Explainer: What’s the debate over the wages paid to junior lawyers by law firms?

For the past few weeks, social media and the opinion pages of various publications have been abuzz with junior lawyers lamenting that many firms do not pay them sufficient remuneration.

The issue, as told to Dawn.com by Hassan A. Niazi, Advocate High Court and former faculty at the Lahore Univerity of Management Sciences (Lums), is about the salary of junior associates working in law firms or chambers that primarily practise litigation.

How did the debate begin?

The issue was highlighted during a panel discussion organised by Lums on September 14, titled ‘Law Firm Economics in Pakistan: What are you worth?’.

The event was followed by a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter) by Aman Rehan, a lawyer and Lums alumna, wherein she detailed the challenges faced by fresh graduates in the field.

These included junior lawyers being asked to prioritise “learning over everything” and the different treatment meted out to those working at a firm and those working in-house.

On Sunday night, Qanoondan held a Space session on X, where various lawyers detailed their experiences and digital rights activist Nighat Dad also attended the session.

The LLAA has now organised a ‘Part II’ of the discussion at 6pm on September 30, which will be open to all and held online.

What are the organisers saying?

Salman Ijaz, ex-vice president of the Lums Law Alumni Association (LLAA) and also one of the speakers at the event, told Dawn.com, “In the background of the larger economic crisis, there was an ongoing conversation in the Lums law community regarding the (historically) low payscales, poor benefits and difficult working conditions for junior lawyers.”

He added that there was “ready consensus that junior lawyers are compensated very poorly (relative to their employers who bill in the millions per matter)”.

“Even at many well-known firms, fresh graduates are expected to complete unpaid internships that can span from three months to two years, even while they are expected to work full-time,” Ijaz said.

The lawyer recalled that the issues highlighted included “regulatory failure on the part of the bar councils in respect of licensure and training, billing practices of senior lawyers, the absence of true firm culture, and importantly, tight secrecy around actual compensation practices”.

He added: “The Pakistani legal practice still follows the apprenticeship model in the training of junior lawyers but without guaranteeing them any of the protections that apprentices in other fields have under laws like the Apprenticeship Act.

Ijaz also shared a new project, titled ’Legal Profession Compensation & Benefits Mastersheet (FY2024), which aims to gather compensation data for legal roles at firms, chambers and think tanks as well as in-house roles in a spreadsheet.

Dawn.com has not independently verified the data in the spreadsheet.

Ijaz highlighted that the recently-created spreadsheet did not account for the fact that an “overwhelmingly large portion of the legal profession is organised informally”, therefore it lacked responses from lawyers who have worked with “many small chambers and smaller outfits”.

He added that the consensus was that such informal setups paid first-year associates and fresh grads “nothing”. The lawyer responded in the affirmative when asked if he thought the data collected till now was accurate and in line with what he expected.

Current pay structure

According to Hassan Niazi, a fresh graduate is usually hired as a first-year associate at a law firm, which is the lowest position in a firm’s hierarchy.

After that, one gets promoted to the role of a senior associate, following which they become a partner at a firm, or an associate partner at some, where they are paid a monthly salary while using the title of a partner.

Niazi told Dawn.com that what most young lawyers were asking was that they should at the minimum be paid a “living wage” — a wage high enough to maintain a normal standard of living.

While the countrywide minimum wage was raised to Rs32,000 earlier this year and to Rs35,000 in Sindh, a “living wage” would mean higher pay than the minimum wage.

When asked to describe what the current pay looks like for junior lawyers, Niazi said: “While the salary structure varies from firm to firm and is often completely at the discretion of the firm owners, the most common model is that junior associates are paid a fixed sum on a monthly basis regardless of how many cases they may have worked on.”

Niazi estimated that the average starting salary of a junior associate having fewer than two years of experience is around Rs25,000-Rs30,000 per month. He emphasised there were “very few firms” that were paying a maximum salary of Rs50,000, which, he noted was not a living wage.

“When I started practice in 2013, my starting salary was Rs15,000 a month. Despite inflation over the years, the starting salary in most law firms has remained static,” he said.

While one of the senior lawyers had termed junior lawyers a “net loss” to firms — as is detailed later in this piece — Niazi said, “Working at a law firm as a first-year associate is a net loss for the employee as you are paying for all expenses out of your own pocket.”

