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This is incorrect actually. Pay for lawyers forms a bimodal distribution, where graduates from the top ten law schools tend to occupy most of the high end of the distribution while everyone else tends to fall in the lower end.

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Is that still true if you address his point by checking new hires at the top ten law firms?

From my understanding the pay for newly minted law schools grads for 'big law' (i.e. Associate positions for big firms) are all approx. 160k (this includes bonus). There is one firm, as I understand it, that pays more (wachtell) which pays 160 base + 160 bonus, but on a yearly basis the number of spots for that firm is in the single digits, I think.

This is more or less accurate: almost all of the other top 10 firms pay $160k base with a $10k pro-rated bonus (http://abovethelaw.com/2013/12/breaking-cravath-announces-ye...).

Yeah, it's a bit embarrassing how well I know the numbers for this.. glad I decided against it.

Yeah, it's becoming less and less of a good tradeoff for the $200k+ cost of attendance and 3 years of opportunity cost.

One funny thing about making the engineer-to-lawyer comparison regarding this salary fixing issue is that law actually has a much more obvious salary fixing problem, since almost every biglaw firm pays 160k and firms don't tend to compete for entry-level hires with compensation.

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