The Datum Report

Occupation 3520 · Associate professional occupations

Legal associate professionals

Half of full-time legal associate professionals in the UK earn more than £34,662 a year, and half earn less.

Legal associate professionals provide administrative support for legal professionals and investigate and make recommendations on legal matters that do not fall within the province of a normal court of law.

How people enter it

Entrants usually possess GCSEs/S grades and A levels/H grades in appropriate subject areas. Off and on-the-job training is available. Membership of professional institutions will be required for some posts. Candidates must pass professional examinations and complete up to five years of practical experience.

What the work involves

• runs chambers on behalf of principals, develops the practice, manages the flow of work, decides which cases to accept, arranges appropriate fees and prepares financial records
• ensures judges have the necessary legal other documents, manages their diary and carries out other administrative duties collates information, drafts briefs and other documents
• attends court to assist barristers and solicitors in the presentation of a case
• ensures their organisation complies with relevant regulations and their organisational policies
• assists in all aspects of probate and common law practice
• draws up schedules of legal costs and advises on the allocation of legal costs and the level of legal fees

Also called

Barrister’s clerk · Compliance officer (legal services) · Law costs draftsman · Legal assistant · Litigator · Paralegal assistant

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for legal associate professionals, full-time employees, 2023 to 2025. Each point is that year's ASHE April snapshot as published — revisions are not backfilled into earlier years, and a year ONS withheld is a gap rather than a joined line.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Year-on-year change

The change from each year to the next, in per cent, computed from the figures in the chart above — so the two cannot disagree.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Pay by region

Median gross annual pay for full-time employees, ranked, against the UK figure. 6 of 11 regions are published: ONS withholds a cell where the survey sample cannot support it, and those are shown as gaps rather than dropped — an absent region is not a region without the work in it.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Period 2025. Table

Every regional figure

ONS does not publish occupational pay below region. Cells the survey could not support are shown as withheld, with its reason — adding a region split to a specific occupation leaves roughly a tenth of cells publishable.

Common questions