Research
The SRA Law Firm Feedback Benchmark
Thirty-five years of confidential responses, indexed so a firm can read its own results against the market rather than against last year.
100,000+
confidential responses
100+
elite Am Law firms
1,000,000+
reports delivered
2026
current edition
Where firms lose associates
Engagement items ranked by the gap between their importance to associate retention and their score across participating firms. The largest gaps are supervisory, not financial, and they have widened in each of the last three editions.
Compensation transparency matters, but it sits fifth. A firm that responds to a retention problem with a rate rise is treating the symptom that is easiest to measure.
Retention gap by item, 2026 edition
Importance-to-retention minus mean score, indexed. n = 100,000+ responses across 100+ elite Am Law firms.
Methodology
How the benchmark is built, stated plainly enough to be argued with.
Every figure in the benchmark comes from instruments SRA administered directly. We do not blend third-party panels, and we do not weight results toward participating firms who ask us to.
Where a cut has too few responses to report safely, it is omitted rather than estimated. The suppression maths is published in the appendix.
- Population
- Associates, counsel and partners at participating US firms, fielded on the firm's own roster.
- Fielding
- Named-link distribution with automated reminders. Median participation 87 per cent.
- Suppression
- Cuts below the minimum response threshold are reported in aggregate or withheld entirely.
- Comparability
- Items are held constant year on year. Changes to wording are footnoted and break the series.
- Independence
- No firm sees another firm's data. Participation does not entitle a firm to influence findings.