Coronavirus crisis guide for current (and aspiring) in-house corporate counsel
It’s not exactly the same thing, of course, but the coronavirus crisis and this surreal market volatility has me reflecting on the financial crisis of 2008. Back then, I was a vulnerable junior associate in a Biglaw firm who nevertheless kept my job, and I hope all of us do the same during this crisis too. To that end, here are some tips from the trenches of the 2008-2009 law firm meltdown that I think are just as salient today as they were when Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and others were collapsing over a decade ago, updated to reflect what I think will be a new normal for in-house and law firm attorneys going forward once the crisis ebbs.
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Highlights from Special Counsel’s 2020 law firm & in-house counsel salary guide
It’s 2020 salary guide season! Let’s take a look at this year’s compensation guide published by Special Counsel (which includes data from their formidable Parker + Lynch attorney recruiting group). It covers both corporate legal department salaries as well as law firms and reports on data from 6000 legal professionals across 60 cities in the U.S. Here are some key takeaways if you’re using the guide to either benchmark your current comp or when negotiating pay for a new position.
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Excited to launch our 62-page “Ultimate Guide to Going In-House and Succeeding as Corporate Counsel!”
Our Ultimate Guide to Going In-House and Succeeding as Corporate Counsel is a 62-page, 23,000-word, e-book that peels back the curtain on everything you need to know about getting an in-house position and succeeding once you walk in the door. It’s priced at $49 because (1) by paying for it you are more likely to implement the lessons learned in here and get yourself out of the law firm; (2) it’s a tip of the cap to the “sweet spot” for going in-house: 4 to 9 years inside of a law firm in private practice; and (3) it contains template cover letters, negotiation scripts, a form CV, and lots of other goodies that I think you’ll find make it well-worth the price.
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What does the inverted bond-yield curve mean for the next decade of in-house corporate counsel practice?
Yields on long-term bonds are drifting lower than those on short-term bonds. In other words, investors are betting that, in the future, interest rates will stay depressed on account of a sluggish economy. This means that investors are less bullish on the future than they are on the present – and in the past, this has been a pretty good leading indicator of a recession. So what – if anything – does this situation mean for in-house lawyers, or firm lawyers who are thinking about making the move in-house in the near future?
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Key takeaways from the 2019 BarkerGilmore In-House Counsel Compensation Survey
A “record-breaking” number of in-house lawyers participated in the 2019 BarkerGilmore In-House Counsel Compensation Report (approximately 2000 of us). As I’ve said before here at Dollar Barrister, I find these annual surveys to be invaluable in benchmarking my own compensation and advising friends and colleagues who are also in-house on the suitability of their compensation packages. I personally found the data in this 2019 edition of the Report to be generally consistent with what my friends and colleagues are earning. I also think BarkerGilmore does a great job of parsing the data it receives in a meaningful way that should be helpful both to job seekers and in-house lawyers getting ready to fight their finance and accounting departments during FY20 budgeting
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