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Comment by rorrr | Hacker News Reader

Contrary to the impression media and movies have created, lawyers get paid VERY LOW salaries now, at least in NY. We have overproduced so many lawyer graduates who thought they would be making 100K+ at their first job, it's just insane.

Just start browsing craigslist or monster listings, it's very revealing.

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Just start browsing craigslist or monster listings, it's very revealing.

Craigslist and Monster give a very accurate impression of the legal employment market for clients who are so catastrophically incompetent that they would source legal representation from Craigslist or Monster. Similar to programming.

I don't really have a dog in the fight of "Production of legal talent adequately meeting market demands for legal talent: yay or nay", but it is an observable fact that a particular type of student has a very achievable career trajectory into being a BigLaw associate at a six figure salary in their first job. You can plot out that career trajectory, to the month, the day you receive an offer of admission to one of several undergraduate institutions.

People overestimate the opportunities for lawyers.

If you go to Yale Law you're OK. Maybe even top 3. If you "only" go top a top 14 law school, you need to beat a lot of your classmates, there are quite large numbers of losers. If you do not go to a top 14 law school, it gets a lot worse, fast. And there's 200 law schools...

People assume it works less strictly than that, but the legal job market recently changed so just doing well at a top school isn't enough anymore.

In other words, the "particular type" of student is a narrower category than people think.

People overestimate the opportunities for Yale graduates too. I've received resume from Yale and Harvard grads for legal-related unpaid internships.

The problem is not an oversupply of lawyers; there are just about enough lawyers to satisfactorily satisfy the legal needs of the market (taking attrition into account).

The problem is that most lawyers are unwilling to do the solo/small-practice gig like doctors and dentists do, and consequently chase the firm and government jobs. The number of new firm and government jobs has dropped by more than half in the last 3 years, leaving a glut of "unemployed" lawyers.

But that's the thing about lawyers--they're not supposed to be employed. They're "professionals", so they're supposed to be their own bosses. I wish lawyers would at least try setting up their own shingles. Most of my graduating law school class did (at least, the ones without massive loan debt), and they've all got respectable, self-supporting practices. They won't make filthy money, but they will definitely be comfortable supporting a family within the next few years.

Indeed.

I did the traditional path -- Ivy League undergrad, Top 10 law school -- with the expectation of the traditional big firm job outcome. Got shut out from the big firm jobs due to a below median 1L year performance (I put in lots of effort, but it wasn't good enough). Just graduated. Hugely massive debt.

Grades improved second and third years but only first year grades seem to matter very much.

Law school was an epic mistake. It's also a very tracked profession -- once you're not on the BigLaw track its very difficult to ever get back on.

Now the likely best-case for me in terms of my legal career is that after 10 years of working 40k-a-year public interest, i'll no longer have six figures in debt. So after 7 years of very "prestigious", expensive, and time-consuming education, and 10 years of hard work, I'll have finally broken even, and be looking forward to a flat and low income potential.

That sure wasn't in the brochure.

You'd better become a carpenter! Then, there is always a chance your son will become a prophet.

No, guys, why do you despise manual work so much?

What's really funny is if i'd just worked any random job -- food service, shelf-stocker -- instead of getting all this "elite" education, my financial situation would be way better than it is now right now.

And if I, say, decided I wanted to go to school, then, knowing what I know now, I could major in something serious like computer science or one of the engineering disciplines.

I'm too lazy to look for a cite, but I think Peter Thiel has commented on part of the problem of the legal market being the "prestige" that is associated with being a lawyer vs other jobs, and how people are willing to make flawed financial decisions in part due to this perceived prestige.

I don't know your situation, but have you considered going to one of the developing markets in Asia? One: there's a lot of legal work flowing to that part of the world Two: As those economies grow and mature there's more room for businesses (and individuals) to need legal assistance

The legal work I've seen in Asia tends to 1) involve getting a big firm job and then you can perhaps rotate into their Asia office, and 2) tends to want you have some language fluency.

I'd love to go to Asia, and I'm footloose and fancy free -- nothing tying me to the States. Maybe you know something I don't -- did you have a particular market or type of position in mind? Lemme know.

The top tier firms still pay $160,000 as starting salary, same as since 2007, but they are hiring a lot fewer people. New law grad salaries have been more and more binodal over the last few decades, with the other local maximum at around $55,000, and an increasing share of the new grads getting stuck at the low end.

Here is a data set on post-graduation employment (full time legal) rates for different law schools-- http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/clearinghouse/?show=com... . Here is an explanation of where the data in that table came from-- http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/clearinghouse/ .

> craigslist or monster

Are you reading what you're writing?

You must be new to the internets. These are the sites with jobs listings.

After graduating in the middle of Lawmageddon, craiglist was very useful in finding jobs. I managed to cobble together enough work through Craiglist to start paying off my student loans and gas. If I'd kept at it for an entire year, I could definitely have made enough to at least reach the bottom peak of the bimodal curve (~$50,000) just through craiglist-related work.

Impressive. Jut being curious: How did the Craigslist workload break down, i.e. what kind of work did you get/became the most profitable?

Second-chairing trials was the most lucrative work. This mostly involved helping the primary attorney on the matter with pretrial hearings, jury selection, presentation of evidence, and cross-examination of expert witnesses.

Courtroom appearances was a distant second. For about $100-$200 a day (depending on the court and number of cases), I would appear in court on behalf of other lawyers to file various motions and paperwork.

Yet because of the licensing and laws and regulation, most law firms are still charging > $150/hour (from what I've seen), because there's still few choices. While there's more lawyers than there have been in a while, it hasn't at all brought the pricing down. I suspect it ends up as simply more profit for the larger firms. Because there's more competition for jobs, they can pay less, but because of the regulations (barriers to entry) the prices can remain high. It seems an odd paradox, but I may be over simplifying.

How did this guy get a 160k base then?

My guess would be because he graduated from Stanford Law, which is currently ranked #2.

Law school graduate salary distributions are really an interesting thing. I suggest a quick gander at this chart of the distribution from 2006-2011: http://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib .

Those curves have changed very quickly. I'm very interested to see 2012.

Legal salaries are bi-modal. You either work at a big firm paying the market big-firm rate ($160k+ bonus in NYC, Chicago, etc) or you work at a small firm making $45-70k.

There are some weird market dynamics in the legal field. Law firms create an artificial shortage of lawyers, and thus a corresponding explosion in associate salaries, because they refuse to hire substantial amounts outside the top 15 schools or so. They'll hire anyone at Stanford and most people at Duke, but only the very top of the class at say U Washington.

Exactly, I know a Columbia law grad who works in NYC. His firm hires nothing but Harvard, Columbia, and Yale grads.

He said that it's not because a Berkeley or Texas grad isn't just as good it's because they have a certain culture and in case one of the new hires messes up a case no one wants to be the partner who gave that "public school kid" a chance and lost the firm a lot of money and prestige.

Law is also a pretty insular and regionalistic field. E.g. at one of the most selective firms in the country (Susman Godfrey in Texas), a UT Austin grad has a much better chance than a Columbia grad. They think UT = Harvard down there.

It's all very strange. In most fields such blatant regionalistic favoritism isn't so encouraged.

In most fields the rules do not vary so much by state and to a lesser extent a small collection of states. But in law your state law matters, and even on federal law the precedents can vary according to which circuit you are in.

Indeed, I now may make in legal-related market than I would as a lawyer doing the same work. It's very bizarre...

Worse (well, not from my perspective), I work fewer hours than any lawyer I know but make more than all of them except for the ones working for BigLaw (i.e., the "premier") law firms.

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