The latest annual report on legal industry salaries by Robert Half Legal, a division of staffing company Robert Half, indicates that pay for in-house attorneys continues to grow at a modest rate. The data also shows that law departments are looking to maximize value as their workloads increase by hiring attorneys with high experience levels and specialized knowledge in hotter legal areas like compliance and health care, sometimes on a project-by-project basis.

Robert Half Legal’s 2014 Salary Guide offers statistics gathered from the company’s staffing work and from Robert Half-commissioned surveys. The guide gives national average starting salary ranges, not including bonuses, retirement packages or other forms of additional compensation, for more than 100 legal services positions that can be adjusted by U.S. city using an index.

Based on this year’s guide, in-house counsel seem to be doing all right: in all law department categories, attorneys saw modest gains in salary. Charles Volkert, executive director of Robert Half Legal, said that the increases from the 2013 to 2014 reports are “pretty much stable” compared to changes in previous years. The highest-paid counsel, making between $171,750 and $245,750, were those who have more than 10 years of experience and work for the biggest companies—defined by the guide as those with revenues of $250 million or more. These more experienced big-company attorneys saw a 3.7 percent increase in salary from last year. In-house counsel with 10 or more years of experience at a small company, defined as having up to $25 million in revenue, by comparison made between $121,500 and $176,500, which is only a 2.8 percent salary bump over last year.

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Tags: Charles Volkert, Robert Half, Robert Half Legal