Setting aside the number of students in each class of the ranked law schools, is there any pattern in the number of graduates who are Fortune 500 general counsel according to the law school’s rank? The plot above shows the number of graduates by the height of the blue dots…
My hypothesis was that the larger the law school, in terms of students enrolled, the more graduates it would have who are the general counsel of a Fortune 500 company. To keep the data tractable and the plot below legible, I took the 150 top-ranked schools from US News &…
ALM publishes data about the Fortune 500 companies and their chief legal officers. One of the pieces of information is the law school from which the CLO graduated. Firing up my trusty software for data analysis, I looked at the distribution of those graduates. The plot below shows how many…
During 2012, General Counsel Metrics collected compensation data for 65 law department administrators. The report shows medians and quartiles for base salary, bonus, and total compensation as of Dec. 31, 2011 by six industries as well as five revenue ranges (a minimum of four respondents in each). The industries…
An article in the Stanford Closer Look Series (at 2) addresses how government-appointed monitors should be paid. It cites research by Equilar on the compensation of the top lawyers within large U.S. companies. “General counsel within Fortune 1000 companies receive compensation that is 43 percent salary, 27 percent annual bonus,…
The compensation data currently in the General Counsel Metrics study includes almost 1,000 in-house lawyers, of which 404 reported the value of the equity award they received for 2011 (either zero or an amount; the others did not complete that question). Of that group that reported on equity, 225 got…
Some publications regularly trawl the annual reports of U.S. publicly traded companies and assemble those that include the general counsel in the five most highly paid executives. The articles they publish list the reported data in tables and inevitably headline the general counsel who “made the most last year.” It…
The vital role played by notaries, particularly in Europe, raised questions for me about the overlap between what lawyers do and what notaries do, and law department management implications. Italy has 5,000 notaries while France has 9,000 of them, and the latter enjoy a monopoly over property conveyancing. Typically, governments…
At the recent InsideCounsel SuperConference, the legal search firm of McCormack Schreiber distributed its In-House Counsel Salary Survey. The firm had gathered self-reported salaries for 2010 through 2012 from 163 in-house attorneys. Based on the scattergram they created and a linear regression equation, they produced a formula. What the…
A speaker at the recent InsideCounsel SuperConference offered a good suggestion for general counsel – indeed, for all lawyers who manage others – who want to develop and energize the lawyers beneath them. Ed Ryan, the veteran general counsel of Marriott International, urged people to let someone else in the…