According to a new report from the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC), the number of in-house counsel in the United States has been consistently growing at a far higher rate than the number of lawyers working in either private practice or government. The report, which analyzed data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' annual Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics report, finds that the in-house counsel population rose by almost 90% between 2008 and 2024, from 78,000 to 145,000.
Private practice lawyers were more than five times as likely as their in-house counterparts to choose hourly billing, while in-house counsel were more than twice as likely to choose value-based or outcome-driven pricing.
