Dive Brief:

• The in-house legal world looks different for those who’ve entered the profession recently compared to those who’ve been in it a while, data from the Association of Corporate Counsel and Empsight suggest.
• Pay differences are big, as you would expect, with general counsel and chief legal officers graduating before 2000 earning a median $473,400 in base pay and incentives, compared to $255,000 for those who graduated in 2010 or after, an 86% difference.
• There’s a similar disparity for associate GCs. Those with degree dates between 2000 and 2010 earn a median $336,250, a 32% difference. The difference is much smaller for a regular staff attorney. Those who graduated before 2000 only earn about 7% more than the more recent grads: $224,879 compared to $209,980.

Dive Insight:

Many factors go into what in-house legal talent make, including how much revenue the company generates, what industry it’s in, what area of law you specialize in and even what law school you went to, with those from the top 20 schools earning up to 41% more in the case of GCs who oversee more than one attorney. 

There’s also a big pay differential if you cut your teeth at a law firm before taking an in-house job. If you went to a law firm first, you make on average 20% more than if you went straight to an in-house role out of law school. 

That could end up being an issue going forward, since the data show that graduates are increasingly skipping the law firm experience. 

On average, 17% of in-house lawyers go straight into in-house work, but in 2018, some 40% of graduates went straight into in-house work and in 2018, the number was a whopping 60%.

If the pay differential holds, that means a lot of newer graduates won’t make as much in-house.   

There’s another difference between those who’ve been in the profession a while and those who are relatively new: confidence in their skills. 

The longer you’ve been practicing in-house, the more confident you are that you have the skills to meet what’s expected of you five years from now. Almost 90% of in-house professionals on average think they have the skills to do the work in five years. That drops to just 67% of recent graduates who think that.

“While there are certainly variations year-over-year, the trendline is clearly downward,” the survey report says. “Attorneys who are recent graduates tend to be less confident in having those skills on average.”

The data reflects input from 2,032 in-house legal professionals, representing 26 job titles, in a May survey.