The world changed a lot between public companies filing proxy reports in 2019 and today, when the Daily Report, aided by sister organization ALM Intelligence, issued its annual list of the general counsels for Georgia public companies with the highest reported cash compensation. That means the data on the 12 top legal officers who are among their companies' five highest-paid executives--meaning their compensation is listed publicly--could serve as stark pre-pandemic examples when the 2020 numbers come in next year. Two of the 12 in the Daily Report's list are already known to have taken steep pay cuts as their companies, in the hard-hit airline and automotive industries, slashed expenses. However, the economic effects of the pandemic have been widely varied, according to Bob Graff, who recruits in-house counsel in his job at Major, Lindsey & Africa. While consumer-facing companies in hospitality and retail sectors are hurting, he noted, "banks are doing really well." Graff added that, economically, the pandemic "doesn't feel as bad to me as 2009-10," when paychecks were hit particularly hard by the Great Recession. While the Daily Report's list offers interesting snapshots of GC cash compensation, it is not a comprehensive look at compensation for GCs at Georgia public companies. ALM Intelligence sifted through 2019 proxy filings from the Fortune 1000 to determine pay for companies' top legal officers. Despite being highly-paid, some prominent Georgia GCs do not appear in the survey because they are not among the five best-compensated executives at their companies, or they work at privately-held companies. For example, the leader on this list for the past two years, Audrey Boone Tillman, the general counsel at Aflac, is not on this year's list because she is no longer listed as one of that company's five highest-paid executives. Significantly, the survey ranks GCs by total cash compensation, which is a combination of base salary, cash bonus and nonequity incentives (a form of pay made popular after the Dodd-Frank Act; it is discretionary and often based on performance). ALM Intelligence does not factor stock awards and options into the rankings. Graff noted that GCs generally aren't among the five highest-paid executives in a public company. Some appear in smaller companies, and "tenure outweighs anything" in determining some of these salary figures. Click on the arrows above to see each GC in the list; click on their names on each slide to read about them.