Salary in United States

Salary Definition

(from “salarium,” sal, salt, the medium of payment to the Roman soldiers). The periodical allowance or compensation to a person for his official or professional services or for his regular work. 193 Mich. 476; 105 Cal. 212; 10 Ind. 85. A reward or recompense for services performed. It is applied (according to the definition of Salary based on the Cyclopedic Law Dictionary, which may need to be proofread) to the reward paid to a public officer for the performance of his official duties. Salary is also applied to the reward paid for the performance of other services; but if it be not fixed for each year, it is called “honorarium.” Poth. ad Pand. According to M. Duvergier, the distinction between “honorarium” and “salary” is this: By the former is understood the reward given to the most elevated professions for services performed; and by the latter, the price of hiring of domestic servants and worfemen. 19 TouUier, Dr. Civ. n. 268, p. 292, note. There is this difference between “salary” and “price,” the former is the reward paid for services or for the hire of things; the latter is the consideration paid for a thing sold. Lee. Elm. §§ 907, 908. “Salary” and “wages” have been held to be synonymous (24 Fla. 29), but in other cases, distinctions have been suggested, one, that salary is per annum compensation (42 Alb. Law J. 832), and another, that the difference lies in the more or less honorable character of the services for which they are paid. Read more about Salary in the legal Dictionaries here.

In-House Counsel Attorneys Salaries

As the pace of pay raises within corporate law departments continued to slow, in-house counsel received average salary increases of 2.6 percent in 2010, down from average raises of as much as 6 percent earlier in the decade.
This salary slowdown may become the “new norm” for in-house attorneys as corporations cut costs, according to a survey of more than 6,000 in-house attorneys by legal consultants Hildebrandt Baker Robbins.

But it also appears that variable pay—including cash bonuses, deferred compensation, and stock options—is becoming a bigger part of compensation for law departments. In 2010, for example, the median bonus level rose 10.2 percent from 2009. For all in-house attorneys, that translates to average bonus checks of $57,000 (though among chief legal officers, the average bonus was $539,000).

This means that when the ledger is finally tallied, the total compensation for in-house counsel in 2010 averaged $289,000-significantly more than the $174,000 base salary last year and slightly more than the $285,000 total compensation that in-house attorneys earned in 2009.

Source: 2010 Law Department Survey, Hildebrandt Baker Robbin

Salary in Foreign Legal Encyclopedias

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