PSedrishMD

BTW, it makes more sense to examine median salaries and not mean salaries.

Gatsby

Where can you find median-salary numbers?

Sugee

Concerneddad,

Many thanks. That sure did help. I am thinking that I might go back to school to study law after both my sons go to school. Teaching and/or public jobs is what I have on mind.

concerneddad

Good luck Sugee if you venture into the law. It can be fun, and challenging, all at the same time.

CD

sakky

There are some graduate programs for lawyers who want to really dive into research/theory, but don't want to clerk, for example, the doctoral programs that many law schools offer (not to be confused with the standard Juris Doctor or JD degree - I'm talking about true doctoral programs).

However, I do agree that they are extremely specialized and that you generally don't need to graduate from one of those programs if you want to be an legal researcher/academic. Strong performance in your JD program is often times sufficient.

Susan777

Taxguy is incorrect about graduates of the very best schools. (I don't think thinkingoutloud ever mentioned top programs.)

If you attend a Top 10, or Top 15 program, and place anywhere in the top half of your class, you'll have little trouble getting a job paying over $100,000. Even if you're closer to the bottom of your class, you shouldn't have that much trouble getting a good job. (I know people from top schools that got good jobs without even putting their GPA on their resume.) The vast majority of graduates from top schools, in other words, won't have much trouble finding well-paying work.

However, thinkingoutloud's points are certainly valid for most schools, including many other "Top Tier" schools in the 15-50 range. At most of these schools, you'll probably need to be in the top 20% to get a 100,000 + job, and below that level, you'll probably need to be in the top 5%-10%. (At some schools, no grads will get those jobs.)

The bottom line is that most law schools exaggerate their students' placement and salaries. Most grads at most schools probably don't get private-sector jobs, and most make far less than six figures. ($50,000 is probably closer to the mark, with many, if not most, making far less.)

And, of course, just because grads from the top schools can get high-paying work doesn't mean they'll like it, or be able to do it for very long.

In terms of academia, you're best off going to a top-10 program if you want to do this, or perhaps doing extremely well at a strong local program (combined with clerkships, etc.)

Sugee

Thanks, Susan and Sakky.

Greybeard

Here's some info from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Elsewhere on their site, they list the average lawyer salary at $107K, and the median at $91K, but exclude sole practitioners (and annual bonuses) from these figures.

"How much does this job pay?

"The middle half of all lawyers earned between $61,060 and $136,810 a year in 2002. The lowest-paid 10 percent earned less than $44,490. The highest-paid 10 percent earned more than $145,600 a year. The pay for lawyers depends on whom they work for. It also depends on how long they have been lawyers and on how many special things they have learned about the law. In general, lawyers are among the highest paid workers in the country.

"How many jobs are there?

"Lawyers held about 695,000 jobs in 2002. About 3 out of 4 lawyers practiced privately either in law firms or solo practices. Other lawyers worked for a wide range of private businesses and government agencies.

"What about the future?

"Employment of lawyers is expected to grow about as fast as the average for all occupations through 2012. This is because there will be more reasons for companies, persons, and governments to hire lawyers. But it is also true that a lot of people will try to become lawyers. This means that a person who wants to be a lawyer will have to work really hard to be one of those who get into law school. Graduates from law school will have to compete for good jobs also."

sakky

I would agree with the general tone of this thread which is that if you are absolutely intent upon making money, don't become a lawyer. Go work at an investment bank, a hedge fund, a venture capital firm, or some other field in finance. The amount of money those people make, especially the stars, easily dwarfs lawyers' pay. Even the highest paid lawyer can be outearned by even a mid-level investment banker.

Gatsby

Sakky, right now I'm vacillating between I-banking (or something else in finance) and law...I basically know what I need to do in order to get a top job in the legal world (relatively easy major at, perferably, a top school for undergrad and super-high LSATS; graduate at top of elite law school class), but I'm sort of in the dark regarding I-banking: namely, does it matter what I major in? Most major in econ, but econ sort of turns me off--would a humanities-related major, like english/history/polysci/philosophy open any doors for finance? Anything else I should know? Thanks for your time and help.

Susan777

With all due respect, Gatsby, I don't see you doing well in finance if econ turns you off. Seems to me the same principles would be involved, and they'd probably want a business/econ/accounting background.

Also, Sakky is right that lawyers don't always make that much, and probably generally make less than investment bankers. It's an exaggeration to say that even the "highest-paid" lawyer can be outearned by a mid-level I-banker, though. There are trial lawyers making billions, and many others making millions. (See Tobacco Settlement.)

Greybeard

"Billions" may be a bit of an exageration. I've never heard of a bilionaire lawyer. The guy who represented Penzoil against Texaco earned a 9-figured fee for his firm, and the big tobacco case generated some large fees (that were split between a significant number of lawyers).

John Edward was a legendary trial lawyer, and earned maybe 20 or 30 million in the course of his career. The lawyer I personally know who made the most money made his fortune ($20m) on stock options as general counsel of a pre-IPO company that went public.

If you chose a career based on what's most likely to make you fabulously wealthy, you'll probably be disappointed. If you do somethig you think you'd enjoy, you're more likely to be successful anyway (financially and otherwise), and more likely to be contented with your choice of careers, regardless of remuneration.

