13 ms·

This isn't an apples to apples comparison. Law school can require as much as $200k and 3 years of opportunity cost on top of whatever was spent on undergrad. A

by doktrin 13y ago

This isn't an apples to apples comparison. Law school can require as much as $200k and 3 years of opportunity cost on top of whatever was spent on undergrad. Additionally, it's my understanding that getting a shot [1] at the big leagues in law requires a top-12 school. Are mid-tier law schools pumping out lawyers who make $150k as first year associates? I'd be surprised, but I don't have the data. [1] Even attending a top school is no guarantee. Law school is fiercely competitive, and only top-scoring students from top schools get the really lucrative & prestigious positions.

wallflower 13y ago
In Big Law, rankings are everything and permeate the entire profession. See "PPP" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_firms_by_profits_per_partner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_firms_by_profits_pe...
- brianbreslin 13y ago
  Are these law firms structured similar to wall street where a big portion of a partner's pay is in form of bonuses?
  - wallflower 13y ago
    Like in the largest financial firms like GS, there is a compensation committee that determines your yearly profit share. Pretty interesting reading: http://www.skadden.com/sites/default/files/ckeditor/files/How_Skadden_Does_It.pdf http://www.skadden.com/sites/default/files/ckeditor/files/Ho...
  - logical42 13y ago
    From my understanding, only if you're a partner.
  - grmarcil 13y ago
    In general, at the associate level, no. Partner level positions have varying compensation agreements, so hard to generalize there, but associates generally receive most of their compensation in salary. This is as opposed to finance, where even associate level positions will generally pay a large portion of total compensation in the form of an annual bonus, tied to the firm's performance. In a good year, these can exceed 100% of base salary after a few years of experience, but this is not the case for any non-partner lawyers I know of.
    - vqc 13y ago
      Susman, Wachtell, Boies (and several other litigation boutiques) all have had bonuses that exceeded 100% of base salary (160k). In order to get those bonuses, however, you're probably looking at at least 2400 billable hours a year.
      - brianbreslin 13y ago
        Working 2400 billable hours probably means closer to 3000 actual hours right?
        vqc 13y ago
        Right. 80% efficiency is about as high as you can get. It's a real grind.
        rahimnathwani 13y ago
        A lawyer dies and goes to heaven. He complains: "I'm too young to die; I'm only 45!" The response: 'Not according to your billable hours.'
StefanKarpinski 13y ago
That's a fair point, but that doesn't really lessen the massive theft by the top tech companies from essentially all software engineers. Law was just a point of comparison that struck me as puzzling at the time.
- ankitml 13y ago
  That might be a fair point but a bad argument. Market salaries are notional values which stabilize at an equilibrium where companies who pay and engineers both expectations are managed. This comes from demand and supply. High cost of law school can only impact the supply side of lawyers. One need to understand trends in both demand and supply of these professions to get the larger picture. Law school is competitive and software is not, will not be a valid argument that can justify higher salaries of lawyers.
  - nickonline 13y ago
    But you could argue that Law school is only competitive because the real world salaries are. In the same vein if you raised the salaries at certain large faculties the technology degrees may end up competitive as well.
  - nbouscal 13y ago
    Law school is so competitive precisely because there is more supply than demand. You're arguing against yourself.
leemcalilly 13y ago
It's all about who you know.
jseliger 13y ago
To bolster your point and weaken this—"newly minted lawyers were still making several times as much as good programmers"—see also Paul Campos's Don't Go To Law School (Unless): A Law Professor's Inside Guide to Maximizing Opportunity and Minimizing Risk and Steven Harper's The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis. It is true that a tiny number of lawyers make a lot of money straight out of school, but as noted their numbers are small and their hours (and often lives) awful.
- atmosx 13y ago
  A tiny number of everything makes insanely lots of money: Developers, Lawyers, Chefs, Engineers, etc. Speaking for that tiny number, does Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple's top management (who are or were developers at some point) qualify as developers? If yes, then there's no comparison I guess. That said is more than obvious that in a digital world the future belongs to developers, because the demand for them will go up, it's inevitable.
vqc 13y ago
The distribution of pay is depressingly bimodal: http://www.nalp.org/salarycurve_classof2011 http://www.nalp.org/salarycurve_classof2011. Mid-tier law schools are definitely not pumping out lawyers who make $150k as first year associates. Even coming out of a top-20 school, you have to be ~top 20% to be competitive.
ken47 13y ago
"Law school can require as much as $200k and 3 years of opportunity cost on top of whatever was spent on undergrad." You seem to be missing the economic realities at play. The cost of law school does not matter. All that matters is the supply and demand for lawyers and programmers. And if you've been keeping your ear to the ground, you may be aware that there is a significant oversupply of law grads nowadays. There is no economic law that says that lawyers should make more money than programmers because they choose to be ripped off in pursuit of their training. If in the future, the salary of the average lawyer were to drop below that of the average programmer, Adam Smith would not bat an eye.
- rohanpai 13y ago
  If law school is so expensive, it is harder to become a lawyer. If less people become lawyers, the supply decreases (resulting in the demand for the shortage of lawyers to be greater). "There is no economic law that says that lawyers should make more money than programmers because they choose to be ripped off in pursuit of their training." You don't NEED a degree to do programing. Arguably a computer science degree is standard but even then, you don't need 7 years of schooling. In order to be a lawyer, you need to complete law school. At the end of the day, it's fair for a lawyer to charge more. Why? Because someone is willing to pay the premium.
  - mehrdada 13y ago
    >In order to be a lawyer, you need to complete law school. Not in California.
    - ZanyProgrammer 13y ago
      The number of people who go the apprenticeship route in CA is very miniscule. There are lots of law schools that are certified by the CA Bar and not the ABA, but you'd be a fool to go to one, unless you like being an unemployable lawyer with 200K+ in debt.
    - dredmorbius 13y ago
      In order to be hired (by a top-tier firm) you'll likely need that top-tier law degree. Though there are successful independent lawyers. And an awful lot of unsuccessful ones.
walshemj 13y ago
Going to a top uni and the debt that entails is also often needed for entry level jobs at tier1 tech employers as well.
geebee 13y ago
Did this collusion affect the wages of people with PhD or MS degrees? Also, the opportunity cost for law students is different than it is for engineers, since you can attend law school with a degree in art history. When I was in grad school in engineering at UC Berkeley, I saw the average salary for MS and PhD level graduates relative to law and MBA programs in various surveys. It was pretty remarkable - not even a PhD in CS matched the average salary for a JD or MBA out of Boalt and Haas, respectivel. This was just during the first dot com boom, when silicon valley companies were lobbying congress for an increase in visas due to a severe shortage of UC citizens pursuing these degrees. I always wondered why this question so rarely came up during the debates - why do you think you should be able to hire someone who majored in physics and went to 6 years of a PhD program in EE for 2/3 of what people are paying top law grads? I remember one part of a floor debate with Feinstein and a biotech CEO - the CEO was trying to get someone with a PhD in Biology with a focus on genetics, unix ability, and programming skill - and couldn't find one in spite of offering 90K, stock options, and a "lease on a new BMW" (which makes it sound like they're giving a BMW, but really they're just letting the worker drive it, a perk probably worth about 6k a year). Feinstein replied "what was the name of your company again?" and everyone laughed. Feinstein didn't say "why do you think you can hire someone like this for 2/3 the starting salary of an art history major with a law degree that can be completed in half the time with 1/50th the attrition rate?" I get the feeling the gap isn't as pronounced as it used ot be, but it is still a good question for framing this debate.

