The comparison most firms run in their heads is a salary against a monthly fee, and it is the wrong one, because the salary is not the cost. The conventional loading factor is 1.25 to 1.4 times salary once employer taxes, benefits, equipment and software are counted — and that still leaves out the hours a partner spends directing the work.
What the hire actually costs
Defaults reflect common US ranges. Change any of them. Nothing is sent anywhere.
| Where the money goes | Per year |
|---|
Runs in your browser. No email, no form, nothing stored.
Cost is the smaller problem
The structural issue is that marketing for a law firm is not one job. It is five: technical and local search, paid search, web development, legal content, and analytics with call tracking. Someone genuinely strong at three of those five is not applying for a coordinator salary — they are running an agency or working at one, because the market pays more for that combination than a single small firm reasonably can.
So the realistic hire is strong in one area, competent in a second, and learning the rest on your budget. That is not a criticism of the hire; it is arithmetic about what the salary buys.
- Availability. Down the hall. A change happens in an hour rather than in a queue.
- Institutional knowledge. After a year they understand your practice, your referral sources and your voice better than any outside party.
- Volume and coordination work. Social posting, events, print, sponsorships, CLE logistics.
- Intake. A coordinator who also owns intake follow-up is worth more than either job alone.
And one risk that is usually discovered rather than anticipated: when the programme lives in one employee’s head and that employee leaves, it stops — not degrades, stops — for the two to three months it takes to replace them.
The fuller version of this argument, including when hiring in-house is clearly the right call, is on our page about hiring in-house versus using an agency.
How this is calculated, and what it leaves out
Calculators like this one are easy to rig, so here is what this one does and does not do.
- Three layers, kept separate. Employment cost (salary, employer taxes, insurance, retirement) is shown on its own, because that is the figure with a conventional benchmark — 1.25 to 1.4 times salary. Tooling and your management time are added after, not folded into that multiplier.
- Your time is an opportunity cost, not an outlay. It is listed separately and labelled as such. If you would not actually bill those hours, set the hourly value to zero.
- Paid time off is not charged as a separate line. It is already inside the salary. Counting it twice is the most common flaw in these comparisons.
- Advertising budget is excluded from both sides. You pay Google the same either way, so including it would flatter one column for no reason.
- Turnover and recruitment are not modelled. They are real and they favour the agency side, which is exactly why they are left out — the comparison is conservative without them.
- Every default is editable. They reflect common US ranges, not your market.
If the honest answer for your firm is to hire, that is a legitimate outcome of this calculation and worth saying so. Hiring tends to win when you already have someone who can direct a specialist, when there is enough volume to keep one busy every day, and when your case values are high enough that one extra matter a quarter covers the difference.