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Needs to be updated.

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First Choice College

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Article of Law Field

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Compensation for corporate lawyers in Chicago is following a nationwide trend: Pay is headed north, as more attorneys receive competing job offers.

Legal recruiters say the competition is being fueled by corporate law departments that seek to keep more work in-house, rather than referring it to a pricey law firm. And that means hiring lawyers who can handle the workload.

A North American lawyer with a decade of experience will earn a median salary of between $150,000 and $225,000, says Danice Kowalczyk, a recruiter at London-based Laurence Simons, which released a compensation survey in late March.

Kowalczyk, who says she did most of her recruiting in the Midwest last year, found that compared with 2013, more candidates last year were likely to negotiate salaries at the top of that range.

Sonya Olds Som, a recruiter in the Chicago office of Major Lindsey & Africa, says the firm's professionals recently discussed how to ensure clients understand they need to move quickly, to avoid losing attractive prospects. It's a far cry from the buyers' market of 2008, when "you would offer (lawyers) water, and they would say, 'I accept!' "

The hottest competition is concentrated among lawyers with previous in-house experience who work in desirable practice areas, like intellectual property and compliance, Som says.
OVERALL TREND
Nationally, base salaries for lawyers of all experience levels in 2014 increased a median 2.9 percent. Total compensation-folding in bonuses and long-term incentives like stock options-increased a median 5 percent, according to a November survey by Chicago-based HBR Consulting.

For a senior counsel, a standard title to describe an experienced corporate lawyer with no managerial responsibilities, salary ranges at the largest companies are $190,000 to $200,000, up from $160,000 to $175,000 a few years ago, says Mike Evers, president at Evers Legal Search. In a recent blog post, he described how for only the second time in the firm's 18-year history, he'd turned down a search request because the client wanted a candidate pool beyond what it could afford.

"The price of poker has gone up," he wrote.

Evers said in an interview that the upward pressure on compensation comes from law departments' desire to keep more of the "high value" legal work in-house, rather than farming it out. While bet-the-company litigation and marquee deals will always go to outside counsel, "law departments are elevating the pedigree" of their lawyers, hunting for attorneys who graduated from top-tier schools and have experience working at major firms.

"There are only so many of those people to go around," he says.

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Compensation for corporate lawyers in Chicago is following a nationwide trend: Pay is headed north, as more attorneys receive competing job offers. Legal recruiters say the competition is being fueled by corporate law departments that seek to keep more work in-house, rather than referring it to a pricey law firm.

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This is a collections of stories that I have written in creative writing.