There has been much grousing in the legal profession and blogosphere about the recent National Association of Law Placement report finding that recent law graduates have a “bimodal” pay distribution: while those who get jobs in big firms have starting salaries around $160,000 per year, few others top $75,000. No doubt, this finding will lead to renewed claims that lawyer salaries are too low, and that we need to restrict the supply of lawyers further. I previously criticized such arguments here.
There is no doubt that only a minority of new lawyers will get 160K starting salaries and that most will earn a great deal less than that. This is not a new finding by any means. Still, the NALP data does not change the fact that most lawyers earn quite impressive incomes. It is important to remember several key points that have been absent from most of the discussion of the data so far.
First, these are merely entry-level first year salaries. In law, as in most professions, pay increases with years of experience. Data on overall lawyers’ salaries compiled by the Labor Department shows that the median lawyer makes some $113,000 per year (meaning that 50% of lawyers make that much or more). Even lawyers at the 25th percentile of pay in the profession make about $76,000 per year. You have to go to the bottom 10% of the profession to find lawyers making under $55,000 per year. Thus, claims that most lawyers can expect to earn “somewhere between $30,000 and $60,000 a year” are misleading at best.
Second, the data for the Class of 2009 are taken from a year that saw the worst economic downturn in some 30 years. In such a period, employment prospects and salaries tend to be down in almost every profession. The relevant time horizon for lawyers, however, is the entire 30 to 40 year period of their expected career. On that score, it is difficult to make any precise forecasts. Still, the continued growth in the scope and complexity of law suggest that the demand for legal services is likely to rise. The demand for lawyers is inevitably closely tied to the growth of government and law.
Furthermore, the NALP data for the class of 2009 show that the median graduate has a salary of about $72,000; in other words, 50% of first year lawyers can expect to make that much or more. Even if you adjust the figure downward a little to reflect reporting rates skewed in favor of large firms, you still get a level of perhaps $65,000 based on the formula that NALP used to recalculate the mean salary (reducing the initial estimate by about 9%). That’s not bad for an entry level salary in the middle of a deep recession.
I certainly don’t wish to suggest that law is the best career path for everyone, or even for more than a minority of college graduates. Some can certainly make more money elsewhere, though there are not many professions that offer comparable salaries to liberal arts graduates with few or no math and science skills. Even among those who can’t earn as much in a different field, it might be reasonable to go into a profession that has more interesting work or shorter hours. In my view, too many people choose law school as a sort of default option without fully considering the alternatives. That said, recent complaints about lawyer pay are overblown, and the NALP data does not change that fact.
Since I am a law professor, some will be tempted to dismiss my comments on this issue on the ground that I have a self-interest in encouraging more people to go to law school. Perhaps so. But I have advocated many policy reforms that are not in the interest of either lawyers or law professors, including reducing the size and complexity of government (which would depress demand for both lawyers and legal academics) and abolishing the legal requirement that people must attend law school before entering the legal profession. In any event, the validity of any argument is independent of advocates’ motives for making it.
UPDATE: I should note that the NALP and Labor Department data do not account for lawyers who are unemployed. Unfortunately, neither these sources nor others I have looked at have shown anything approaching a good estimate of the unemployment rate among lawyers. However, it seems unlikely that there is large Marxian “reserve army” of unemployed lawyers out there. If there were, one would expect lawyer salaries to drop substantially as competition from the unemployed drives down the pay of those who have jobs, especially at the lower ends of the distribution (e.g. – the 10th and 25th percentiles noted in the post). Yet the Labor Department data shows lawyer salaries holding fairly steady. For example, today’s 10th percentile salary of $55,000 per year is actually slightly higher than the prerecession 2007 figure. That would be highly improbable if there were large-scale unemployment among lawyers.
PolyisTCOandbanned says:
less laws, less of a litigation society. Get rid of the 50% of the parasites on production.
