Are the pay packages in your legal department keeping up with the Joneses? The new “In-House Counsel Compensation Report” from General Counsel Metrics LLC and Major, Lindsey & Africa, a legal search firm, deciphers the trends in compensation by compiling data from over 1,700 in-house lawyers at approximately 480 U.S. and Canadian companies. The information used for the report includes: base salaries, cash bonuses, law school graduation years, primary practice areas, company revenues, and company industries.
“It’s data that we all deal with a lot, but we never collected it all at once and analyzed it,” Rees Morrison, president of GC Metrics told CorpCounsel.com. He says the report provides a “roadmap for roughly figuring out where [counsel] sit on [the compensation] spectrum.”
“There’s so much hype around lawyer compensation in general, and I think the expectation is that it’s very high,” Bob Graff, vice president of global business development at ML&A told CorpCounsel.com. In reality, he noted that in-house lawyers and GCs probably work more predictable, shorter hours than their Big Law counterparts, and thus salaries are “in a much tighter, realistic range,” says Graff. “They’re not as high as people may think.”
Just how high are they? From company revenue to practice experience, the report found five major trends:
1. Experience matters in-house
“Median base salaries for in-house lawyers cross the $180,000 mark at about 20 years experience, and peak at about 30 years out of law school,” the report says. The median salary for a lawyer who graduated law school in 1975 is $195,000, whereas the median salary for a lawyer who graduated in 2010 is $75,000. Not surprisingly, bonus levels for all in-house lawyers peak at 25-30 years of experience.
