Personal injury attorney job description template: duties, requirements and pay range

A personal injury posting has five working parts: the injury work, the bar admission you require, the skills and systems, a good-faith pay range with benefits, and how to apply.

Each gets its own block in the template below.

If you are still deciding what the role needs — the case mix, the seniority, where to source candidates — our guide to how to hire a personal injury attorney covers the decisions before the posting; this page is about writing it.

Core duties.

Write the work a candidate can picture, not adjectives: the case types you file, the courts you appear in, how far into a case this hire carries it, and who they answer to.

Injury work runs in stages, so say where the hire joins — signing and building pre-suit files, pushing demands and negotiation, or carrying litigation through trial.

If the attorney will direct paralegals or legal assistants, say so too — supervising nonlawyer staff carries ethics duties of its own, and our guide to supervising non-lawyer staff under Rule 5.3 covers the structure.

Duties worth a line on the posting:

• Evaluating new matters: screening potential cases, assessing liability and damages potential, and documenting the fee agreement [say how cases get signed at your firm]
• Building files: investigating facts, collecting police reports, medical records and bills, and directing investigators and experts
• Drafting demand packages and negotiating with insurance adjusters and defense counsel
• Drafting pleadings, motions and written discovery; taking and defending depositions
• Preparing cases for mediation and arbitration [if your docket includes them]
• Trying cases that do not resolve [say how much court time this hire should expect]
• Keeping clients informed at every stage of the file
• Managing the caseload, filing deadlines and calendar

One boundary shapes the duties block: the work has to sit inside the jurisdictions where the hire is authorized to practice.

ABA Model Rule 5.5(a) says a lawyer must not practice law in a jurisdiction in violation of its regulation of the profession, or assist another in doing so — and the "assist" clause is the firm's exposure, not just the lawyer's.

Filings, depositions and court appearances all happen in a named place, so write the courts and counties to match where the hire's license actually runs.

These are the ABA's model rules; your state adopts its own version, so confirm the wording that fits with your state bar's ethics counsel.

Qualifications and bar admission.

The credential line does the heavy lifting on this block, because it is the one you can and should verify.

Write it as "[State] bar admission in good standing" — the state where the cases are filed, not a generic "licensed attorney."

Then verify it: the ABA says lawyers are licensed by a state agency in each state, that agency can confirm whether a person has a law license and may practice there, and the ABA keeps a state-by-state directory of those agencies.

A resume line is not a license check; run the check before you rely on the credential, and again before the start date.

Decide what you will accept and write exactly that.

"Admitted in any state" or "strong litigator" pulls applications you cannot use.

If you would consider a lawyer admitted in another U.S. jurisdiction, check with your state's admitting authority on how that lawyer becomes admitted where you practice before you write a waive-in line — the paths and their conditions are state-specific and not something a posting should promise.

If you would hire a graduate who is not yet admitted, be careful twice over: states' rules on what an unadmitted graduate may do were not verified in our research, so confirm with your state's admitting authority before you post the role — and know the title rule, because a lawyer not admitted in a jurisdiction must not hold out or represent that they are admitted to practice law there (ABA Model Rule 5.5(b)(2)).

Experience follows the same required-versus-preferred split: a background that transfers into your practice — insurance defense for a plaintiff firm, another plaintiff firm's caseload, a judicial clerkship — belongs on a preferred line unless you genuinely require it, so you do not screen out candidates whose experience fits.

The candidate-side view of the practice is in our personal injury attorney career guide.

Skills and software.

Name the systems your firm actually runs — case management, document generation, e-filing, e-signature, and whatever you use to organize medical records and discovery — and split them into must-have-on-day-one versus willing-to-train.

The non-software skills that matter in an injury practice are specific: written demands and negotiation, deposition work, calendar control across a caseload with filing deadlines that can end a claim, the judgment to decline a case that should not be signed, and client communication with people recovering from injuries.

If you ask candidates for a writing sample or a drafting exercise, keep it on a mock file — under the FLSA's definition of "employ" ("to suffer or permit to work," 29 U.S.C.

203(g)), a candidate doing real, usable work for the firm may be an employee owed wages.

A posting that names its real stack and real expectations filters better than one that lists "strong negotiation skills."

Pay range and benefits.

Anchor the range in your market and your budget, then adjust for the duties you wrote above.

The national benchmark: in the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) May 2025 release, lawyers (SOC 23-1011) had a median annual wage of $159,670 ($76.76 per hour), with the 10th percentile at $78,360 and the 90th percentile at $351,600 — the spread of the whole profession, not a floor and a cap for your hire.

