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The fact that lawyers with jobs are still extremely highly paid in many cases also skews the perceptions, I think. Lawyers at the big firms are still making $15

The fact that lawyers with jobs are still extremely highly paid in many cases also skews the perceptions, I think. Lawyers at the big firms are still making $150k+. That's different from areas like some parts of the liberal arts, where you don't really see people pulling down those kinds of salaries at all, so nobody is under the illusion that $150k+ jobs exist. In law they really do exist: salaries at law firms are comparable to those at tech firms. It's just that the odds of getting one of those jobs have significantly decreased over the past 5 years. Why that situation remains, I'm not as sure. Why has the glut of lawyers not brought down salaries or prevailing rates? It seems instead that incomes have become bimodal, with one group of highly paid lawyers, and another group of very poorly paid lawyers with unstable employment.

antiterra 14y ago
Salaries were definitely affected by the changes in the market, though they didn't drop so much as stop growing nearly as quickly. Also, because internship, first-year and clerkship positions became much more scarce, much of the glut of law grads have no real path to gain the experience they need to compete for firm salaries. Even in the good old days, it was very easy to get left behind in the biglaw game if you didn't score a position or clerkship right out of school. Another factor is the partnership structure. In the 50 US States, only lawyers can have an ownership stake in a law firm. Partners are often practicing, so there is some motivation to keep the hourly rates high for their own benefit. * DC is an outlier, mostly to enable our 'wonderful' lobbying system.
rayiner 14y ago
It's not a new phenomenon: http://www.nalp.org/uploads/0812Research.pdf http://www.nalp.org/uploads/0812Research.pdf. As for what keeps the upper peak going, ironically law is supply constrained. Not by the number of JD's (if you just need legal services you can get them on Craigslist for $10/hour), but by available training opportunities. You're not going to hire a lawyer to do a $100 million bond offering who has never worked on one before, and there are only so many of those that are done each year which gates the number of new lawyers that can be trained to do them. This gating is the same reason you see similar or higher salaries in consulting or finance. There is no shortage of fresh BBA's and MBA's who'd love to be doing M&A deals, but MS/JPM/GS only need so many people each year to handle the deals they have.

antiterra 14y ago

Salaries were definitely affected by the changes in the market, though they didn't drop so much as stop growing nearly as quickly. Also, because internship, first-year and clerkship positions became much more scarce, much of the glut of law grads have no real path to gain the experience they need to compete for firm salaries. Even in the good old days, it was very easy to get left behind in the biglaw game if you didn't score a position or clerkship right out of school. Another factor is the partnership structure. In the 50 US States, only lawyers can have an ownership stake in a law firm. Partners are often practicing, so there is some motivation to keep the hourly rates high for their own benefit. * DC is an outlier, mostly to enable our 'wonderful' lobbying system.

rayiner 14y ago

It's not a new phenomenon: http://www.nalp.org/uploads/0812Research.pdf http://www.nalp.org/uploads/0812Research.pdf. As for what keeps the upper peak going, ironically law is supply constrained. Not by the number of JD's (if you just need legal services you can get them on Craigslist for $10/hour), but by available training opportunities. You're not going to hire a lawyer to do a $100 million bond offering who has never worked on one before, and there are only so many of those that are done each year which gates the number of new lawyers that can be trained to do them. This gating is the same reason you see similar or higher salaries in consulting or finance. There is no shortage of fresh BBA's and MBA's who'd love to be doing M&A deals, but MS/JPM/GS only need so many people each year to handle the deals they have.