The lawyer noted that the associates were expected to cover all expenses within such salaries, emphasising that it put young lawyers, who may not be able to afford to survive on such a meagre pay, at a disadvantage.

“Yet, the mentality of many senior lawyers is that young lawyers should simply ‘tough it out’ and be grateful that a senior lawyer is investing time and money in training them.”

Stacked against women

Niazi highlighted that female lawyers face discrimination in hiring, promotion and career growth along with low pay.

“It is an open secret that most litigation law firms prefer not to hire female associates because they are not comfortable with sending them to the male-dominated courts,” he stated.

“It is also thought that female lawyers will likely get married and will lose the desire to work afterwards. Hence, [in their perspective] it isn’t worth a law firm’s time to hire and train them,” the lawyer said.

He argued that the lack of any formal employment contracts for junior lawyers exacerbates the problem because employers then owe them no contractual obligations (for paid time off, etc).

Expanding upon the difference between litigation and corporate law, he stated that the former involves making arguments before courts.

“In Pakistan, lawyers sometimes draw a distinction between those who practise litigation and those who practise transactional law, ie legal advice concerning business dealings such as the drafting of contracts and advising on commercial matters. These are, of course, imperfect definitions and there may be overlap between the two areas.”

Speaking to Dawn.com, Women in Law Founder Nida Usman Chaudhry also said there were “no set rules or standardised policies regarding remuneration, and the practice was mostly arbitrary and non-transparent at the moment”.

She added, “Typically, internships are unpaid and long probationary periods may either be expected to be entirely unpaid or pay very little without any consideration of the economic imperatives of the associate.”

Even in instances where associates do get a salary, Chaudhry said, it was usually a fixed amount paid monthly as opposed to a case-to-case basis. In some cases, they may give a percentage or commission as well, the lawyer added.

Chaudhry emphasised that rates at litigation firms were low as compared to corporate firms but it also depended on how much experience a person has. While stating that some entry-level lawyers at litigating firms say they are paid between Rs15,000-Rs30,000, she noted that pay at firms doing more corporate work could be within the bracket of Rs30,000-Rs50,000.

The Women in Law founder also recalled that some women in the field have stated that their probationary periods tend to be longer as compared to their male counterparts.

On the matter of laws that may regulate lawyers’ salaries, Chaudhry said there were none. “The labour laws protect the working class and therefore, minimum wage requirement is technically not applied in the context,” she highlighted.

However, she said, “There is at best a power that provincial bar councils have under Section 56(m) (power of provincial bar council to make rules) of the Legal Practitioners and Bar Councils Act 1973, under which they can make rules for the forming and regulation of firms of lawyers either throughout the province or any specified part thereof.”

“But so far the bar councils have not exercised this power — not even for safeguarding the interests of young lawyers or clients,” the lawyer lamented.

What are the law firms saying?

Earlier this week, Feisal Naqvi — a Supreme Court advocate and senior partner at Bhandari, Naqvi and Riaz — wrote an opinion piece, offering law firms’ perspectives on the issue.

Admitting that “law firms do not offer a living wage to fresh graduates”, among other things, Naqvi wrote: “To summarise, a fresh graduate is a net loss for a law firm.”

He argued that most fresh graduates were unable to do “work of a sufficiently high standard” and were “generally not very useful”, hence, their ability to “actually save a senior counsel’s time is minimal”.

This limited senior counsels from maximising their income because “extra time means (in theory) extra money”, the lawyer added.

The SC advocate also highlighted the “problem” of junior lawyers moving to other professional and personal endeavours after a couple of years and not sticking around at a firm.

Commenting on the matter, Naqvi told Dawn.com, “People are conflating low associate salaries generally with low salaries for freshers. Those are two very different things.”

He clarified that the debate was not about “minimum wage” but rather that the “starting salaries offered do not amount to a ‘living wage’” — a wage high enough to maintain a normal standard of living.

In contrast to the figures given by Niazi, Naqvi noted that the “current starting salaries for freshers at top Lahore firms” were around Rs50,000.

“The current situation is not good for anybody but we need to understand why it exists and then try to change it — maybe law firms will change things, maybe lawyers will change their perspective, maybe some structural reforms can be brought.”

