How do you hire a litigation attorney? A hiring guide for law firms

In litigation, the work arrives in phases: pleadings and answers, written discovery and productions, depositions, discovery and dispositive motions, settlement negotiation, and trial or arbitration.

Decide which of those phases the hire owns in the first year, because that decision sets every other one on this page — a litigator who takes depositions in month three is a different search, and a different salary conversation, from one who spends year one on research and drafting under a senior's review.

Write the level down in work, not titles.

A junior associate drafts discovery responses, cite-checks and assembles motion briefs, and maintains the document record under review.

A mid-level takes and defends depositions, argues motions, and runs discovery without a partner re-checking each step.

A senior hire carries matters first chair — strategy, key witnesses, trial — and the case flow you can offer them belongs in the conversation as much as the number.

Judge candidates against the rung you are buying, and say which rung it is in the posting.

The candidate-side picture — the licensing path, the training, the career routes into the seat — is in our guide to what a litigation attorney does.

The level and title structures common to every attorney hire — associate, of counsel, contract — are in our attorney hiring guide, and the cross-role work in hiring for your law firm.

What follows here is what litigation adds.

The case mix you run shapes the search too: an insurance defense docket, a plaintiff personal injury docket, commercial disputes and employment litigation each point to a different pool of experienced litigators — two of the association boards in the sourcing section below are organized around their members' side of that work (civil defense and plaintiff-side employment rights).

Budget for the team around the hire as well — the staffing decisions for that side of the desk are in our guide to hiring litigation paralegals.

The first credential is an active law license in good standing, and for a litigation hire the working assumption is admission in the state where your court sits, because an appearance takes place in a specific courthouse.

Per the ABA, lawyers are licensed by a state agency in each state, and that agency can confirm whether a person has a law license and is permitted to practice there; the ABA keeps a state-by-state directory of those agencies, which is where the check starts.

Run it yourself — admission, current status and standing — before the offer, not from the resume or a certificate PDF.

Our guide to verify bar status before hiring covers that lookup.

Per the ABA's directory, in New Hampshire and South Dakota you call the bar association to confirm that a person is licensed to practice and in good standing.

Two boundaries in the ABA's Model Rule 5.5 matter if you hire a litigator who is not admitted in your state — a research-heavy associate hire, for example.

Model Rule 5.5(b)(2) bars a lawyer who is not admitted in a jurisdiction from holding out or representing that they are admitted there, which is why the titles, bios and signature blocks of an unadmitted hire deserve a second look, and Model Rule 5.5(b)(1) bars establishing an office or other systematic and continuous presence for practicing law in the jurisdiction, except as the Rules or other law authorize.

Model Rule 5.5(a) also bars a lawyer from practicing law in violation of a jurisdiction's regulation of the profession — and from assisting another in doing so, the clause that reaches your firm.

These are the ABA's model texts; the rule that binds you is the version your state adopted.

Out-of-state and remote candidates raise the same questions in a newer form.

Model Rule 5.5(c) lets a lawyer admitted in another U.S. jurisdiction — and not suspended or disbarred — provide legal services on a temporary basis in four listed situations, one of which is association with a locally admitted lawyer who actively participates in the matter.

ABA Formal Opinion 495 separately concluded that a lawyer may practice the law of their licensing jurisdiction while physically located in a state where they are not admitted, so long as that state has not deemed the arrangement unauthorized practice and the lawyer does not hold out as locally licensed — and the opinion warns that local contact information on a website, letterhead or business card would improperly establish a local office or presence.

For a hire whose work includes appearances in your courts, treat any remote or out-of-state arrangement as a question for your state bar's ethics counsel before you make it the plan.

A resume line like "board certified" or "certified specialist" in a trial or litigation specialty is a claim to check directly with the organization that issued it.

Our research for this page did not verify which boards certify litigation specialties or where, so treat the line as unverified until the issuing body confirms it.

