Of counsel is a law firm title for a lawyer affiliated with the firm who sits outside the associate and partner track — not a ladder associate, not a partner.
What does of counsel mean at a law firm in practice?
The label covers senior lawyers in a range of arrangements: retired or semi-retired partners, lateral hires, part-time practitioners and subject-matter specialists.
This page explains the title, the work behind it, and how it compares.
What does an of counsel attorney do day to day?
"Of counsel" names a relationship before it names a job: a lawyer affiliated with a law firm who is neither an associate on the firm's ladder nor one of its partners.
The category is established enough that NALP, whose annual diversity reports track law-firm demographics, counts "counsel" as its own law-firm category — separate from partners, associates and staff attorneys — and reported that women were 38.79% of counsel in 2024.
The work underneath the title is still what attorneys do: advising clients, drafting and negotiating documents, and carrying matters in the lawyer's subject area.
What changes is who sets the mix.
An of counsel job description is written by the firm and the lawyer together — which clients the lawyer touches, which matters they carry, and how much business development the firm expects — rather than by a ladder position with its own fixed expectations.
That is why two of counsel lawyers can hold visibly different jobs.
Firms attach the title to different arrangements, for example:
- A retired or semi-retired partner who stays close to the firm's clients and institutional knowledge after leaving the partner tier.
- A lateral hire brought in for an established practice rather than grown up through the firm's associate class.
- A part-time practitioner whose schedule is built into the arrangement instead of negotiated case by case.
- A subject-matter specialist the firm wants affiliated for one practice area without a partner or associate seat.
Each arrangement writes its own day.
The title tells you the lawyer is senior and non-ladder; the firm's agreement with the lawyer tells you the rest.
Where do of counsel attorneys work and who employs them?
Of counsel is a law-firm title: the firms that report demographics to NALP count counsel as its own category, alongside partners and associates rather than inside either.
As a slice of the profession, lawyers held about 863,700 jobs in 2025 (SOC 23-1011), per the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, and BLS's largest employer groups of lawyers in 2025 were legal services (52%), self-employed lawyers (11%), local government (8%), state government (7%) and federal government (5%).
Law firms sit inside the legal-services group.
Neither source counts the title itself.
BLS treats lawyers as one occupation and does not split it by title, and our research found no verified headcount for of counsel specifically.
NALP's firm demographic reports are where the category is visible in data — which is also why generalizations about the group are hard to make: the public record on it is thin, kept in firms' own reporting rather than a federal occupation series.
What skills and credentials does an of counsel attorney need?
The credential is the attorney license.
Per the BLS, lawyers typically need a law degree and a state license, which usually requires passing a bar examination.
Our research found no separate license or certification for the of counsel title — it is an affiliation with a firm, not a credential.
What firms weigh when they extend the title comes from practice: depth in a subject area, client relationships, and judgment on the kinds of matters the firm handles.
Those expectations are set firm by firm — the same range of arrangements that makes the title flexible makes its requirements impossible to generalize from a national rule.
Licensing is set state by state
What does a typical caseload or workload look like?
Our research found no workload or caseload data for the of counsel title itself.
The label describes the lawyer's relationship to the firm, not a workload, so the same title can sit over a full-time senior practice or a part-time, semi-retired schedule built into the arrangement.
A posting's duties section — and the arrangement the firm describes in an interview — will tell you more about the load than the title does.
For lawyers as a whole, the BLS reports that most lawyers work full time and some work more than 40 hours a week, and that self-employed lawyers may set their own schedules.
Of counsel is not a BLS category, so there is no title-specific read on hours.
How does the role compare with nearby attorney roles?
The honest comparison is structural: of counsel is defined by what it is not — not the associate ladder, not the partnership — so each nearby role is best compared one relationship at a time.
Of counsel vs. partner.
Partner is a firm's senior tier, and even that tier is layered: at multi-tier firms in NALP's data, the share of partners who are equity partners fell from 61.3% in 2011 to 56.3% in 2024.
Of counsel is not part of that tier — NALP counts counsel separately from partners.
Titles are expected to keep those distinctions honest: the Ohio Rules of Professional Conduct, adopted by the Ohio Supreme Court, state that lawyers may state or imply that they practice in a partnership or other organization only when that is the fact (Rule 7.5(d); Ohio's rules as amended January 1, 2026).
Other states' rules may differ — check the rules where you practice.
Of counsel vs. associate.
An associate holds a ladder position the firm can promote; of counsel describes an affiliation outside that ladder.
NALP's categories draw the same line: counsel and associates are separate entries in its law-firm demographics.
Of counsel vs. staff attorney.
NALP also tracks "non-traditional track/staff attorney" as its own law-firm category — a related non-ladder label, but a different one.
Firms that use both titles draw the line between them their own way, which makes the firm's own definition the one that matters.
How do you become an of counsel attorney?
There is no single documented route into the title, and our research found no data on how lawyers move into it.
What the research does fix is the baseline: per the BLS, lawyers typically need a law degree and a state license, which usually requires passing a bar examination.
The title itself is an arrangement a firm offers a lawyer rather than a credential to earn.
Because the title follows the relationship, the practical question for any lawyer considering it is what arrangement — scope, clients, schedule — the firm is actually offering.
That conversation, not an application, is where an of counsel role gets made.
How much do of counsel attorneys make?
No federal series tracks of counsel pay.
BLS publishes wages for lawyers as one occupation (SOC 23-1011), and its Occupational Outlook Handbook put the median annual wage for lawyers at $159,670 in May 2025, with the lowest 10% earning under $78,360 and the highest 10% over $351,600.
Two limits matter when reading that number against this title: it covers every kind of lawyer, not of counsel lawyers as a group, and BLS wage figures exclude self-employed lawyers and owners or partners of unincorporated businesses.
This site shows the lawyer figures, labelled as a proxy for this title, on its salary page: of counsel attorney salary.
Career information, not legal or salary advice: the figures above are BLS data as dated, and licensing questions belong with the admitting authority in your state.
Where to find of counsel attorney jobs
Of counsel openings are posted on legal job boards and on law firms' own careers pages.
Read the posting's duties section rather than the title: firms attach their own meaning to of counsel, so the described work, clients and schedule are the real job description.
LawFirmHires lists of counsel openings — browse of counsel jobs to see how firms describe the role in current postings.
For the profession's backdrop: the BLS projects lawyer employment to grow 5% from 2025 to 2035, with about 28,700 openings a year on average, many from replacing workers who retire or change occupations.