My Attorney Blog

Would it surprise you to learn that different contract attorneys are not always paid the same wage rate for doing the same exact work? This discrepancy holds true even for those staffed on the same project and responsible for performing the same set of duties. If you are working on a temp assignment, you could very well be earning less than what the person sitting next to you is making. Unless you are performing contract work due to some inexplicable, altruistic motivation, this should come as disturbing news. Like it or not, this is a well documented common agency practice. Not all agencies engage in this manipulative practice, but it happens much too frequently.

I Was Paid Less Than The Other Temps On the Project

When I first started doing contract work not too long ago, I was staffed on a long term project by an agency that offered me a wage rate slightly lower than the market rate of $35. Despite my initial hesitation, I took the assignment because there were promises made by the agency that the project had the potential to last a very long time. Because longevity is a valuable commodity in the temporary lawyer business, I agreed to the slight wage reduction as consideration for the opportunity to work on a longer duration project.

A few months into it, I was sitting at my computer command station with my headphones on when I casually overhead two contract attorneys discussing their document review experiences. One temp had been on the project before I came along and another had only recently joined the team. The subject of wage rate disparity came up and the newer temp mentioned that the agency was paying him a rate of $35 an hour. The older temp immediately became agitated and expressed his shock and incredulity. Apparently the older temp was only being paid $33 and had been under the impression all this time that everyone else was being compensated at the same rate. The only reason he had agreed to the pay cut was because the agency had promised a long stint.

This information disturbed me greatly. After all, I later learned, we were all DC barred and likely being billed off at the same rate. Eventually more contract attorneys joined the conversation, and we discovered that only the newer temps were being paid the slightly higher wage rate. Several of us immediately called the agency to demand an explanation. After several attempts at feigning innocence and putting the blame on the law firm, the agency agreed to bump the wage rates of those affected to the same rate as everyone else. Requests for retroactive application were rejected.

Comparatively, my story is tamer than the ones I’ve heard from some other people. One individual being staffed on a supposedly lucrative foreign language review was being paid a rate of $40 an hour. It was not until a few months into the project that she learned that her similarly situated peers were being compensated at $53.

While not legally improper, the practice of paying different wage rates is very distasteful and underhanded. While not all legal staffing agencies practice this, some do, and those that do this give the rest a bad name.

Temporary Legal Staffing Agencies Try To Limit Information To Maintain their Competitive Edge

Many legal temp agencies try to make the discussion of certain subjects taboo. Most, if not all contract attorney staffing agencies have their own boiler plate employee policies that expressly prohibit temps from discussing topics such as wage rate. The conclusion I can draw is that agencies want to adopt policies that will allow them to maintain competitive control over their temps. While they want the strategic right to offer different deals to different contract attorneys, they also want to limit key information that could cause rebellion or unrest in Temp Town.

I think these agencies must be really naive if they think they can perpetually keep their contract attorneys in the dark. You know what they say. You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

Agencies will not be able to fully prevent contract attorneys from talking among themselves regarding subjects like compensation. If legal staffing agencies want to encourage loyalty among their contract attorneys and ensure quality of effort and work, it’s in their own interest to maintain fairness in how they treat their contract employees. There is nothing good that can come out of paying similarly situated workers differently.

I will not list names at this time, but I know many contract attorneys are already well aware of which agencies have this type of shady practice. Their tainted names are routinely circulated among those in Temp Town.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Income, Working Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.