In-house counsel job description template: duties, requirements and pay range

An in-house counsel posting has five working parts: duties, bar admission and qualifications, skills and software, pay and benefits, and how to apply.

Each gets its own block in the template below.

If you are still deciding what the role is — the scope, the level, whether a registration route applies — our guide to how to hire an in-house counsel covers the decisions before the posting, and the mechanics of the posting itself sit in writing a law firm job posting.

This page is about writing the document.

Core duties.

Whether the employer is a company's legal department or a firm hiring counsel for its own affairs, the duties block works the same way: write the legal work the organization actually produces, not adjectives.

Name the contract volume, the compliance obligations, the disputes, and how outside counsel fits — work the hire owns versus work they manage through a firm.

Two lines earn a place here.

The first is the work mix: the subjects the role will actually touch, so candidates can judge the fit.

The second is reporting: who the counsel advises, who reviews their calls, and whether anyone reports to them.

Duties worth a line on the posting:

• Advising [leadership / departments] on [the legal questions your operations produce — commercial, employment, regulatory]
• Drafting, negotiating and managing [commercial, vendor and customer contracts]
• Building and running [the compliance program — policies, training, records]
• Managing disputes and outside counsel [strategy, budgets, reporting]
• Supporting [M&A / financing / IP / real estate] work alongside outside counsel
• [Supervising a legal operations coordinator or paralegal, if the role has direct reports]

One boundary shapes the duties block: the work has to sit inside the jurisdictions where the hire is authorized to practice law.

ABA Model Rule 5.5(a) says a lawyer must not practice law in a jurisdiction in violation of its regulation of the legal profession, or assist another in doing so — and the "assist" clause is the employer's exposure, not just the lawyer's.

For an in-house role, that makes location part of the duties: name where the lawyer will sit and practice from, and treat any cross-state or remote arrangement as a question for your state bar's ethics counsel before the posting goes up.

Qualifications and bar admission.

The credential line does the heavy lifting in this block, because it is the one you can and should verify.

Write it as "[State] bar admission in good standing" — the state where the work happens, not a generic "licensed attorney."

Then verify it: the ABA says lawyers are licensed by a state agency in each state, that agency can confirm whether a person has a law license and may practice there, and the ABA keeps a state-by-state directory of those agencies.

A resume line is not a license check; run the check before you rely on the credential and again before the start date.

If you would consider a candidate admitted in another state, decide the route before you post: ABA Model Rule 5.5(d) lets a lawyer admitted elsewhere practice from a local office when the services are for the lawyer's employer or its affiliates (in-house) or are authorized by federal or other law, but which registration your state requires, if any, is a question for the admitting authority — our guide to hiring an attorney licensed in another state covers the process.

Whichever candidate you weight toward, ABA Model Rule 5.5(b)(2) bars a lawyer who is not admitted in a jurisdiction from holding out or representing that they are admitted to practice law there, so an admission claim the agency cannot confirm is a discrepancy to resolve before an offer, not a typing quirk.

Experience follows the required-versus-preferred split: "[X]+ years advising on [the matters above]" if you mean it; otherwise make it a preferred line, so you do not screen out candidates whose experience transfers.

The candidate-side view of the role is in our in-house counsel career guide.

Skills and software.

Name the systems the hire will actually run and split them into must-have-on-day-one versus willing-to-train.

For an in-house counsel the stack is workflow-shaped: contract lifecycle management or document automation, e-signature, compliance and policy trackers, entity management, your legal research service, and matter or spend management if outside counsel invoices route through the legal team.

The judgment skills matter as much as the tools: advice a non-lawyer executive can act on, contract turnaround the business can plan around, risk flagged early rather than after signature, and comfort owning a call alone when there is no partner down the hall.

A posting that names its real stack and its real expectations filters better than one that lists "strong legal skills."

Pay range and benefits.

Anchor the range in the market you are hiring for, then adjust for the duties you wrote above.

The benchmark series: in the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) May 2025 release, lawyers (SOC 23-1011) had a national median annual wage of $159,670 ($76.76 per hour) — wage-earning lawyers, excluding the self-employed.

