Distribution of Law School Graduate Starting Salaries

Another commonly overlooked fact is that many law schools contact recent graduates who have yet to find employment and offer them brief opportunities to assist professors with research projects for $20/hour. Other schools offer to subsidize internships with public defenders' offices for similar pay. These outreach programs invariably coincide with the period when U.S. News and other organizations start doing their surveys for yearly law school rankings. Apparently, these programs are enough to count recent graduates as "employed" for the sake of rankings.

Truth be told, recessions hit the legal profession early and hard. Anyone considering going to law school and waiting out the recession should carefully weight their options. Obtaining a law degree is an expensive and time-consuming process that provides little guarantee that good jobs will be available upon graduation. I graduated from a great law school in 2009 and found good work, but I have several classmates that were not so lucky.

The most interesting aspect of this is that starting salaries follow a bimodal distribution, with one cluster around $50K and another around $165K. This is very unusual. You would think that lawyers would follow a normal distribution, peaking in the middle, but instead the salaries suggest that there are a bunch of stars and a bunch of laggards, with very few falling between the two extremes. Bottom line: law school is very risky. If you don't reach the $165K starting peak, you fall off the cliff.

related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2140283

tl;dr: Law schools are liars.