Calling All Inhouse Counsel: Turn on the Lights!

Commenter Publius asked this question on one of the previous posts:

What exactly is the salary range for in-house counsel? Is there one that can even be arrived at or is it simply too disparate an array? Perhaps making this information available discreetly would make individual attorney’s bargaining positions slightly stronger; a blog might serve as a perfect medium for such an endeavor…

We’ve already written pretty extensively about the factors that make up a pay package for an inhouse job.  See: Pay Day!, Pay Off!, Pay Up!, and Pay Me!, for example.

After the jump we provide a bit of history, make an (unsatisfactory) attempt at answering, and propose a solution.

Clearly, one of the best things that ever happened to BigLaw associates was the rise of the blog, or more specifically in the earlier days, message boards.

Greedy Associates did more for salary transparency than any NALP directory or firm marketing materials.  The combination of the rise of the board (circa 1998-2000) coincided with an explosion in demand for legal services.  Firms could no longer make generic statements about matching market and rely on ambiguity and lack of communication to keep associates in the dark.

More importantly, word of every raise quickly spread throughout the market and managing partners were faced with explaining why they hadn’t, or when they would, match Gunderson Dettmer or whatever upstart was bumping salaries and paying huge bonuses.

Good times were had by all (associates – partners and clients, not so much).

There’s no such resource for inhouse for a number of reasons (most of these have been addressed in the previous posts linked above, btw):

• inhouse compensation includes many more components than just the base and bonus structure at firms;
• inhouse jobs are far more unique than associate jobs;
• companies in the Fortune 100 have much less in common with each other than firms in the AmLaw 100 (industry, size, location, etc.); and
• inhouse jobs are meant to be for longer terms (lifetime career) than associate jobs (up or out).

It’s almost impossible to get a real apples-to-apples comparison.

But we’re willing to give it a shot.

Here’s what we propose.

Any of our readers can submit information about his or her inhouse job and comp. As soon as we get 14 submissions, we’ll include our own information and put them all up in a table, completely anonymized.  Hopefully that will get the ball rolling.

Here’s what we envision – let us know if there’s more/less/other information you think appropriate:

• employer – is or isn’t Fortune 100/500, industry, location (city or region)
• job – is or isn’t a manager, line of business or corporate service, type of practice (litigation, transactional, special service (employment, tax, etc.)
• employee – graduation year, time spent in BigLaw
• comp – base, bonus, long-term, any other big perks

Bear in mind, this is supposed to be a mutually beneficial activity, so let’s try to keep it on the level.

We promise to keep any submissions completely confidential.

That’s it!  Start sending in those details.