NALP aims to be the premier resource for information on legal employment and recruiting in the United States and Canada. We produce a variety of research reports, including Jobs & JDs, our Associate Salary Survey, and our Public Service Attorney Salary Report. NALP produces the Public Service Attorney Salary Report, the piece of NALP research most relevant to PSJD’s audience, every four years. We released our most recent version of the Salary Report in 2018, when we also integrated that report into PSJD as a series of interactive visualizations and made it free to access for all PSJD jobseekers. (Actually, the 2014 report data is also free to access via PSJD as well, so that users can make comparisons and see how salaries have changed over time; the whole report is well worth a look if you haven’t already taken the time to check it out.)

But although the Salary Report is available to jobseekers on PSJD via the site’s Resource Center, the PSJD Fellow and I speak regularly with jobseekers who ask us whether NALP has any information we can share about public service salaries. So we took some time and asked ourselves whether we could do anything to make this information easier to find and easier to use. I’m writing this blog post because, as it turns out, there was!

Beginning today, all of PSJD’s users who have access to the Public Service Attorney Salary Report (school administrators, jobseekers, and employers who have purchased access to the report or who have complimentary access because they contributed to our dataset when we conducted the Salary Survey back in 2018) should begin seeing relevant data excerpted from the report alongside job announcements as they browse PSJD. (Employers cannot browse PSJD job announcements generally, but if they have access to the salary report they will see salary graphs alongside their own job announcements.)

Here are a couple of examples of how this works. This is a job with a civil legal aid organization, located in Philadelphia PA. The relevant portion of the Public Service Attorney Salary Report is the section that discusses salaries with civil legal aid organizations in the Northeast US Census Region (the introduction of the report discusses how states are divided geographically). So in the sidebar, users will see a graph of median salaries in this region for attorneys at organizations of this type, drawn from the dataset for the 2018 Public Service Attorney Salary Report.

If a job announcement describes a position available in multiple locations, the salary visualization may describe multiple regions. This job announcement discusses a position with a public interest nonprofit which is available in New York NY, Oakland CA, and Boston MA. Because the position is available in locations within both the Northeast US Census Region and the West US Census Region, users will see a graph including median salaries for attorneys with such organizations in both regions, drawn from the 2018 Public Service Attorney Salary Report.

So that’s the basic idea. When we have relevant information about salaries that might help you as you browse PSJD’s jobs database, we’ll do our best to provide it to you–no need to go hunting to find out what we have. There are a few provisos worth keeping in mind:

• Jobs that are classified as “unpaid” or “pro bono” have no relevant salary information and will not have salary graphs.
  This limitation is pretty straightforward. If a job expressly says it is unpaid, there’s no need to compare it against salary information.
• Jobs with organizations that are not covered by the 2018 Public Service Attorney Salary Report’s categories will not have salary graphs.
  The 2018 Public Service Attorney Salary Report covers four organization types: (1) civil legal services organizations, (2) public defender offices, (3) local prosecuting attorney offices, and (4) public interest organizations with issue-specific missions. In the PSJD Jobs Database, these sections correspond to our organization types ‘Civil Legal Aid’, ‘Public Defender’s Office’, ‘Prosecutor’s Office’, and ‘Public Interest Nonprofit’. Job announcements with these employer types will include these integrated salary graphs.

We hope that all makes sense, but if you have any questions about the new feature please feel free to reach out. We’d be happy to talk about it with you.