Rules change and agencies move.

Verify current admission status with the state's licensing agency before any offer, and confirm your state's versions of the rules above with your state bar's ethics counsel.

Match the channel to the rung you decided in the first section.

For a senior litigator, work the channels you already have: referrals from the litigators and clients in your network, direct outreach, or a search firm.

For a junior hire, start with law-school career offices and alumni networks, with your state and local bar associations as the other place to ask.

Whatever the mix, screen a candidate from any channel the same way — the checks in the sections below do not change with the source.

For experienced hires, the practice-area associations our research verified as running job boards today include:

• DRI Career Center — DRI, the national organization of civil defense lawyers, runs a career center job board — the channel for insurance defense litigators.
• NELA Job Board — the National Employment Lawyers Association, whose members are plaintiff-side workers' rights attorneys, has a job board on its site.
• ALA Job Board — the Association of Legal Administrators' board accepts ads for practicing attorneys alongside legal managers, administrators and support staff.

AAJ, the association of plaintiff trial lawyers, is another litigation-focused body; our research could not confirm that it runs a job board today, so check with the association directly.

Posting costs for the boards above were not part of our research — ask before you budget.

If you work with a legal search firm, two clauses of the NALSC Code of Ethics — which members subscribe to as a condition of membership — touch you directly: a member firm may not solicit any attorney from an office where it made a placement for six months after that placement, unless you agree otherwise, and candidates may be submitted to you only with the candidate's express prior consent and your prior authorization, or a reasonable belief from prior direct contact that you would accept it.

For a lateral litigation partner search, NALSC also publishes the open-source Uniform Lateral Partner Questionnaire, which it estimates covers about 80% of the data a firm needs from a lateral partner; any search firm or law firm may use it.

Our research found no primary-source benchmark for recruiter fees, so get the fee and any guarantee terms in writing and treat a quoted percentage as an opening position, not a market rate.

Before you post anywhere, look at the market from the candidate's side: browsing litigation attorney jobs on this board shows how competing firms describe the role, the courts and the pay.

The channel-by-channel detail is in our guide to where a law firm should post job openings.

Benchmark before you budget.

The broadest figure in our research is the federal wage survey: in the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) May 2025 release, Lawyers (SOC 23-1011) had a national median annual wage of $159,670 ($76.76 an hour), with the 10th percentile at $78,360 and the 90th at $351,600, in employment of 754,500.

The band in the banner above — $102,990 at the 25th percentile to $221,370 at the 75th — is the same series nationally.

Our sources carry no litigation-only wage series, so treat every one of these figures as the all-lawyers proxy, and note its two blind spots: the survey excludes the self-employed, so it says nothing about what firm owners take home, and BLS footnotes published values at or above $239,200 a year ($115 an hour) as approximate — the 90th percentile above sits past that line.

The sector and state cuts of the same release narrow it toward your market.

Lawyers in the Legal Services industry (law firms, NAICS 5411) had a median annual wage of $157,870 in May 2025.

Among states, New York had the highest lawyer median at $207,860, followed by DC at $195,190 and California at $195,080; Mississippi was lowest at $91,690.

The state-by-state percentile tables are on our litigation attorney salary page.

For a first-year associate, the survey with the most direct evidence is NALP's.

Its 2025 Associate Salary Survey found a median first-year base salary of $200,000 as of January 1, 2025 — $215,000 at firms of more than 700 lawyers — in a sample that skews large-firm.

At the other end, among firms of 250 or fewer lawyers, a first-year salary of $150,000 or less was the most common figure, reported by 44% of offices.

Geography moves the number: median first-year salary was $225,000 in six cities — Austin, Boston, Houston, New York City, San Francisco and the Washington, DC area — while outside NALP's 19 major-market cities, medians ran $181,900 in the West, $170,000 in the Northeast, and $160,000 in the South and Midwest.