July 25, 2010, 10:49 pmGopher Law says:
The problem is that along with the bimodal distribution, the cost of law school is continuing to shoot through the roof. Even if over the long run the return on investment isn’t that bad, a recent grad making $30k-$60k is going to have a very hard time living while paying down $200k in loans. Which wouldn’t be so much of a problem if law schools didn’t dangle the BigLaw carrot in front of so many prospective students’ noses through misleading (dare I say outright deceitful for many schools) salary and employment data.
July 25, 2010, 10:50 pmanonymous says:
Prof. Somin,
Even if one accepts that lawyers eventually make decent pay, the fact is that most of your students will not be lawyers by then, whenever that is. does that not bother you? that you earn a living by selling non-dischargeable debt for a degree so many will find useless?
there simply is not demand for 45,000 new JDs each year, ad infinitum. there hasn’t been for some time. don’t libertarians believe in the market, in supply and demand?
I hate to tell you, there is no market for what you are producing, and the cost of your services is purely a function of a federal program that guarantees student loans that absolutely nobody in their right mind would ever otherwise extend in a FREE market. Do you think your institution would survive for ten minutes without FEDERALLY GUARANTEED STUDENT LOANS?
the problem: way too many law schools, and way too much $ for tuition. as though there aren’t enough crappy lawyers out there, outsourcing to India, and all the rest, I suppose that we can have this naive deregulated and standardless vision of yours, BUT…
let’s have the other half of libertarianism, the part that makes it all work: ACCOUNTABILITY FOR FRAUD, which is a good description of all the bullsh*t fantasy numbers from NALP, career services, and the rest of the law school industrial complex. You are a very smart man and could do great providing legal services, if anyone outside academia would hire you. Care to try?
This is the problem with too many libertarians: selective application of libertarian concepts. Regulation in the form of bar exams, bad. Reglation in the form of ABA barriers to entering a profession, bad. But what about out and out fraud by schools? Government subsidized loans distorting the market? Any sort of accountability for the harm imposed on third parties by incompetent lawyers? silence.
July 25, 2010, 11:17 pmMike says:
I hate to tell you, there is no market for what you are producing, and the cost of your services is purely a function of a federal program that guarantees student loans that absolutely nobody in their right mind would ever otherwise extend in a FREE market. Do you think your institution would survive for ten minutes without FEDERALLY GUARANTEED STUDENT LOANS?
Correct. And that should end the discussion.
Libertarian law professors are parasites on the federal government.
I ain’t gonna hate the player, but what’s up with defending the game?
July 25, 2010, 11:32 pmBurned says:
anonymous is dead on. The dirty secret here is all the people who never even make it into the stats because they can never find ANY law work to begin with. This was actually the MAJORITY of my graduating class (a tier 3 school in 2005).
I know SO many law graduates over the last few years who had to give up on ever working in law (many working in the mall, or wherever), and the minority who got jobs have to look forward to many years of unacceptably low pay…
And the behavior of law schools is abominably dishonest; even libertarians who don’t want the government to “ban” dishonesty could still at least decry it.
The upside is that the new income-based repayment plan helps, but no thanks to the schools…
July 25, 2010, 11:42 pm1Ler says:
LASER HAAS? Is that really you? I was wondering where you went…
July 25, 2010, 11:43 pmFredosaurus Rex Friday XIII says:
The proper comparison group is highly-educated professionals, not the masses of high school graduates.
July 25, 2010, 11:45 pmBurned says:
[I should add that the un-employability of my graduating class, like so many, was NOT reflected in the official "stats," which continued to use the same deceptive techniques discussed on previous posts by various commenters.]
July 25, 2010, 11:46 pmUntied to value says:
+1 to what anonymous and Mike said. The demand (and cost) for JDs is untied to the value of the degree and ultimate demand for lawyers. The result is a bunch of unemployed lawyers. The artificially-abundant, non-discharge-able, federally-backed loans are the sole reason for this.
July 25, 2010, 11:46 pmGordon says:
Are the figures for law grads believable? If they are flawed data based on graduates who reply to a survey (reported by schools, of course, who have an interest in the results), they should be heavily discounted. Unemployed grads or those working for peanuts at a non-law job are less likely to reply to surveys out of embarrassment.
