The Golden Handcuffs You Fitted Yourself (A Practical Guide to Asking for More Money)

You have been in the role for two years. Maybe three. You are good at your job, you know you are good at your job and occasionally someone with a title much bigger than yours will confirm this in a performance review using words like "exceptional" and "high potential”. Then the salary conversation begins, and something happens to you. Your mouth goes a little dry. You think about whether now is really the right time, whether you will seem difficult, whether being grateful for the role is more appropriate than asking for more. You name a number that is about fifteen thousand dollars less than the one you actually wanted. They accept immediately. You wonder, briefly, what that means.

That moment, that specific flavour of self-silencing, is not a personality flaw. It is a trained response and it is costing you more than you think, not just this year, but for every year that follows.

Over fifteen years in corporate law, including as APAC Head of Legal at a global US technology company, I sat on both sides of that conversation.

Since leaving corporate life to build Counsel Media, I have had hundreds of conversations with lawyers at every stage through the podcast, through coaching and across social channels. The pattern I see most consistently in early and mid-career lawyers is not lack of capability. It is the quiet, persistent belief that asking for more money is somehow not quite professional, not quite safe, or simply not something they were ever taught to do.

The golden handcuffs you fitted yourself

In Part 1 of the Ungatekept Guide to Legal Careers, I wrote about the golden handcuffs trap: the way lawyers end up locked into roles they have grown to hate because their lifestyle has inflated to match their income, and the gap between what they earn and what they could afford elsewhere becomes impossible to bridge. The prescription was practical: live below your means, build escape savings and know your walk-away number.

That advice still stands. But there is a parallel version of the trap that gets far less attention and it does not require a single unnecessary purchase to spring.

Every time you accept a salary below your market rate and do not push back, you set a new baseline. Future increases are calculated as a percentage of that baseline. Your next role uses your current salary as a reference point. Five years of quiet acceptance and you are not just underpaid for where you are now, you are structurally underpaid relative to where you could be, and the gap makes staying feel more financially rational than it actually is. You did not inflate your lifestyle. You just never got what you were worth, and now the number you need to leave has grown larger than the alternatives can match.

The handcuffs are real. But some of them were made from your own silence, not your own spending. Unlike the lifestyle version, this one has a much more immediate correction: the conversation you have not had yet.

The profession that trained you to advocate for everyone except yourself

Law school teaches you to argue persuasively on behalf of a client, to research the strongest case, to anticipate counter-arguments and neutralise them. It does not teach you to apply any of that to your own career. The gap between those two things is where a lot of mid-career lawyers quietly bleed money for years.

There is an unspoken but pervasive idea in the legal profession that good lawyers are above financial grubbing, that the work should speak for itself, that mentioning money directly is not quite the done thing. It is dressed up as professionalism. It is not. It is a norm that benefits one party in the negotiation and that party is not you.

The genuinely good news is that you already have every skill required to negotiate well. You know how to build an argument, prepare a brief and hold your position under pressure. You have just never been given explicit permission to use those skills on your own behalf. Consider this your permission.

Someone is benefiting from what you don't know

Salary information in the legal profession is, by design, opaque. Firms do not publish pay scales. In-house teams often have a range wider than the number they open with. Bonuses are discretionary in ways that leave considerable room to the person holding the budget. This is not an accident.

Information asymmetry always benefits the party with more information.

When you walk in not knowing what your peers earn, what the firm budgeted for your role, or what a lateral hire in your market would attract, you are negotiating from the weaker position. The firm is not. The correction is information: salary surveys, a conversation with a recruiter, trusted peers. LinkedIn Salary, Hays Legal, Robert Half, Mahlab. None of them are infallible, but they are more than most lawyers consult before walking into a review.

The negotiation penalty is real, and it falls unevenly

Research, and the lived experience of lawyers I speak with regularly, shows that women face a specific bind in salary negotiation. The same behaviour that reads as confident and strategic in a male counterpart frequently reads as aggressive or difficult in a woman. This is the negotiation penalty. It is documented, it is real and pretending otherwise is a form of gaslighting the profession has indulged for too long.

This is not a reason to stay silent. It is a reason to be strategic.

Anchoring your ask to market data rather than personal need, positioning the conversation as a professional calibration rather than a personal request and using collaborative rather than adversarial language all help navigate the bias without surrendering the ask. None of this is fair. All of it is practical.

The language that actually works

Most lawyers freeze in salary conversations not because they lack courage but because they have never been given the actual words.

To open on your terms rather than waiting for the annual review to happen to you: "I'd like to schedule some time to discuss my remuneration. I've done some market research and I want to make sure we're aligned." Neutral, professional, signals preparation not aggression.

When you name a number: go first, go high within reason, go specific. "I'm looking for $X" is stronger than "somewhere around $X" and considerably stronger than "whatever you think is fair." Vagueness signals you are open to being lowballed.

If you receive a no or a not yet: "I understand. Can you help me understand what would need to change for that to be a yes, and what the timeline looks like?" Not an argument but a reasonable request for a roadmap.

Remove from your vocabulary entirely: "I know it's not a great time" or "I know budgets are tight." You are not asking for a favour. You are participating in a professional calibration.

Be your own Kris Jenner

Kris Jenner did not become the world's most famous ‘momager’ by waiting to be discovered. She assessed what the people she represented were worth and then went and got it, loudly, repeatedly and without apparent embarrassment. That kind of energy is instructive and a version of it belongs in your career toolkit.

You are the only person who is solely and permanently focused on your career.

Your employer is focused on the business. Your manager is focused on their targets. The person who sets remuneration budgets is focused on cost management. None of them are lying awake thinking about whether you have been adequately compensated for your last three years of excellent work. That is your job.

Being your own “career agent” is not an aggressive posture. It means knowing your numbers before you walk into the room, treating your career as a portfolio that requires active management and having the conversation before resentment has replaced strategy. Advocating for your financial interests is entirely compatible with being a generous colleague and an excellent lawyer and the belief that it is not is exactly what firms count on.

The golden handcuffs problem, whether it comes from lifestyle inflation or a salary baseline that was never challenged, is ultimately a problem about options. Negotiating well does not just improve this year's number. It protects your future ones, including the option to one day look at a role that pays less but costs less of you, and find that you can actually afford to say yes.

Ask for what you are worth. Then ask again.

Trust me, the conversation gets easier every single time you have it.

Mel

Mel Storey is the host of the Counsel Podcast and the founder of Counsel Media. She spent 15 years in corporate law, including as APAC Head of Legal at a global US technology company, before building a full-time media and coaching business for lawyers and law students. Find her @careerbigsis across the platforms.