OEWS has no in-house-specific series, so the closest cut the release offers is by industry: lawyers in Management of Companies and Enterprises (corporate head offices, the closest BLS in-house proxy) had a median annual wage of $223,560, while lawyers in the Legal Services industry (law firms, NAICS 5411) had a median of $157,870.

Those are different cuts of the same release measuring different markets — set your range from the one that matches your organization rather than blending them.

Where our research verified a posting rule, the law puts the range in the posting itself:

• California — employers with 15 or more employees must include the pay scale in the job posting and give it to any third party that posts for them; "pay scale" means a good-faith estimate of the salary or hourly range the employer reasonably expects to pay on hire, with penalties running $100 to $10,000 per violation
• Washington — employers with 15 or more employees must disclose the wage scale or salary range and a general description of benefits in each posting (in effect since January 1, 2023)
• Illinois — 15 or more employees; pay scale and benefits in the posting, a hyperlink allowed, for jobs performed at least partly in Illinois or reporting to an Illinois supervisor
• Minnesota — 30 or more employees in the state; the starting salary range and a general description of benefits, and ranges may not be open-ended
• Massachusetts — 25 or more employees in the Commonwealth, effective October 29, 2025
• Maryland — the wage range and a general description of benefits in each public and internal job posting, set in good faith
• New York State — four or more employees; compensation ranges in postings for jobs, promotions and transfers
• New York City — a good-faith pay range in job advertisements for work performed in the city, since November 1, 2022
• Colorado — compensation and benefits disclosed in all job postings
• Connecticut — the wage or wage range and a general description of benefits in every internal or public job advertisement, effective October 1, 2026
• Virginia — the wage, salary or range disclosed in each public and internal posting

Nevada runs the other way: its law requires giving the wage or salary range to an applicant who has completed an interview, not posting it upfront.

Two notes for a smaller organization.

California's posting duty starts at 15 employees, but any California employer, whatever its size, must give an applicant the position's pay scale on reasonable request.

And more than a dozen states plus DC now have posting rules of their own, with different size thresholds and effective dates — check with your state labor agency before you post.

The benefits block is where a small organization competes on honesty rather than size.

List what you actually offer — health coverage, retirement plan, paid time off, bar dues and CLE support, malpractice coverage where the role needs it — and state your hours expectation as your organization's own number rather than leaving it to guesswork.

Frame the pay range the way the laws above do: a good-faith estimate of what you expect to pay on hire, not a promise.

Before yours goes live, confirm the two rules that move: pay-disclosure rules with your state labor agency, and anything touching licensure with your state bar's ethics counsel or your state's admitting authority.

Adapting the template for a small organization.

In a small company or firm, the hire is the legal function, so write the breadth in honestly: the contracts they will paper, the compliance obligations they will own, the disputes they will manage, the outside counsel budgets they will control.

A named supervisor matters more, not less — "reports to the CEO" or "reports to the managing partner" tells a candidate who reviews their calls and where they escalate.

If one person cannot cover every subject the organization produces, say which two or three domains matter most and name outside counsel as the route for the rest — a posting that pretends one hire covers everything sets up the disappointment you will manage in year one.

And post the range you actually budgeted rather than a number copied from a benchmark; a range you can stand behind saves you from renegotiating with the candidate you wanted.

Adapting for a focus area.

Rewrite the duties bullets around the work your operations produce.

A contracts-heavy role lives in the commercial pipeline — templates, negotiations, turnaround commitments.

An employment-heavy role adds policies, investigations and agency questions.

A regulated-industry role leads with the compliance program.

An IP- or privacy-heavy role papers licenses, data handling and vendor terms.

Let the requirements block follow the same logic: ask for experience with the matters your organization generates, not "in-house experience" in the abstract.

And if the role will lean on outside firms for litigation or specialty work, say so — management of outside counsel is itself a skill worth naming.

Adapting for seniority.

Say which level you are hiring, because the level changes the duties, the pay and the reporting.

A first-counsel posting leans on the outside counsel network already around the organization.

A counsel joining an existing legal team should be told what they own and what they escalate.

A general counsel or head-of-legal posting should say what the person runs: the budget, the team, the board or owner reporting.

If the organization genuinely needs someone flexible on level, say what the workload decides it.

Adapting for remote or hybrid.

Say where the lawyer will practice law, not just where they will sit.

