Leading legal jobs board TotallyLegal has just published its annual Audience Insight Report. Download your copy today to discover more about your profession and benchmark your earnings as a Legal Secretary or PA.
In early 2021, we asked more than 800 legal professionals to disclose the details of their daily working lives and tell us how their careers had been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. With Administrators and Paralegals working alongside Solicitors, In-House Counsel and, of course, Legal Secretaries and PAs, responses revealed an audience representative of the full legal profession.
This year, Legal Secretaries and PAs make up 5% of total respondents and are part of a wider 33% that represent support and non-fee-earning legal professionals in our audience.
Overall responses indicated that the Covid-19 outbreak has had a significant impact on the lives and livelihoods of legal professionals. With cutbacks reported across pay rises, benefits and bonuses, employers have been reducing rewards and remuneration in an attempt to offset costs and losses incurred as a result of the pandemic.
For Legal Secretaries, average annual salaries have reached £28,235 – a year-on-year decrease of almost 5%. Meanwhile, Legal PA salaries remain flat at around £35,800 per year.
Despite facing such setbacks, the TotallyLegal community proved to be equipped with the skills and experience required to negotiate these difficult times. With 90% educated to degree level or above and 44% more than seven years into their career, the vast majority of our audience avoided redundancy and the furlough scheme in 2020 and early 2021.
Positively, small but significant steps have been taken in the past year to redress long-standing disparities within the profession, resulting in a slight narrowing of both the ethnicity and gender pay gaps.
Discover more about your profession and benchmark your salary with the TotallyLegal Audience Insight Report 2021.