by doktrin 13y ago

wallflower 13y ago

In Big Law, rankings are everything and permeate the entire profession. See "PPP" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_firms_by_profits_per_partner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_firms_by_profits_pe...

brianbreslin 13y ago
Are these law firms structured similar to wall street where a big portion of a partner's pay is in form of bonuses?
- wallflower 13y ago
  Like in the largest financial firms like GS, there is a compensation committee that determines your yearly profit share. Pretty interesting reading: http://www.skadden.com/sites/default/files/ckeditor/files/How_Skadden_Does_It.pdf http://www.skadden.com/sites/default/files/ckeditor/files/Ho...
- logical42 13y ago
  From my understanding, only if you're a partner.
- grmarcil 13y ago
  In general, at the associate level, no. Partner level positions have varying compensation agreements, so hard to generalize there, but associates generally receive most of their compensation in salary. This is as opposed to finance, where even associate level positions will generally pay a large portion of total compensation in the form of an annual bonus, tied to the firm's performance. In a good year, these can exceed 100% of base salary after a few years of experience, but this is not the case for any non-partner lawyers I know of.
  - vqc 13y ago
    Susman, Wachtell, Boies (and several other litigation boutiques) all have had bonuses that exceeded 100% of base salary (160k). In order to get those bonuses, however, you're probably looking at at least 2400 billable hours a year.
    - brianbreslin 13y ago
      Working 2400 billable hours probably means closer to 3000 actual hours right?
      - vqc 13y ago
        Right. 80% efficiency is about as high as you can get. It's a real grind.
      - rahimnathwani 13y ago
        A lawyer dies and goes to heaven. He complains: "I'm too young to die; I'm only 45!" The response: 'Not according to your billable hours.'

