicitors, research has revealed this week.

The findings came from a survey by legal recruitment company Taylor Root, which questioned 2,500 in-house legal departments across the UK.

The research found that in-house lawyers have seen a vast increase in their wage packets over the last 12 months, with an average rise of 20%.This brought the average base salary for a head of legal to 108,000, an increase of around 20,000 on last year.However, when combined with other perks such as bonuses, company cars, shares, pension and insurance schemes, legal department chiefs are pulling in a package worth an average of 146,000.

At the lower end of the scale, in-house solicitors with two years' post qualification experience in London will now earn an average of 43,000, up from 37,500 a year ago.

Lawyers based in the midlands and the north saw similar increases, although heads of legal in the south still earn 20,000 more, and two-year qualified solicitors 10,000 more on average than their northern counterparts.

Nick Root, group partner in Taylor Root, put the incentives down to 'the main consequence of the private practice salary increases, which has been the difficulty for heads of legal to attract and retain lawyers of real quality'.Ann Page, vice-chairman of the Law Society's Commerce and Industry Group, said she had given out pay rises, but disputed that it was a matter of competing with private practice.'I recruit from industry and looked at the positions advertised by companies in the north-west [where she is based at the Co-operative Bank],' Ms Page explained.

'I saw that they were advertising higher salaries, so I used that as a benchmark.'Richard Wiseman, UK General Counsel for Shell International , said in-house employers may struggle to keep up with competitors as a result of the dot-com recession and trouble brewing in the economy.

'This may well affect the long-term sustainability of these salary levels and the profitability of the firms which pay them,' Mr Wiseman warned.Paula Rohan