What a difference a year makes. This time last year, Charles Kalil was in the number 12 spot on our annual list of the highest-paid Fortune 500 general counsel. In last year's report, the GC of The Dow Chemical Company enjoyed a hefty $1.8 million bonus and earned $2.67 million in total cash compensation. But Kalil needed fewer wheelbarrows to cart his money to the bank in 2011. His earnings took a nosedive to $1.56 million, the direct result of a precipitous $1 million drop in his bonus.
Why? The chemical giant linked its executives' bonuses to meeting critical annual company goals in 2011. And since Dow's top brass didn't meet projected profit and cost management targets, Kalil's base performance award was just half of what it could have been.
| 2012 GC Compensation Survey: |
Kalil's slide was one of the year's steeper drops; he landed at number 39 on this year's list. But Corporate Counsel 's latest GC Compensation Survey shows that he wasn't alone. It was a year of declines—some in the double digits—for every component of GC pay that we measure. A number of reasons are to blame—the economy, poor share performance, and last but decidedly not least, shareholder scrutiny. Say-on-pay resolutions are taking their toll on executive pay, and GCs aren't immune.
As bad as they look, this year's results go down better with a spoonful of historical context. The drops come on the heels of double-digit gains across most categories in last year's survey. And those results in turn followed a year of plunging take-home cash, particularly in the area of bonuses.
So what's the bottom line? "After three very volatile years, what we're seeing is a return to normalcy," says Aaron Boyd, head of research at executive compensation analysts Equilar Inc. in San Francisco.
Let's examine the components of GC compensation individually. Base pay took the softest blow in this year's survey, dropping only 1.8 percent, to $611,411. That wasn't surprising, because salary tends to be the most static element of the executive total pay packet. That's unlike stock awards and bonuses, which tend to fluctuate dramatically, a trend exacerbated over the last five years. Salary averages, on the other hand, have fluctuated just 2.6 percent per year. From 2009 to 2010, GCs saw their base pay inch up 0.6 percent. (For an explanation of how we conduct the survey, see our Methodology page.)
The highest-salaried GC on this year's list was Philip Morris International Inc.'s David Bernick. After just two years with Philip Morris, the GC abruptly resigned his post in February. But before he left, the tobacco company's top lawyer was earning an annual salary of $1.6 million. If he sticks to the terms of his noncompete agreement, Bernick stands to collect an additional $1.6 million next February. Not too shabby for not working against the company for a year, right?
After a 28.7 percent surge the previous year, bonuses did an about-face in our most recent survey. Traditional bonuses and nonequity incentive pay (which basically are bonuses tied to meeting certain targets) were down a combined 7.7 percent, to an average of $1,125,458. That's not to say that there weren't GCs who were handsomely rewarded for a job well done. Thirty-nine lawyers crossed the million-dollar bonus mark—two fewer than last year. The biggest bonus check was made out to Louis Briskman, CBS Corporation's general counsel. He took home $5.2 million in bonus and nonequity incentive compensation, a package that hoisted him to the top of this year's survey.
Briskman's cash compensation totaled $6.5 million—which incidentally was about the same amount earned by last year's highest-paid GC. But overall, chief legal officers from the nation's largest companies took a hit in total cash compensation. The average salary-plus-bonus combo weighed in at $1,736,869, down 5.7 percent from the year before.
Cash compensation is only part of a chief legal officer's pay packet. Stock awards (either options or grants) are a big part of the lure of working in-house, and here again, there's another contrast to the relatively stable base salary picture. (We feature stock awards in our survey, since they're such a large part of the total compensation package, but our rankings are based on cash compensation only.)
Now for the punch line: GCs had a collective case of the incredibly shrinking equity award last year. The average stock award fell 10.8 percent, to $1,426,325, in this year's survey. And of the 70 lawyers who received once-lucrative (but still coveted) option awards, the average award fell a shocking 18.7 percent, to $732,453. To be sure, not everyone saw his or her stock portfolio wind up underwater: Google Inc.'s David Drummond, for example, received an $8.4 million stock grant and an option award of $6.2 million. (Continue reading >>)
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