NALP's salary curve for the Class of 2025 shows why a single "market rate" is elusive: of 22,715 reported full-time starting salaries — a curve that covers all full-time jobs, not just law firms — 50.0% fell between $60,000 and $100,000, and 21.5% sat at $225,000 — a bimodal curve, so for an entry-level opening, know which end of it you are competing with.

At the top of the market, the reference point the legal press has covered since mid-2026 is the associate base scale: Milbank's June 2, 2026 memo set a new associate base scale effective July 1, 2026, running from $235,000 for the classes of 2025 and 2026 to $455,000 for the class of 2018, and firms including McDermott, Quinn Emanuel, Sullivan & Cromwell, Katten, Norton Rose Fulbright and Troutman Pepper Locke announced matches — hence the name "Milbank scale," since Milbank rather than Cravath led both the 2023 and the 2026 raises.

Read those figures for what they are: press coverage of firm memos, not a government or association series.

Not every market firm matched on the same terms — Katten's scale tops out at $440,000, and Susman Godfrey set $240,000 for first-years — some firms tie the scale to 1,900- or 2,000-hour billable expectations, and our research found no sourced base-scale data for secondary markets such as Texas or Chicago.

Treat the scale as what the most aggressive payers do, not as the median your firm must clear.

One classification note before the offer: under federal law (29 CFR 541.304), a licensed lawyer who is actually engaged in the practice of law is an exempt professional, and the federal salary-level and salary-basis requirements do not apply to that lawyer — so an hourly-paid contract litigator can still fall under the exemption.

Job titles do not decide exemption status; the duties and the salary must meet the regulations.

One state exception to watch is California: a practicing lawyer is exempt there only if the salary is also at least two times the state minimum wage for full-time work — $70,304 a year ($1,352 a week) at the 2026 minimum wage of $16.90, which took effect January 1, 2026.

Have employment counsel confirm the classification for each hire.

If you advertise the role, the posting itself may need a number in it.

Pay-scale posting rules our research verified from statute or the state agency cover employers with 15 or more employees in California, Washington and Illinois, four or more in New York State, 30 or more in Minnesota — where the range may not be open-ended — and 25 or more in Massachusetts; New York City has required a good-faith pay range in advertisements for NYC-performed work since November 1, 2022; Colorado requires compensation and benefits disclosure in all job postings, internal and public; Connecticut's posting requirement took effect October 1, 2026; and Virginia requires the wage, salary or range in each public and internal posting, though its employer-size threshold was not confirmed in our research.

Compliance trackers report posting rules in other jurisdictions — Maryland, New Jersey, Vermont and Hawaii among them, plus Washington, D.C. and Cleveland, Ohio — that our research did not confirm from primary sources, so check the current rule with your state's labor agency before you post.

Nevada runs on a different clock: its law requires giving the wage or salary range to an applicant who has completed an interview, not in the posting itself.

California defines the pay scale as a good-faith estimate of the salary or hourly range the employer reasonably expects to pay on hire, with penalties running $100 to $10,000 per violation — a fair description of how to treat your range everywhere.

Screen against a written scorecard built from the docket, not a feel.

Before the interviews, write down the phases the hire must own on day one — the written-discovery load, the motion practice, whether depositions start in month one or year three — and score every candidate on the same sheet.

For a litigator, the evidence is checkable, so check it.

Ask for writing samples from motion or brief work, redacted as needed, and have the candidate walk you through the research question and what survived their edits.

Ask for the deposition record in specifics — the case, the court, who noticed it, how it was defended — because a narrative that stays at the level of "we" is asking you to take the resume on faith.

Collect the matter history in the same pass, prior firms and matters included, because that list is what your conflicts check runs on.

Run the conflicts check before the offer, not after.

