Survey Finds Top-Paid Higher-Education Lawyers Are at Private Colleges and Research Universities

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Table: Median pay of college lawyers, 2005-6

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By JEFFREY SELINGO

Washington

The top lawyers at private universities and research institutions receive the highest pay among in-house higher-education lawyers, according to the results of a new survey released to The Chronicle by the National Association of College and University Attorneys, which also found that college legal staffs are growing and that the offices have, on average, 33 active litigation files open at any one time.

The survey, which had a 36-percent response rate, marks the first time that the group conducted a combined study on compensation and the issues facing college legal staffs. Previously, the two surveys were conducted separately.

While the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources includes lawyers in its annual administrative-salary survey, the Nacua survey is much more detailed. It breaks down compensation by office position, Carnegie classification, college budget, student enrollment, years of experience, and ethnicity, among other things.

Among chief legal officers, those with the highest median salary, according to the survey, were at institutions where the counsel's office had a budget of more than $2-million. Lawyers in those positions earned $240,000. The lowest median salary for the category of chief legal officers was $105,000. (Five chief legal officers in the survey were under 34 years old and had a median salary of $70,000.)

In addition, female chief legal officers earned a slightly higher median salary than their male counterparts, $135,000 compared with $130,625 (56 percent of chief legal officers are men; 44 percent are women).

Because Nacua's previous compensation survey, which was conducted in 1999, included outside lawyers, comparisons between the two surveys are not possible.

Melinda W. Grier, general counsel at the University of Oregon and president of Nacua's Board of Directors, said the group hopes that the survey will act as a guide for college presidents at a time when institutions are looking either to expand their legal staffs or to create such offices.

"It allows presidents to see how they fit in the overall scheme," Ms. Grier said in an interview. "It also gives national data to use in conjunction with local-market data when hiring."

The other part of the survey, the so-called provision of legal services, found large increases in the budgets of legal offices in the last year. The average increase was 10.3 percent at single institutions, 18.5 percent at colleges within systems, and 8.4 percent at system offices.

Kathleen Curry Santora, Nacua's chief executive, attributed those increases to the hiring of more staff members. Four in 10 respond- ents said that the size of their staffs had grown in the last five years, partly because their workloads had increased. Of the 33 active litigation files that the survey found legal offices have open at any one time, an average of 18 were being handled by outside counsel.

The top three legal areas handled by outside counsel were litigation, intellectual property, and bond issues and other financial matters.

As colleges have become more complex organizations, Ms. Grier said, legal offices have become more important. Presidents, she said, "want legal counsel involved in a lot more areas."

"It used to be that law offices were used as consultants," she continued. "Now almost all the general counsels serve on the president's executive body."

The general counsel may also be one of the most stable positions among senior administrators. According to the survey, the average chief legal officer has been employed at the same institution for 10 years, eight of those years in the top position.

A copy of the survey can be ordered by contacting Miriam Miller at mmiller@nacua.org. It costs $125 for Nacua members who participated in the survey, $250 for members who did not participate, and $500 for nonmembers.