ACC Survey Sees GC Salaries Up, Outside Spend Down
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A new survey by Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC), a global bar association with 33,000 in-house counsel members, and Empsight International, a human resources consulting firm that collects in-house attorney compensation data, indicates that general counsel salaries are increasing at a fairly predictable rate, while many law departments are cutting back on outside legal spend.
The 2013 Law Department Compensation Survey was conducted in the spring of 2013 and drew responses from more than 450 companies, some multinational and others strictly domestic. Companies were divided by size into large, medium and small categories. Across company sizes, base general counsel salaries increased by 2.7 percent on average in 2013. James Merklinger, general counsel of the ACC, said that a rate of annual increase in this range is becoming fairly common: “That’s the way it seems to have been for a long time,” he said.
When broken down by company size though, not all general counsel paychecks are created equal. Those GCs working in law departments at companies with more than $30 billion in revenue drew salaries 79 percent higher on average than those general counsel working at companies with revenue between $3 billion and $5 billion. Having a lawyer or two to manage also made a difference in the pay of general counsel in small law departments. The average general counsel with supporting attorneys got paid 1.29 times the base salary of a GC in a single-lawyer setting.
Read original articleTags: Association of Corporate Counsel, Empsight International, law departments
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