StefanKarpinski 13y ago

That's a fair point, but that doesn't really lessen the massive theft by the top tech companies from essentially all software engineers. Law was just a point of comparison that struck me as puzzling at the time.

ankitml 13y ago
That might be a fair point but a bad argument. Market salaries are notional values which stabilize at an equilibrium where companies who pay and engineers both expectations are managed. This comes from demand and supply. High cost of law school can only impact the supply side of lawyers. One need to understand trends in both demand and supply of these professions to get the larger picture. Law school is competitive and software is not, will not be a valid argument that can justify higher salaries of lawyers.
- nickonline 13y ago
  But you could argue that Law school is only competitive because the real world salaries are. In the same vein if you raised the salaries at certain large faculties the technology degrees may end up competitive as well.
- nbouscal 13y ago
  Law school is so competitive precisely because there is more supply than demand. You're arguing against yourself.

leemcalilly 13y ago

It's all about who you know.

jseliger 13y ago

To bolster your point and weaken this—"newly minted lawyers were still making several times as much as good programmers"—see also Paul Campos's Don't Go To Law School (Unless): A Law Professor's Inside Guide to Maximizing Opportunity and Minimizing Risk and Steven Harper's The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis. It is true that a tiny number of lawyers make a lot of money straight out of school, but as noted their numbers are small and their hours (and often lives) awful.

atmosx 13y ago
A tiny number of everything makes insanely lots of money: Developers, Lawyers, Chefs, Engineers, etc. Speaking for that tiny number, does Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple's top management (who are or were developers at some point) qualify as developers? If yes, then there's no comparison I guess. That said is more than obvious that in a digital world the future belongs to developers, because the demand for them will go up, it's inevitable.

vqc 13y ago

The distribution of pay is depressingly bimodal: http://www.nalp.org/salarycurve_classof2011 http://www.nalp.org/salarycurve_classof2011. Mid-tier law schools are definitely not pumping out lawyers who make $150k as first year associates. Even coming out of a top-20 school, you have to be ~top 20% to be competitive.

ken47 13y ago

"Law school can require as much as $200k and 3 years of opportunity cost on top of whatever was spent on undergrad." You seem to be missing the economic realities at play. The cost of law school does not matter. All that matters is the supply and demand for lawyers and programmers. And if you've been keeping your ear to the ground, you may be aware that there is a significant oversupply of law grads nowadays. There is no economic law that says that lawyers should make more money than programmers because they choose to be ripped off in pursuit of their training. If in the future, the salary of the average lawyer were to drop below that of the average programmer, Adam Smith would not bat an eye.

rohanpai 13y ago
If law school is so expensive, it is harder to become a lawyer. If less people become lawyers, the supply decreases (resulting in the demand for the shortage of lawyers to be greater). "There is no economic law that says that lawyers should make more money than programmers because they choose to be ripped off in pursuit of their training." You don't NEED a degree to do programing. Arguably a computer science degree is standard but even then, you don't need 7 years of schooling. In order to be a lawyer, you need to complete law school. At the end of the day, it's fair for a lawyer to charge more. Why? Because someone is willing to pay the premium.
- mehrdada 13y ago
  >In order to be a lawyer, you need to complete law school. Not in California.
  - ZanyProgrammer 13y ago
    The number of people who go the apprenticeship route in CA is very miniscule. There are lots of law schools that are certified by the CA Bar and not the ABA, but you'd be a fool to go to one, unless you like being an unemployable lawyer with 200K+ in debt.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    In order to be hired (by a top-tier firm) you'll likely need that top-tier law degree. Though there are successful independent lawyers. And an awful lot of unsuccessful ones.

walshemj 13y ago

Going to a top uni and the debt that entails is also often needed for entry level jobs at tier1 tech employers as well.

geebee 13y ago

Did this collusion affect the wages of people with PhD or MS degrees? Also, the opportunity cost for law students is different than it is for engineers, since you can attend law school with a degree in art history. When I was in grad school in engineering at UC Berkeley, I saw the average salary for MS and PhD level graduates relative to law and MBA programs in various surveys. It was pretty remarkable - not even a PhD in CS matched the average salary for a JD or MBA out of Boalt and Haas, respectivel. This was just during the first dot com boom, when silicon valley companies were lobbying congress for an increase in visas due to a severe shortage of UC citizens pursuing these degrees. I always wondered why this question so rarely came up during the debates - why do you think you should be able to hire someone who majored in physics and went to 6 years of a PhD program in EE for 2/3 of what people are paying top law grads? I remember one part of a floor debate with Feinstein and a biotech CEO - the CEO was trying to get someone with a PhD in Biology with a focus on genetics, unix ability, and programming skill - and couldn't find one in spite of offering 90K, stock options, and a "lease on a new BMW" (which makes it sound like they're giving a BMW, but really they're just letting the worker drive it, a perk probably worth about 6k a year). Feinstein replied "what was the name of your company again?" and everyone laughed. Feinstein didn't say "why do you think you can hire someone like this for 2/3 the starting salary of an art history major with a law degree that can be completed in half the time with 1/50th the attrition rate?" I get the feeling the gap isn't as pronounced as it used ot be, but it is still a good question for framing this debate.