Comment by hacknat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hacknat | Hacker News Reader

Lawyers currently have one of the most bi-modal salary distributions of any profession. It seems to me that for folks who want to enter the profession doing low pay work that this should be a more supported and common path as law school is a ridiculous choice for someone who is going to make less than a teacher for the rest of their life. I’ve known a handful of public defenders in my time and almost all of them had some form of alternative support (usually rich spouse or parents).

Additionally, the UK has a hybrid system that seems to work well, and they also have two types of lawyers: barristers and solicitors. From what I understand it’s easier to become a solicitor, but your mostly doing small cases and family law and can only argue before certain courts. Barristers have a more arduous path, take more serious cases, and can argue cases in the higher courts. Seems like we could adopt a similar system (though it’s probably too late at this point).

The barrister/solicitor split is theoretically that between litigation (solicitor) and advocacy (barrister). If you're a commercial solicitor working in the city it's very much not a second-best option and is very lucrative. Solicitors do advocacy in the lower courts, but it's theoretically not the main focus of their job.

You're right that it's generally harder to fully qualify as a barrister, though [edit: in England and Wales]: there's a compulsory year-long practical training in a law firm element, which is murderous to try to get a spot in.

The distinction's actually eroding in the UK. Solicitors can train in advocacy and get rights of audience in the higher courts, and barristers can now be instructed directly by the public (which used to be illegal: their client was always a solicitor).

"Solicitors can train in advocacy and get rights of audience in the higher courts"

Solicitors who do get the right of audience apparently don't appear as much as you'd expect - solicitors still use barristers/advocates to offload risk on high value cases.

Litigation is not the right word for solicitors' work in general – they do a lot of non-contentious business, especially in the City (eg. corporate finance and M&A). Although many solicitors do litigation (which includes advocacy in the courts), most barristers do it exclusively. Also, it is solicitors who are required to undertake a year of practical training in a law firm [1]. Barristers do a pupillage [2] under the supervision of a mentor.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Training_contract

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pupillage

"Barristers have a more arduous path"

That's not true in Scotland - solicitors have two years of on the job training after a law degree and a postgraduate qualification. Training to become an advocate (Scottish equivalent of a barrister) takes a year as a "devil" which means passing some extra exams and basically following a senior junior (or two) about for most of a year and you can do that after a single year of training as a solicitor.

During this phase you are an "advocate's devil".

Source - my wife was called to the Scottish bar - which is an amusing ceremony in itself (no clapping, only stamping of feet).

Agreed, as a Scots qualified lawyer and now an engineer I don't feel that choosing the solicitor route was somehow the 'lesser option'.

Additionally most advocates/barristers will work as a solicitor for several years before making the leap to the bar. It's useful to have contacts and to be somewhat known before you do your devilling/pupillage as the minority of the advocates/barristers will pull in the majority of the work and it can be slim pickings for someone who is new.

I wonder why that's not more commonly known - I imagine many think of a solicitor as simply the "S" in ESPC or ASPC, i.e. that they relate mostly to property stuff.

Ironically, the chances of actually having domestic conveyancing done by an actual solicitor is pretty small - it's mostly done by paralegals (domestic conveyancing is very much at the low end of the legal market - with corporate at the high end).

Edit: Not to say that domestic conveyancing can't be complex but the fees are so low for the actual conveyancing part (rather than the sales part) that you are unlikely to get a very comprehensive job done. I've heard utter horror stories of what can happen with conveyancing when it goes wrong....

> Lawyers currently have one of the most bi-modal salary distributions of any profession.

I understand what you're saying but I feel like the top 50 would be occupied by people in various types of art, food preparation/serving, personal care/service, and writing. It would probably be top 3 easily for the amount of debt most of the lawyers go into for their degree(which seems to be the issue you are getting at anyways).

https://www.bls.gov/oes/bulletin_2004.pdf

You’re probably not wrong to which you could add sports, entertainment etc. but there’s a distinction between professions that have a fairly large number, if overall minority, of well paid to very well paid members and those that almost have a lottery winner sort of effect.

Income in those professions is not bimodal; it follows a power law. The frequency distribution of income for US lawyers has two clear modes (local maxima) at around $50,000 and $160,000 [1], meaning that roughly the same number of lawyers earn each of those salaries. Put another way, a randomly-selected US lawyer is more likely to earn $160,000 than the much lower mean US lawyer salary.

[1]: https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/the-toppling-o...

I literally posted a bls link where they discussed how bimodal at least a couple of those types jobs are. Did you bother to ctrl+F "bimodal" in that link? Furthermore upon a quick glance at your source, nothing in your source seems to discuss any of the jobs I had mentioned. Were you hoping your gut feeling was evidence enough?

The bimodal distributions mentioned in that source are not salary distributions.

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