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Compensation Decision Aids: How Better Guidance Evolved

By James D. Cotterman

Editor's Note: Having invited Jim Cotterman to write an A&FP article based on his recent Altman Weil(r) seminar on “internal and external equity” in compensation decisions, I was delighted to see that his introduction can also be read as a highly interesting short history of law firm compensation preoccupations over the last two decades. I therefore found the article doubly thought provoking, and expect that readers will have the same response.

When I began consulting 18 years ago, compensation advisory services focused primarily on benchmarking. We would look at market data, find comparables, refine study data to adjust for timing differences, and determine appropriate compensation ranges. This latter focus was partly due to the nationwide run-up in associate starting salaries and law firms' attempts to deal with those market forces and the system-wide compression they created.

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