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On a Tuesday in February, Priya knocked on my door, sat down, and told me she was leaving. She had been with us for six years. She knew our biggest files better than I did. And a firm three blocks away had offered her nine thousand dollars more than we were paying, plus a title we had never bothered to give her.
I said all the right things. I wished her well. I meant it. Then I closed the door and sat with the very uncomfortable feeling that I had no idea what we were actually paying anyone, or why.
The resignation we did not see coming
Here is what stung. It was not a surprise offer that pulled Priya away. It was the fact that we had never given her a reason to say no. Her raises came whenever I remembered, usually after a good year, usually a flat two percent because that felt safe. She had taken on estate files, trained two juniors, and quietly become the person who kept intake from falling apart. None of that showed up in her pay.
When someone leaves like that, the instinct is to blame the money. But money was only the visible part. The real problem was that our compensation had no logic. If Priya had asked me to explain how we set her salary, I could not have. And a person who cannot get a straight answer about their own pay starts listening when a competitor calls.
What the exit interview taught us about pay
I almost skipped the exit interview. I am glad I did not. I asked her to be blunt, and she was.
It was never really about the number. I could have lived with the number. It was that I never knew where I stood, or what I would have to do to earn more. The other firm handed me a sheet on day one.
That sentence changed how I thought about the whole thing. She had wanted clear criteria, and we had given her nothing. The competitor had not outbid us by much once you accounted for our lower billing pressure and shorter commute. They had simply been transparent, and transparency read as respect.
Note. If you only do one thing after reading this, do exit interviews and actually ask about pay clarity, not just pay amount. People will tell you things on the way out that they would never risk saying while they still work for you.
Building bands when you have no benchmark
Small firms rarely have a compensation department, and neither did we. What we had was a partner who felt guilty and a payroll spreadsheet that looked like it had been maintained by three different people who never spoke. So I started with what I could actually find.
I gathered every legal staff posting I could within a reasonable drive, wrote down the ranges, and where a posting hid the number I noted the firm size and the duties instead. I called two colleagues at firms our size and traded honest figures under a promise of discretion. That gave me a rough floor and ceiling for each role. It was not scientific. It was enough to stop guessing.
Then we defined the roles themselves, which turned out to be the harder job. We had been paying people, not positions. We wrote three bands, each with a low, middle, and high point, and we described what moved someone up: not tenure alone, but scope, independence, and the kind of work only that person could do.
| Band | What it recognizes | What moves you up |
|---|---|---|
| Assistant | Reliable support, learning the practice area | Owning a task end to end without checking |
| Paralegal | Independent file work, client contact | Carrying files, training others, judgment calls |
| Senior paralegal | Complex matters, mentoring, process | Redesigning how the work gets done |
The bands overlapped on purpose. A strong paralegal should be able to out-earn a brand new senior, because a title is not the same as value delivered. Getting the roles named clearly came first, and our piece on writing legal job posts helped us describe them in a way the bands could hang on.
Telling the rest of the team the truth
The scariest part was the meeting where I explained all of this to the people who had stayed. Two of them were underpaid against the new bands. One was slightly over, which is its own awkward conversation. I decided to say the quiet thing out loud: we had not been fair, we now had a system, and here is exactly where each of you sits inside it.
A pay band you keep secret does not do the work a pay band is supposed to do. Something I wish I had learned earlier
I brought the two underpaid staff up over the following two pay cycles rather than all at once, and I told them the plan on the spot so there was no fog. Nobody was asked to take a cut. For the person over band, we froze the number and let the band catch up. What I did not expect was the relief in the room. People do not need to be the highest paid. They need to believe the process is honest.
Tip. Keep the mechanics tidy so the story holds up. When roles, rates, and review dates live somewhere you can actually see them, like the People and Hiring tools inside A1 CMS, the annual pay conversation stops being an archaeological dig through old spreadsheets.
What changed a year later
We have not lost anyone since. That could be luck, and I am not going to pretend one spreadsheet fixed retention on its own. But the tone shifted. Raises are no longer a favour I hand down when I feel generous. They are a conversation about where someone sits and what the next band asks of them. Reviews got easier because the criteria were written down before anyone got emotional.
Priya, for what it is worth, and I check in with her, is doing well at the other firm. I do not resent the move. She gave me the most useful piece of feedback I have ever received about running a practice, and she gave it to me on her way out the door. If you are reading this with a nagging feeling that you could not explain your own pay decisions either, do not wait for a resignation to force the issue. Write the bands, say them out loud, and give your people the map before someone else hands them one.
