Recent years have seen a general acknowledgement that in-house counsel, including general counsel, are shouldering increased responsibilities at their companies. Is all of that hard work translating to bigger and better compensation packages? It appears so—at least for general counsel heading up legal departments of Fortune 1000 companies.

The 2013 In-Depth Top General Counsel Compensation Report by Equilar Inc., a provider of executive compensation data and governance tools, shows that general counsel in the Fortune 1000—particularly in certain industries—are doing pretty well for themselves. The data was taken from 262 general counsel of Fortune 1000 companies who responded to both the 2012 and 2013 editions of Equilar’s Executive Compensation Survey.

For general counsel in the 2013 Executive Compensation Survey, the median total compensation—defined as base salary and bonus plus grant date fair value of time-based option awards, time-based stock or unit awards, and performance-based awards—was $1,613,654. The average total compensation was somewhat higher at $1,979,594. Median total compensation increased 4.9 percent between the 2012 and 2013 Executive Compensation Surveys. (Corporare Counsel’s annual GC Compensation Survey measures total cash compensation without stock awards.)

Aaron Boyd, director of governance research at Equilar, told CorpCounsel.com that these positive numbers don’t really surprise him. “These are trends that we’ve seen over the last several years specifically for general counsel pay,” he said.

The rise, he explained, corresponds with the growing amount and scale of legal work that companies have to deal with in an environment of growing regulation and litigation that often has high stakes. Boyd pointed to the recent ruling in a dispute between Kraft Foods Group Inc. and Starbucks Corporation that will require the coffee giant to pay Kraft $2.76 billion as an example of where the general counsel’s skills can potentially have a major influence on a company’s bottom line.

The report indicated that general counsel who reported directly to CEOs had larger compensation packages: The median total compensation for GCs who reported to the CEO was $1,676,098, versus $1,258,131 for those who did not. Tenure with the company also made a difference—those GCs who put in less than three years at the company had median total compensation of $1,327,930, while those with more than 10 years on the job made a median of $1,723,288.

According to the report, general counsel compensation diverges across industries. The Finance and Insurance category received the highest compensation, with the Health and Life Sciences and the Tech, Media, and Telecom technology fields also faring well. “I don’t think that’s really any sort of surprise, as those are three of the more heavily regulated industries,” said Boyd. The industry where Equilar saw attorneys bringing in the least pay was in Retail & Consumer.

The situation is somewhat different when it comes to general counsel perquisite eligibility by industry. Of the range of industries examined in the Equilar report, the Food & Beverage industry had the most general counsel—94.1 percent—with perquisite eligibility, followed by Business Services at 90 percent.

As for long-term incentive (LTI) awards, the most commonly awarded LTI to general counsel was performance-based stock. Some 68.3 percent of the GCs surveyed got this type of incentive. In contrast, the least commonly awarded incentive was performance-based options, at 3.8 percent. Most of the performance-based LTI given to general counsel was in equity, not cash—only 6.8 percent reported receiving a cash incentive.

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