In the same release, lawyers in the Legal Services industry (law firms, NAICS 5411) had a median annual wage of $157,870.

OEWS measures the whole lawyers series (SOC 23-1011) — there is no separate personal-injury series — and excludes the self-employed, so it does not measure what a contingency-fee firm owner takes home.

State figures are on our personal injury attorney salary page.

A second anchor, from a different survey: NALP's 2025 Associate Salary Survey put the median first-year associate base salary at $200,000 as of January 1, 2025 — but among firms of 250 or fewer lawyers, a first-year salary of $150,000 or less was the most common response (44% of offices).

NALP's sample is large-firm-heavy, so treat those figures as context for where the market sits, not as the number your firm must match; set the range from what the role you wrote actually is.

If your practice is contingency-based, candidates will want to know how pay is structured — say in plain terms what is base salary and how any bonus or incentive works, without promising a number you have not budgeted.

Whatever range you post should be one you believe — and in the jurisdictions listed below, each verified from statute or the state agency, the law requires pay information in the posting itself: California (employers with 15 or more employees, which must also give the pay scale to any third party that posts for them), Washington (15 or more; wage scale or salary range plus a general description of benefits, in effect since January 1, 2023), Illinois (15 or more; pay scale and benefits, a hyperlink allowed), Minnesota (30 or more employees in the state; starting salary range and a benefits description, and ranges may not be open-ended), Massachusetts (25 or more in the state; effective October 29, 2025), New York State (four or more employees), New York City (since November 1, 2022), Colorado (compensation and benefits in all postings), Connecticut (effective October 1, 2026) and Virginia (the wage, salary or range in each posting).

California also requires the pay scale on an applicant's reasonable request regardless of employer size, and it defines "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.

Nevada works differently: there, an employer gives the wage or salary range to an applicant who has completed an interview, rather than in the posting.

Other places have rules we did not read, and the thresholds move — check with your state labor agency before you post.

Two more blocks finish the posting.

The benefits block is where a small firm competes on honesty rather than size: list what you actually offer — health coverage, retirement plan, paid time off, bar dues and CLE support, malpractice coverage — and state your hours expectation, including any caseload target or billable target, as your firm's own numbers.

And classification: under federal law (29 CFR 541.304), a lawyer who holds a valid license and is actually engaged in the practice of law is an exempt professional, and the federal salary-level and salary-basis requirements do not apply — but California has no such carve-out, and exempts a practising attorney only if they also earn at least two times the state minimum wage for full-time work, which works out to $70,304 a year ($1,352 a week) at the 2026 minimum wage of $16.90.

Confirm classification with employment counsel in your state before you set the posting's pay line.

Adapting the template for a small firm.

In a small injury firm, the hire is the docket, so write the breadth in honestly: the matters they will own from intake to resolution, the clients they will counsel directly, the staff they will direct.

A named supervisor matters more, not less — "reports to the managing attorney" tells a candidate who reviews their work and who they escalate to.

If this is a solo's first attorney hire, say what the hire inherits and what the firm still expects the owner to carry.

And post the range you actually budgeted rather than one copied from a big-firm survey; a range you can stand behind saves you from renegotiating with the candidate you wanted.

Adapting for a case mix.

Rewrite the duties bullets around the files you actually run.

An auto and trucking practice hires for volume and speed — many files, adjuster negotiation, a tight demand pipeline.

A medical malpractice or product liability practice hires for depth — expert work, records review, motion litigation and trials that take years.

A mixed practice should say the split, because a candidate built for one is not built for the other.

Let the requirements block follow the same logic: ask for experience with the kind of cases your firm signs, not "injury experience" in the abstract.

If you expect a caseload target or after-hours availability, state it as the firm's own number rather than leaving it to guesswork.

Adapting around intake.

In a contingency practice the attorney's caseload is only as good as the files the firm signs.

If this hire will screen and sign cases, say so in the duties and say how signing decisions get made — and if a separate team runs intake, name the handoff so candidates know who owns the first client call.

Our guide to staffing intake at a personal injury firm covers the intake roles themselves.

Adapting for hybrid or remote days.

Court dates anchor this role to specific courthouses, so say where the hire will appear and where they will work the rest of the week.

When part of the week is remote, the license question follows the lawyer, not the desk: ABA Formal Opinion 495 (Dec.

