Jean O Grady Report: LexisNexis CounselLink Data Reveals Law Firm Billing Rate Discrepancies Across Gender and Ethnic Groups

O’Grady writes

Today, LexisNexis’ CounselLink will be releasing new data which highlights hourly billing rate discrepancies based on gender and ethnicity. The data comes from more than 20,000 attorney profiles in CounselLink  and analyses hourly billing rates on invoices billed between January 2020 and September 2021. I

I had a call with Kris Satkunis, Director of Strategic Consulting at CounselLink. Satkunis described how law firm billing rates are “a proxy for how much the firm values the attorney’s work or skills” and this obviously has a significant impact  on attorney compensation. An examination of the data indicated that  billing rates are generally the same across gender and ethnic groups at the lowest billing rate levels but then begin to diverge at higher levels. Satkunis concludes that “ethnicity is clearly a factor, with Asian billings rates coming in higher than all other groups and Hispanic/LatinX coming in at the lowest.”

Program Today The data will be discussed at a program sponsored by the Buying Legal Counsel at 11 am EST today. Register at this link.

Here are some sample key findings:

Gender

  • Associate: There is no noticeable disparity through the 10th/25th/50thpercentiles of billing rates, but an 8% gap forms between males and females in 75th and remains in the 90th.
  • Partner: For firms overall, there is no disparity in billing rates until the 50thpercentile (6%). At the 75th percentile, the gap widens to 10%, then dips to 9% at the 90th At very large firms (>750 lawyers), gender billing rate disparity among partners is constant across all percentiles, ranging from 11% to 17%.

Read the full report at 

LexisNexis CounselLink Data Reveals Law Firm Billing Rate Discrepancies Across Gender and Ethnic Groups