You in-house lawyers are extremely important at this moment. The law is in a ridiculous state of flux, as Trump tries to reshape the country through executive order. Internally, compliance is doing all it normally does, plus they’re furiously trying to update the employee handbook to make it clear that, say, locking an employee in your office and masturbating in front of her is FROWNED UPON IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT.
You want your general counsel on these walls, you need your general counsel on these walls.
Given that, plus the Trump bubble fueling the stock market, it makes sense that GC pay is on the rise. From Corporate Counsel:
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The 2017 In-House Counsel Compensation Report from legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa looked at compensation data from more than 2,200 in-house counsel (including 500 GCs and chief legal officers) between 2015 and 2016. The study reveals that general counsel during this period saw a 9.6 percent increase in total compensation, with base salaries increasing a little over 1 percent and bonuses growing by a whopping 38 percent.
Great. Congratulations. It’s not like Biglaw bonuses are growing 38%.
But the in-house gains are not being spread around equally.
Even as general counsel compensation climbs overall, the report also reveals that at all levels, female in-house counsel are making far less than their male in-house counterparts. At the GC level in 2016, total compensation for men was 17.5 percent higher than for women, and male base salaries were 6.3 percent higher than those of female GCs. What’s more, bonuses for male GCs were 31 percent higher than those of female GCs, with the highest male bonus coming in at $3 million, compared to the top female bonus of $675,000.
In other roles in the legal department, female in-house counsel made 8.2 percent less than male in-house attorneys in 2016.
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Right now, we’re looking back on the behavior of Matt Lauer, or whoever else is in the barrel by the time I finish writing this sentence, and we’re asking “how did he think he was going to get away with it?”
One day, we will look back at this time and think “how did these companies think they could get away with paying women bonuses that were THIRTY-ONE PERCENT LESS than her counterparts? HOW IN THE ACTUAL F**K WAS THAT A THING?”
I literally don’t know if I will live to see that day, but this patently discriminatory pay disparity cannot last forever.
GC Compensation Is Up, as the Gender Pay Gap Lives On [Corporate Counsel]
Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.