16, 2020) treats a lawyer as able to practice the law of their licensing jurisdiction while physically present in a state where they are not admitted, if that state has not deemed the conduct the unauthorized practice of law and the lawyer does not hold out as locally licensed, advertise a local office, or offer local legal services — and the opinion says local contact information on websites, letterhead or business cards would improperly establish a local office.

Confirm the arrangement with your state bar's ethics counsel before you publish a hybrid line.

Five wordings sink otherwise good injury-firm postings.

Each is fixable before you hit publish.

1. Bar-admission wording that invites practice where the hire is not admitted.

A lawyer not admitted in a jurisdiction must not hold out to the public or otherwise represent that they are admitted to practice law there (ABA Model Rule 5.5(b)(2)) — so a posting line that reads as licensed-in-your-state for a hire who is not is the trap, and the firm shares the exposure: Model Rule 5.5(a) bars a lawyer from practicing law in violation of a jurisdiction's regulation of the profession, or assisting another in doing so.

Write the admission requirement as the state where the cases are filed, and treat any role for an out-of-state or unadmitted lawyer as a confirm-with-the-admitting-authority question before the posting goes up.

2. Preference wording that screens by who people are.

The EEOC says it is illegal to publish a job advertisement that shows a preference for, or discourages applications from, people because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information — its own example is an ad seeking "recent college graduates," which may discourage people over 40 from applying.

Write about the work, not the person: cut "young," "hungry" and "recent grad" from an injury posting the same as any other.

Keep application questions to what is essential to decide whether a person is qualified — the EEOC treats questions about race, sex, national origin, age or religion as irrelevant to that decision — and treat the borderline ones as risky rather than harmless, because federal law does not clearly forbid every such question but the answers can be used as evidence of intent to discriminate unless justified by a business purpose.

Keep the process accessible, too: an employer must provide an accommodation a disabled applicant needs to apply, unless it causes significant difficulty or expense.

3. Salary-history questions.

Several of the state laws we read restrict them.

California (Labor Code 432.3) bars all employers from seeking an applicant's salary history and from relying on it in hiring or pay decisions; New York (Labor Law 194-a) bars requesting it as a condition of being interviewed, considered, hired or promoted, and seeking it from a current or former employer; Illinois (820 ILCS 112) bars screening by it, requiring it for an interview or offer, and seeking it from employers; Massachusetts (G.L. c.149 §105A) bars seeking it from the candidate or their employers.

The posting states above overlap here too: Virginia's posting law also bans seeking salary history, Nevada bans seeking it and instead requires the range be given to an applicant after an interview, and Connecticut bars asking about salary history unless the applicant volunteers it.

Ask for expectations instead — California's law expressly allows an employer to ask about salary expectations for the position, and an applicant who volunteers history without prompting may have it considered.

Other states and cities have rules we did not read, so check yours before the interview stage.

4. Conviction-history questions too early.

An injury firm is an employer first: fair-chance timing rules apply to its own hiring like anyone else's.

California's Fair Chance Act (employers with five or more employees) bars asking about or considering conviction history until after a conditional offer of employment, and New York City's Fair Chance Act makes it unlawful for most employers to ask about or consider criminal history before a conditional offer.

If your application form asks about criminal record, check your state and city law before you post — other states and cities have fair-chance rules this page does not cover.

5. Vague everything — and hype in its place.

"Injury attorney wanted," no case mix, no courts, no seniority, no range — an umbrella posting pulls applications across every level of experience and saves you none of the sorting.

The opposite error is the same problem in costume: "unlimited earning potential" and other hype lines tell a candidate nothing about the work, the structure or the number.

The fix is the template above: name the case mix, the courts, the stage coverage a hire will own, and a range you believe.

If the level is associate, say associate; if the firm genuinely needs a lawyer flexible on level, say what the docket decides.

After you post.

Set a review cadence before the posting goes live and hold to it — a slow reply reads as a closed door.

If the pay range or the duties change, update the posting rather than explaining the difference in interviews.

Prepare the interview the same way for every candidate — the same questions, the same structure, a scoring sheet — so comparisons stay fair and every question stays tied to the job.

And before yours goes up, browse the live personal injury attorney jobs on this board to see the pay framing and duty lists you are competing against.

This page is employer information, not legal advice. Posting laws, bar-admission rules and ethics rules change and vary by jurisdiction — confirm them with your state labor agency, your state's admitting authority, employment counsel and your state bar's ethics counsel before you post.