I’d like to see some audited numbers, and some information as to what schools are counting as “employment”…. if someone is working at The Gap selling clothes, it would be misleading to count them in percentage of employed graduates, and then leave them out when reporting salaries (only reporting salary numbers for people working in legal positions).
Stated more briefly, the salary of a “lawyer” does not necessarily have anything to do with the salary of a “law school graduate”, since many graduates are not practicing law after a few years, or can not find employment as a lawyer after graduation.
If a graduate of a professional school is not engaged in that profession, it goes without saying that this was a wasted financial investment. 100,000-200,000 dollars in loans, not to mention opportunity costs.
If law school were such a great investment, students wouldn’t need federal student loans, banks would be lining up to loan cash to prospective students. Right?
July 25, 2010, 11:54 pmJames H says:
I think this kind of graph is incredibly important to show to anybody who plans to go into law for the money, rather than for other reasons. Mainly, such people need to recognize the likelihood their first few years of practice, at least, will not be in six-figure territory.
Moreover, a person who has an existing career may wish consider his prospects in that career before going to law school … and this bimodalism should be an important part of that consideration.
July 26, 2010, 12:06 amBurned says:
Gordon is right. My law school actually asked if they could count me as “employed” when I said I had the SAME job I had when I had begun law school! They reasoned that padding the numbers would indirectly help me by making the school look better. Ha!
I told them they better not count me as “employed” or else I would put my degree to use by suing them, LOL.
July 26, 2010, 12:11 amJobless Top Quintile of Class says:
Compare, “this finding will lead to renewed claims that lawyer salaries are too low, and that we need to restrict the supply of lawyers further” with, http://www.law.com/jsp/law/careercenter/lawArticleCareerCenter.jsp?id=1202463693987
Of course, it behooves the King indeed to keep the laws by which he himself is enthroned.
July 26, 2010, 12:13 amMike says:
That salary distribution is becoming true of most career tracks. This is not an issue unique to law.
We live in a society best described as Winner Take All.
CEOs are now paid 300-500 times more than regular workers. This is the case even when CEOs do not add value.
Most industries are becoming bimodal. “Winners” – who most often get their jobs by politics and connections – get huge pay. Screw everyone else. Who cares if the Middle Class dies?
Wealth inequality within the law will only grow. As with inequality overall. This is bad for society, despite what parasitic libertarians claim.
P.S. No sour grapes attack on my motives. I’m actually on the correct side of the distribution. Still, it’s sort of a phucked situation overall.
July 26, 2010, 12:14 amr gould-saltman says:
“Data on overall lawyers’ salaries compiled by the Labor Department shows that the median lawyer makes some $113,000 per year (meaning that 50% of lawyers make that much or more). . . . . Thus, claims that most lawyers can expect to earn “somewhere between $30,000 and $60,000 a year” are misleading at best.”
Hmm. There’s the first problem with that bit of statistical fooling-about. “Labor Department data on lawyer SALARIES”, of course, would appear to exclude self-employed lawyers (those who bought the “You can always make a living by hanging out your own shingle” stuff) and any holder of a bar card whose employment description doesn’t SAY “attorney”. I’m guessing that a chunk of the folks who never had a serious bite at a $160,000 starting salary fall into those categories…
July 26, 2010, 12:39 amanonymous says:
Oh, and by the way, how is it that “most” lawyers have “impressive” incomes? if mid-way through a career, perhaps in middle-age, you are basically a coin-toss for beating $113k, that is absolutely NOT worth the cost of law school…. even if one assumes, improperly, illogically, and contrary to common sense, as does Prof. Somin, that graduates = lawyers. As mentioned by others, no, law school graduates =/= lawyers.
But even these numbers are simply not credible. I’ve been out a long time, T-14. Many of my classmates struggle to make a living and many if not a majority are not practicing law at all because there is No. Money. In. It. And $113k a year is what a normal modestly successful small business can pull down, no expensive degree and opportunity cost required.
