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Economy Hits GC Pay, Too

By Robert J. Ambrogi

In good times or bad, general counsel compensation has tended to drift upward, notes the introduction to Corporate Counsel magazine's 2009 GC Compensation Survey. But this year, even GC were not immune to market forces, the survey finds. While some indexes of GC pay rose, the basic trend was nearly flat, it concludes. But let's not shed tears for our brothers and sisters who work in-house. Overall, the general counsel of the nation's largest companies still managed to get a modest raise. "Modest" is Corporate Counsel's descriptor, not mine. When one starts from an average earning base of over $1 million, modesty is a matter of perspective. Consider that the year's average bonus was $1.16 million and the average salary was $596,393. That means GC earned a total average cash payout of $1.8 million. Certainly, that would be enough to make me blush. Notably, the year's top earner -- at $9.7 million -- was not a top legal officer. In fact, he no longer even works for the company that so richly rewarded him. He is Gregory Doody, an expert in bankruptcy law hired by the Calpine Corp. in 2006 as its chief restructuring officer tasked with leading the company...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on July 21, 2009 (boomark / email).