H. Lawrence Brown, who runs privacy and legal executive search at JW Michaels & Co., has a useful piece on why privacy, cyber and AI counsel searches keep stalling. His short answer: the seat grew faster than the talent pool. Privacy counsel used to mean product counseling, contracts and vendor diligence. Now companies want someone who can build a program, sit in on incident response and brief the board on AI risk. Very few lawyers have done all three, and Brown says the pay is following the bigger job.
If you are weighing your privacy counsel salary, the message is plain: AI governance is the skill that moves your band. Read it next to the JW Michaels salary guide and our in-house counsel salaries guide (salary ranges; some figures are base salary only), then see who’s hiring on our privacy counsel jobs page.
“The IAPP’s Salary and Jobs Report 2025-26, based on more than 1,600 respondents in over 60 countries, found that half of respondents working in both privacy and AI governance earn more than $169,700. By comparison, half of those working only in privacy earn less than $123,000, and half of those working only in AI governance earn less than $151,800.”
Read: The Data Lawyer Shortage: Why Privacy, Cyber and AI Searches Keep Stalling at JW Michaels & Co.