Clarifying that he was “not trying to justify” the low pay scales, the SC lawyer pointed out that the role of fresh associates was limited in Pakistan.

Litigation — going to the courts and arguing — has a different setup from a corporate law firm, he emphasised.

The senior advocate further said that the profession of a lawyer was such that one learns by practising and needs practical experience, similar to how a doctor or a chartered accountant does.

He acknowledged that there was a need for more structure in the hiring process as firms here merely receive a few resumes every month compared to extensive hiring in the US. He noted there was “no understanding” of how long an associate would stay at a firm, which needed to be formalised.

While referring to some of the arguments made by junior lawyers in their opinion pieces, Naqvi said law firms were not comparable to multinational corporations as the former were usually run by only a few partners. Hence, the economic models on which both operate were very different, he added.

He also highlighted that apprenticeship was not a colonial construct but rather a common feature of many cultures, including Pakistan, where the student-teacher relationship has been highly valued.

Naqvi reiterated his points made in his column that people would act according to their “own economic interests”, and that the lack of retention at firms was a “giant problem”.

Describing the market as a “feast or famine” situation where clients are not regular, the lawyer said firms were “reluctant to make continuous financial commitments” by hiring lawyers.

Response

Responding to Naqvi’s column, Chaudhry wrote an analysis piece the next day, terming his article an “open admission of the cycle and layers of exploitation at play within the legal profession”.

She highlighted that there was a “lack of any human resource policies regarding the rights of employees/workers, such as regulated working hours, minimum pay, equal pay, non-discrimination, clear entry and progression track in the firm, and a conducive working environment in general”.

Supporting Rehan’s statements, Chaudhry stated that litigators were “often placed at a high pedestal and crowned ‘actual lawyers’ as if everyone else doing corporate advisory or other work is not”.

She noted that the Lawyers Protection and Welfare Act 2023 also failed to take into account the concerns of young as well as female lawyers, particularly with regard to stipends, parental leaves, daycare and other needs.

The lawyer went on to assert: “It is important that determination of living wage be viewed as a human rights and dignity issue as opposed to how-much-of-a-senior’s-time-can-be-saved perspective.”

On the matter of the “retention problem” highlighted by Naqvi, Chaudhry contended that “prevailing exploitative practices have a significant role in pushing the junior lawyers towards this culture of not staying committed to the firm”.

“Why would you blame them for that when you cannot pay them a decent wage?” the Women in Law founder asked.

Citing a survey conducted by her and Anoshay Fazal in 2022, titled ‘Fair Representation in Justice Sector’, she said 91 per cent of the respondents replied in the negative when asked if law firms had formal recruitment policies.

The same survey also stated that 86pc of the participants believed firms did not offer clear progression routes.

In her piece, she also referred to numerous reforms and amendments she drafted last year with the support of her research associate Hania Riffat, based on her study.

More lawyers speak up

Lums law graduates Ayesha Siddique and Reham Kundi also shed light on the debate in their opinion piece in Dawn, titled ‘Overworked & underpaid’.

They pointed out that the situation was “further exacerbated for female lawyers, introducing a dimension of gender disparity”, and called for a “potentially standardised remuneration policy for fresh graduates”.

Meanwhile, lawyer Rafeh Hyder offered a satirical and witty take on the matter — in support of young lawyers — in his opinion piece, titled, ‘Ramen and robes: a legal comedy’.

“Thus, it’s only fitting for recent graduates to express gratitude for the invaluable learning experience they gain — even if it sometimes feels like they’re teetering on the edge of financial bankruptcy,” he wrote.

Islamabad-based senior lawyer Adeel Wahid noted in his column, ‘Fair play’, in Dawn: “The industry monopolised by some, with no meagre contribution from judges, requires a reset.”

Listing various structural challenges, he stated, “The ‘face value’ already exists, the stays come easy, with no incentive to pay even below-minimum wages to fresh graduate lawyers.”

Lums law alumna Nimra Arshad, in her piece ‘Lady Justice — or not’, focused on how the “legal profession in Pakistan is particularly cruel to female lawyers”.

She noted that “some male judges won’t look you in the eyes while you are arguing before them”, which she said was not a sign of respect. “There are law firms in Lahore which are known for their we-don’t-send-female-associates-to-court policies,” she added.