But please, don’t try to apply for a non-law job with that JD on your resume! All lawyers are rich and powerful so if you aren’t one there must be something wrong with you!!! Thanks, Professor, for helping your students one more time by perpetuating that job-killing myth. Some of your students might be more successful explaining that 3 year resume gap as a stint in rehab. Recovering addicts and boozers elicit more sympathy than unemployed and unemployable lawyers, sorry, law school graduates.
July 26, 2010, 12:43 amAvatar says:
Without yelling at Ilya on the topic… what would an honest, non-misleading comparison of lawyer to non-lawyer salaries entail?
First, as has been noted, people who have law school as an option aren’t high school graduates. In fact, they’re not even college graduates; there are an awful lot of college grads who can’t gain admission to law school. So we need to start with a fairly select control group – not just college grads, but college grads who have a decent LSAT score (or the brains to score it, anyway, even if they don’t take that particular test) and pretty good grades from a pretty good school, or perfect grades from a mediocre school. (Possibly “mediocre grades from a top university”, though that kind of comparison might end up mattering more than the JD!)
Next, we’ve got to include the whole class of law school graduates, not just the ones who become lawyers. A small number will have washed out of law school or failed the bar exam. Others will have passed law school and the bar, but won’t have been able to find work as a lawyer. Then, of course, we should add in everyone who has become a lawyer, which is the graph we have now. (It should be trivially obvious that adding non-lawyer JD holders is not going to improve the mean or median salary distribution for lawyers!)
Next, when do we look at salaries? Starting salaries are significant, to be sure, but for a truly fair comparison, we should be comparing salaries of people who went to law school for three years (earning nothing, or rather, incurring debt) with people who have been in the workforce for those three years (and who aren’t entry-level employees anymore).
But looking right at the point of graduation for law school might not be particularly fair either. As has been (extensively!) noted, it’s a tough job market out there. An instant comparison will catch a lot of lawyers who haven’t found a legal job yet, but who might soon find one (even if it’s not a great one, it will probably beat Wal-Mart, huh?) So for a true comparison, you might want to do one at 3 years (i.e. upon graduation from law school) and then another at 5 years… maybe even another at 10 years.
The difference may be a lot less pronounced than you think. By and large, we’re not talking about the hoi polloi here – these are people who have been selected for their drive and academic excellence. They’re going to be represented disproportionately in the upper echelons of whatever profession they end up in, be it law, medicine, business… well, perhaps not engineering or science (different set of sorting criteria, what hey!), but those aren’t especially highly compensated professions either.
That kind of data is what you’d need to perform a true cost/benefit analysis of law school. Not just “gee, rookie lawyers can make a lot (but they don’t all make a lot!)” You need to look at what the other alternatives are for potential law school candidates, take into account the added three years of seniority for the pay scale, and emphatically to count JD recipients who don’t end up as lawyers. For even more fun, drop the academics from both groups – they’ll skew the numbers too.
Even failing this, it’s clear that potential lawyers need to think about more than achieving a JD as a golden ticket to wealth. Just as getting a college degree isn’t a sure entry into the law school of your choice…
July 26, 2010, 1:51 amCGG says:
I think the overall level of pay is a separate (though related) issue to the distribution shape. You make a convincing case that overall pay may just be fine. However, having such a whacked-out distribution is troubling in itself, even if median salaries don’t need to be increased.
The fact that law salaries have such a premium (relative to somebody who graduated with “honors” rather than “highest honors”) on Order of the Coif is insane, and unique when compared to other industries. It seems the top law firm that hires these “kids” for 90k would reap a huge benefit. By the same token, why do many small/mid size firms pay no more 50k, regardless of the persons class rank (i.e., why is there no premium for “honors” over “C’s get degrees”)?
I’m not quite sure why this is not the case, and I’m not one to start throwing out “market-failure” theories without some thought. But something clearly isn’t right.
July 26, 2010, 2:04 amJim W says:
My experience so far:
-the first few years of practice are rough unless you place into a good position right away. If you go solo/small firm, everyone makes a shit salary in the beginning. But anyone who is still around after 2-3 years generally ends up making 6 figures. The money difference between starting out and being 2-3 years in? Referrals. Do a good job and you’ll get repeat business. Get a few big clients that keep coming back and you’ve won at lawyering.