ABA Model Rule 1.10(a) imputes a conflict under Rules 1.7 or 1.9 of any one lawyer in a firm to all the firm's lawyers, and the model rule's screening provision (1.10(a)(2)) can keep a lateral's prior-firm conflict from spreading where the lawyer is timely screened and apportioned no part of that matter's fee, prompt written notice goes to the affected former client, and the screened lawyer and a partner certify compliance.

Our research did not confirm state by state which states accept that screen without the former client's consent — state law differs — so check your state's version of Rule 1.10 with your state bar's ethics counsel.

The mechanics are in our guide to conflicts checks before hiring a lateral attorney, and the wider process around an experienced hire from another firm is in our guide to hiring lateral attorneys.

One compliance line for the interview loop: Connecticut bars employers from asking a prospective employee's wage and salary history unless the applicant volunteers it; Virginia's law bans seeking salary history; and Nevada requires the employer to give the wage or salary range to an applicant who has completed an interview, and bans seeking salary history as well.

Keep every question on the job; anything touching protected traits goes to your employment counsel before the loop starts, not during it.

A red flag is not a verdict — it is a question to resolve before the offer.

The ones worth slowing down for in a litigation hire:

• A litigation record that stays abstract. Ask for the checkable specifics — the court, the motion, the deposition, who argued or defended it. A trial narrative that shrinks under follow-up questions is telling you something.
• No writing sample from motion or brief work. A candidate who cannot show a brief they drafted, or whose samples are all form documents, leaves you nothing to judge the drafting you need against.
• Bar claims the licensing agency does not confirm. An admission date, jurisdiction or standing line that the state agency's record does not match resolves with the source before the offer, not after.
• A conflicts history they will not put in writing. The screen needs matter names early. A candidate who stalls on listing prior firms and matters is handing you a conflicts check you cannot complete.
• Local presence where they are not admitted. For a remote or out-of-state hire, a website, letterhead or business card carrying local contact information in a state where the person is not admitted is the fact pattern ABA Formal Opinion 495 warns establishes an improper local office.
• An unverifiable specialty credential. A "board certified" line the issuing body cannot confirm is a claim you would be repeating to clients.
• A departure story with no detail. Vagueness about why they left their last firm deserves a follow-up before you make the offer.

Onboarding starts with the conflicts system: the new attorney goes in before their first client conversation, not after the first week.

If the pre-hire run flagged a matter that needs a screen, stand it up rather than deferring it.

Under the model rule's mechanics, prompt written notice goes to the affected former client describing the screen and stating compliance; the notice should describe the screened lawyer's prior representation and go out as soon as practicable after the need for a screen becomes apparent; the screened lawyer and a partner certify compliance at reasonable intervals on the former client's written request and when screening ends; and the screened lawyer keeps a salary or partnership share set by a prior independent agreement but may not receive compensation directly related to the screened matter.

Confirm the mechanics against your state's version of the rule with your state bar's ethics counsel.

Then put the operating structure in writing: which matters the hire owns versus supports, who second-chairs and who reviews, and the billing or hour expectations, stated as your firm's own.

For a junior hire, calendar the reps deliberately — first research memos and declarations, then arguments, then depositions — because the rung they climb is the retention path as much as the training plan.

For a senior hire, put case flow on the table in the offer conversation itself — where their matters would come from: your client base, referral relationships, panel work — not as a surprise in month six.

Then keep the hire you chose: put the first pay review on the calendar when you make the offer, benchmarked against the published figures in the pay section above so the conversation has a number in it.

Pair the litigation work with the support it runs on — the team decisions are in our guide to hiring litigation paralegals — and give feedback that teaches rather than only corrects.

None of that requires a novel compensation structure; it requires the same transparency in month twelve that won you the hire in the first place.

Employer information, not legal advice. The licensing rules described here are administered by each state's licensing agency, and the ethics rules are the ABA's model texts — the versions your state adopted control. Confirm admission and standing with the state's licensing agency, and the ethics, posting and classification questions with your state bar's ethics counsel, your state's labor agency, or employment counsel, before you act.