ABA Formal Opinion 495 (Dec.

16, 2020) treats a lawyer as able to practice the law of their licensing jurisdiction while physically present in a state where they are not admitted, if that state has not deemed the conduct the unauthorized practice of law and the lawyer does not hold out as locally licensed, advertise a local office, or offer local legal services; the opinion says local contact information on websites, letterhead or business cards would improperly establish a local office.

ABA Model Rule 5.5(b)(1) separately bars a lawyer not admitted in a jurisdiction from establishing an office or other systematic and continuous presence for practicing law there, except as the Rules or other law authorize.

For a posting, that means the remote line should describe work for your organization under the hire's existing license — and the arrangement itself is worth confirming with your state bar's ethics counsel before you publish it.

Four wordings sink otherwise good in-house counsel postings.

Each is fixable before you hit publish.

1. Licensing and unauthorized-practice wording.

A lawyer not admitted in a jurisdiction must not hold out or represent that they are admitted to practice law there (ABA Model Rule 5.5(b)(2)), and Model Rule 5.5(a) bars practicing law in violation of a jurisdiction's regulation of the profession — or assisting another in doing so, the clause that reaches the employer.

So a posting line that reads as licensed-in-your-state for a hire who is not is the trap.

Write the admission requirement as the state where the work happens, and treat any role for an out-of-state or unadmitted lawyer as a confirm-with-the-admitting-authority question before the posting goes up.

These are the ABA's model rules, not your state's law — your state bar's ethics counsel can confirm the wording that fits your jurisdiction.

2. Preference wording that screens by who people are.

The EEOC says it is illegal to publish a job advertisement that shows a preference for, or discourages applications from, people because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information — its own example is an ad seeking "recent college graduates," which may discourage people over 40 from applying.

Write about the work, not the person: cut "young," "digital native" and "recent grad" from an in-house posting the same as any other.

Keep application questions to what is essential to decide whether a person is qualified — the EEOC treats questions about race, sex, national origin, age or religion as irrelevant to that decision — and treat the borderline ones as risky rather than harmless, because federal law does not clearly forbid every such question, but the answers can be used as evidence of discriminatory intent unless justified by a business purpose.

Keep the process accessible, too: an employer must provide an accommodation a disabled applicant needs in order to apply, unless it causes significant difficulty or expense.

3. Salary-history wording.

Four of the states our research verified restrict it.

California (Labor Code 432.3) bars seeking an applicant's salary history, including compensation and benefits, orally or in writing, personally or through an agent, and bars relying on it in deciding whether to hire or what to pay.

New York (Labor Law 194-a) bars relying on wage or salary history and requesting it as a condition of being interviewed, considered, hired or promoted, or seeking it from a current or former employer.

Illinois (820 ILCS 112) bars screening applicants by salary history and requesting it as a condition of an interview or offer.

Massachusetts (G.L. c.149 §105A) bars seeking it from the candidate or a current or former employer, with confirmation allowed only after voluntary disclosure or after an offer with compensation has been made.

Ask for expectations instead — California's law expressly allows an employer to ask an applicant about their salary expectation for the position, and to consider history the applicant volunteers without prompting.

Other states restrict salary-history questions too — check yours before the interview stage.

4. Vague scope.

"In-house counsel wanted — handle all legal matters," with no work mix, no reporting line and no range: an umbrella posting pulls applications from every kind of lawyer and saves you none of the sorting, and it reads as an organization that has not decided what it needs.

The fix is the template above — name the work mix, the outside counsel split, the reporting line, the seniority, and a range you believe.

After you post.

Set a review cadence before the posting goes live and hold to it — a slow reply reads as a closed door to a lawyer with a docket.

If the pay range or the duties change, update the posting rather than explaining the difference in interviews.

Prepare the interview the same way for every candidate — the same questions, the same structure, a scoring sheet — so comparisons stay fair and every question stays tied to the job.

And before yours goes up, browse the live in-house counsel jobs on this board to see the pay framing and duty lists you are competing against.

This page is employer information, not legal advice. Posting laws, pay-disclosure rules, bar-admission rules and ethics rules change and vary by jurisdiction — confirm them with your state labor agency, your state's admitting authority, employment counsel and your state bar's ethics counsel before you post.