Data field · Geographic area · Legal proceeding

Outside counsel hourly rate

Actual billed hourly-rate benchmark for outside-counsel timekeepers, with role, practice, market, firm tier, observation year, and percentile retained as cohort context.

Who carries it ↓

1Data sources

1Providers

1Free to access

Sources that carry it

1 source

LexisNexis Legal & Professional

CounselLink Trends Report

Coordinated annual legal-spend benchmark report family published by LexisNexis Legal & Professional since 2013. The current 2026 edition is available through a standing required-field download form and uses actual invoices paid to law firms for work completed in 2025. Public current materials document pooled outside-counsel hourly-rate, practice-area, global-city/market, law-firm-tier share-of-wallet, and alternative-fee-arrangement benchmarks; coordinated editions also document blended matter-rate percentiles, timekeeper tiers, rate changes, and law-firm consolidation. Reader access does not require contributing invoices. Excludes CounselLink customer records, dashboards, budgets, negotiated panel rates, and buyer-specific Strategic Services analyses.

Free Full file National US 8 fields

Questions it helps answer

Defense counsel rate benchmarks Defense representation cost trends

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