Dive Brief:

• Compensation gains for in-house legal professionals were mixed this year, with general counsel and chief legal officers earning a median $360,000, down slightly from last year, but many other positions saw a modest increase, a survey from the Association of Corporate Counsel and consulting firm Empsight shows.
• Deputy GCs earn a median $311,000, senior attorneys $218,000, attorneys $165,000 and legal operations chiefs $235,000. These are slight increases from last year’s survey. GCs of companies in which they are the only in-house lawyer also saw an increase, to $250,000 from $230,000.
• 16% of survey respondents say they want to find a new job. A separate survey, from on-demand legal provider Axiom, puts that figure at 21%.  

Dive Insight:

The compensation figures include base salary and short-term performance incentives. When long-term incentives like equity shares are factored in, the median income for GCs and CLOs is $574,000, although not all legal chiefs are offered those. 

Slightly more than 55% of GCs and CLOs are offered long-term incentives. Last year, 63% were. The report doesn’t look into what might be behind the drop, but it could reflect challenges companies are facing in the economy.  

When long-term pay is added into their compensation, deputy GCs this year are earning $356,000, senior attorneys $235,000, attorneys $209,000 and GCs in solo in-house roles, $265,000. Comparable dollar amounts weren’t tracked last year. 

One big change is in the percentage difference between what GCs and CLOs at smaller companies earn compared to their big-company counterparts. That pay gap, between legal chiefs at companies with under $1 billion in revenue and those at companies with at least $5 billion in revenue, is 160%, down 45% from a 232% gap last year. That’s for total compensation that includes long-term incentive pay. 

A difference of 160% is still large, but a drop of almost 50% from 232% suggests economic conditions could be having an impact on executive compensation at big, global companies. 

Mixed satisfaction

For the most part, survey respondents appear to be satisfied with where they are, with almost two-thirds saying they’re unlikely to try to change jobs in the next year, against 16% who say they’re likely to. Those figures generally match up to last year. 

Axiom, which provides on-demand help to legal teams, comes to a different conclusion. In a recent survey of more than 300 in-house legal professionals, it found 67% of them looking for a new position. That includes 21% who are actively looking. Burnout is part of the problem, the company says. More than 60% say they’re extremely burned out, up 14 points from last year.  

Driving the burnout are insufficient resources, bigger workloads and more complexity to the work, and too much time spent on administrative tasks, the survey finds.  

“A significant portion of [the legal] team is considering an exit,” the Axiom report says. 

The ACC, Empsight survey was conducted between March and July and is based on responses from 1,934 in-house professionals.