The recent drama involving OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft caught my attention not only for the entertaining corporate governance drama…it also got me thinking about compensation.  Before Altman returned to OpenAI after his weekend ouster, Microsoft offered to match salaries for anyone who wanted to join Altman in his announced move to the tech giant.  The plan was to create an entirely new research division at Microsoft in order to keep Altman's team together.  But it also cleverly avoided upsetting internal pay equities.

Internal pay equity comes up as a crucial topic in most of our recruiting assignments.  If Company ABC has four assistant general counsel positions and we are filling one of them, for example, it's very difficult for our client to pay the new AGC more than the three grade level counterparts who are in place.  The solution is almost always limiting the candidate pool to attorneys who will say "yes" to an offer at or below the maximum available salary that won't upset internal pay equity.