The California Law Firm Benefits Benchmarking Report
Now in its fifth year, the Brystra California Law Firm Benefits Benchmarking Report analyzes how law firms across California structure, price, and enroll their employee benefits. It’s built to answer the question every managing partner eventually asks: are we competitive, and are we overpaying? Generic regional surveys can’t answer that for a law firm. Real, firm-level data segmented by firm size can.
What It Measures
Each annual edition benchmarks law firm medical, dental, and vision programs across the dimensions that actually drive cost and competitiveness — analyzed separately for small group (under 100 employees) and large group (100+) firms, because the two behave very differently:
- Plan offerings — how many medical plans firms offer, and PPO versus HMO enrollment patterns
- Enrollment and participation — employee take-up rates across medical, dental, and vision, and how they shift with firm size
- Employer vs. employee cost sharing — contribution splits for employee-only and dependent coverage across all three lines
- Dependent economics — average dependent premiums, employer contribution levels, and dependent participation
- Plan richness — deductible ranges, individual and family, at the low and high end of the market
- Executive carve-outs — how firms use class-based contribution carve-outs to differentiate benefits for partners and senior staff
How It’s Built
The report is drawn from real, placed law firm benefits programs and carrier data across California, aggregated and fully anonymized, and refreshed every year. Because it’s built from a dataset we’ve compiled and maintained specifically for the legal industry over five years — rather than a one-time survey — it reflects the current market and captures patterns that national brokers, who treat law firms as just another professional-services vertical, don’t see.
Who It’s For
Managing partners, firm administrators, COOs, and HR and benefits leaders who want to know where their firm stands before the next renewal — measured against the firms they compete with for talent.
Why You Won’t Find the Numbers Here
We don’t publish the data. It’s proprietary, and the firms it’s built from trust that it stays confidential. Instead, we apply it directly to your firm in a confidential benchmarking review: we show you exactly where your plan design, cost sharing, and enrollment sit relative to your peers, and where the opportunities are. It isn’t a download — it’s a conversation grounded in five years of legal-industry data.
Request a Confidential Benchmarking Review