Starting Salary for Lawyers
Lawyers are highly educated professionals who can command impressive salaries right out of law school. All law jobs are not created equal, however. An associate position at a prestigious private firm in a major city can easily pay more than $100,000 per year to start. Relatively few students get this opportunity, however, and the vast majority of lawyers are offered starting salaries below the median rate.
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Median Starting Salary
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The median starting salary for lawyers is about $57,000, but actual salaries depend on the kind of work a lawyer performs. Median is not an average of all starting lawyers' salaries; it is the number in the center of the distribution. There are far more jobs below the median than above. Government attorneys for the Department of Justice, Department of Labor and the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, all make less than $50,000 at entry level. The starting salary at most public defender's offices is below $40,000.
Billable Hours
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On consideration of young lawyers is work/life balance. The cost of working for a high-powered, high-paying firm is a long workweek and heavy workload. Associate positions at these firms are usually based on meeting a quota of billable hours charged on behalf of the firm. With these quotas reaching 2,000 hours per year or more, an attorney making $100,000, actually has an hourly rate of only about $50 per hour. In reality, this can be even lower depending on the number of hours worked not considered billable.
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Median Salary by Sector
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It's a simple law of economics that successful lawyers in the private sector will make more money than those in the relatively safe government jobs. The median salary of private-sector lawyers nine months after graduation was $80,000 in 2005, significantly higher than the median for all graduates. The median salary for government lawyers was below the overall median at $45,000. Lawyers working for businesses as part of an in-house legal department split the difference between risk and reward, with a median salary of $60,000--right about equal to the overall median of all graduates.
Starting Salary by Geography
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Where a lawyer chooses to work also affects her starting salary. New York City is consistently the home of the highest-paid legal jobs because of the huge amount of money associated with Wall Street firms and their transactions. In 2007, a few San Francisco-area firms raised their starting salary for associates to $160,000 in order to attract more of the top talent. Texas, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey are all among the states with highest-paying legal salaries because of the large cities located there.
Bonus
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An element of total compensation not included in starting salary is the bonus. Ironically, it is the lawyers who already earn the highest salaries who tend to also receive the highest bonuses. The median bonus for all first year lawyers in July 2009 was about $5,000. For the same reasons that private firms can afford to pay higher salaries, they can also better reward their employees (at least financially) for work that proves to be particularly profitable.
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Comments
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wc3452
Nov 02, 2009
Whoever wrote this article is a moron. Here's why: First, by definition half of all people will earn below the median and half will earn above. That is the very definition this author gives. You can't have more people earning below the median, this violates the definition of a median. Secondly, his quote about how it is "ironic" that higher paid lawyers get higher bonuses is in fact, not ironic. Irony is when the opposite of what you expect happens. This is an example of irony: the author apparently has a degree in English, but fails to grasp the basic concept of irony. That my friends, is pure irony.