Susan777

If you look further into class-action lawsuits, you'll see that there are in fact attorneys who have earned over a billion in fees. And, of course, there are many that make more than I-bankers.

(I would hardly call Edwards "legendary", though he certainly screwed the health-care system out of a good amount of cash. By North Carolina standards, he was certainly effective in that regard.)

I agree with your last paragraph, though. The bottom line is that most lawyers don't make all that much, and you'll need a passion for it to be successful either way.

sakky

I think I can offer a simple proof. The list of the richest people in the world, and certainly the known billionaires in the world is fairly well established, and is published in periodicals like Fortune or Forbes. Name one person among the richest people in Forbes or Fortune's list of richest people in the world who made his/her fortune from lawyer's fees. Don't just come back to me with a lawyer who also happens to be a billionaire, you have to name one that actually made that billion strictly from working as a lawyer. For example, surely you must agree it's not fair to come back with a name like Robert Rowling, who does have a law degree, and is worth over $2 billion, but that's from being a real-estate and oil/gas mogul (he owns Omni Hotels and is the son of the legendary Texas oil entrepeneur, the late Reese Rowling, from whom he inherited much if not most of his fortune). Robert Rowling hasn't actively worked as a lawyer for several decades, and certainly didn't make his billions by practicing law. Similarly, it's also equally unfair to come back with a guy like Charlie Munger, who is also a lawyer and a billionaire, but is a billionaire because he was one of the original partners in Berkshire Hathaway. Again, it has to be a lawyer who made his fortune off fees.

Here is the list of the Forbes World's Billionaires. You can search through it yourself. By all means, if such super-rich lawyers that made billions off law fees and not through other ways, then by all means, let's hear about it.

http://www.forbes.com/2002/02/28/billionaires.html

Or consider this article from the Wall Street Journal. In the year 2004, the most profitable US law firm was Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz, whose partners made over $2.5 million each that year. While obviously $2.5 million is a princely chunk of change, it simply doesn't compare to the kind of money that Wall Street star financiers make. The stars on Wall Street can and do easily make over 10 times that amount in a year.

http://www.lawschool.com/bigbucks.htm

http://www.careers-in-finance.com/ibsal.htm

Now don't get me wrong. I don't doubt that there are lawyers that have earned billions of dollars in fees from cases. The problem is that this doesn't translate into billions of dollars directly into an individual lawyer's pocket. Not even close. The fees that a lawyer picks up doesn't go directly to him/her, but rather to the firm, as standard revenue. The firm then obviously has to pay out expenses - the salaries of associates, secretaries, paralegals, and everybody else, the rent of the office space, Furthermore, many of these big-money cases usually drag on for years, so if you want to properly account for what happened using standard accounting principles, you actually have to amortize the fee that you collect over all the years that you spent working on the case. For example, if you got paid in year 5, it's not like the associates who were working under you for those 5 years are simply going to forgo salaries during years 1-4. They are going to demand to be paid every year. So while you made money in year 5, you lost money in the preceding 4 years, and that has to be accounted for. Finally, and most importantly, big law firms have lots and lots of equity partners, and you have to share the profits of the firm with all of them. If you're a partner, and you win a big case, it's not like you can keep all the money for yourself. I think it's plain to see that it would be extremely difficult for an individual lawyer to have put a billion dollars in his pocket through fees. Made a billion dollars of fees? Sure. But to have billions of dollars in his pocket? Very doubtful.

Greybeard

Joe Jamail, who landed an 11 billion dollar verdict for Penzoil against Texaco, has an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion, and was number 378 on the Forbes list. So now I have heard of a billionaire lawyer (but only one).

Susan777, perhaps you wouldn't call John Edwards "legendary," but I'm not alone in doing so. Here's a quote from the Washington Monthly:

"Until he moved to the Senate, Edwards was a personal injury lawyer---the kind people most love to hate---and a very talented one. More than half his cases were medical malpractice suits. Many involved infants born with brain damage or other serious conditions that entail a lifetime of expensive medical care. Edwards also won cases against hospitals, cities, and corporations. "As a lawyer, he was the whole package," says Mike Dayton, editor of North Carolina Lawyers Weekly. "He's prepared, he's smart, and he's very personable." And he continued winning massive verdicts. In 1990, he was the youngest member inducted into The Inner Circle of Advocates, an invitation-only group of the nation's top 100 trial lawyers. By the mid-1990s, Edwards had become legendary. "After trials," recalls Howard Twiggs, a Raleigh lawyer and former president of ATLA, "jurors would approach Johnny and ask him for his card." It is said that insurance companies would suddenly become interested in settling when Edwards' name was added to a plaintiff's team. Edwards won a $7 million verdict for the parents of a 16-year-old who'd killed himself the day after being dismissed from a psychiatric hospital, an incredibly difficult case to win, Dayton says, because in North Carolina the plaintiff must prove that the entire burden of negligence lies with the defendant. In 1997, Edwards successfully sued a doctor for $23 million on behalf of the parents of a baby severely brain damaged by oxygen deprivation during labor."