-law schools outright lie about their job and salary numbers. They had 99 percent placement rate at the bottom of the recession while all my classmates were either working shit jobs or outright unemployed. Nearly everyone I knew lost their job offers between 1L summer and graduation, myself included. Of course, they count working at best buy the same as working at biglaw. And they have a load of statistical tricks that make the huge number of graduates that leave the legal field disappear from the numbers.
-I’m hopeful for the future. All the more experienced attorneys here seem to do pretty well, financially, when the economy is good. My firm was rolling in money before 2008-2009 hit and collapsed everything. Now we sort of scrape by, billable to billable. I don’t think this is a normal state of affairs, and I hope it doesn’t become one.
July 26, 2010, 2:14 amdfb says:
Law should just be another undergraduate degree. It’ll make for a more informed populace and provide value to degrees in many fields where non-lawyers perform the bulk of the work (environmental regulation, business, etc).
July 26, 2010, 2:22 amJim W says:
My opinion regarding grades is:
-small firms hire based mostly on intangibles because small firms can’t outsource the rainmaking and the customer relationship management to specialist attorneys. Each attorney needs people skills, the ability to litigate and the ability to do research. They pay low because they expect attorneys to be productive and earn pay raises by generating revenue as they gain experience. I’m personally paid a straight percentage of everything that I successfully bill. I started off making public defender money and now I make about 50 percent more than that. I’m probably going to break six figures within my first year out of law school.
-big firms are trying to get guarantees of performance, which they do by selecting for academic achievement. Why do they do this? Because the big firms are all run by people who were selected for their academic achievement back when they were junior associates. Vicious circle. I’m not sure it works or not- my hunch is that economic forces are far more powerful than the grade you got in contracts, which is why the big firms are folding and laying off people like crazy these past few years.
My opinion is that the level of intellect necessary to score a c or higher, combined with lots of judiciously applied effort and good interpersonal skills is more than enough to make someone a successful attorney.
Most lawyers fail (IMO) because they have a fatal deficit in some vital area, not because they aren’t capable of writing a 50 page civil procedure exam. Excelling in some narrow area might make you a great brief writer at a huge firm, but it isn’t going to make you a successful attorney without interpersonal skills, project management skills and the other basics of lawyering.
July 26, 2010, 2:29 amdearieme says:
I wonder whether your inverted commas around “bimodal” imply that you feel that your readers are liable otherwise to understand the word as a reference to bisexual models? Surely not.
July 26, 2010, 4:15 amwhit says:
115k a year is what a cop can make, after about 5 yrs of service and willing to work 12 hrs of overtime a week
maybe slightly less hours if he’s a college graduate (we get incentive pay) etc. and less if one is in many special units
and im certain our benefits are far superior – 100% paid medical, very good medical/dental plan for self and family, about 15 paid sick and another 15 paid vacation days per year and many agencies allow officers to take their vehicles home, saving significantly on gas and time. i’d estimate a take home car is a 10k a year untaxed unrecognized benefit
this is for officers/deputies/troopers.
and in many agencies, even getting subp’d for court is automatic 4 hrs o/t even if one gets to court and then say “never mind we settled it” which happens a fair %age of time.
oh yea, and paid lunch break.
we are hiring btw! :)
sgt’s and higher ranks can do even better
July 26, 2010, 4:33 amcramer pelmont says:
Small firms hire based mostly on intangibles because small firms can’t outsource the rainmaking and the customer relationship management to specialist attorneys. Each attorney needs people skills, the ability to litigate and the ability to do research. They pay low because they expect attorneys to be productive and earn pay raises by generating revenue as they gain experience. I’m personally paid a straight percentage of everything that I successfully bill. I started off making public defender money and now I make about 50 percent more than that. I’m probably going to break six figures within my first year out of law school
July 26, 2010, 5:30 amInstapundit » Blog Archive » LAW SCHOOL GRADUATES face a bimodal salary curve. We used to call this a “brassiere curve” back whe… says:
[...] ANOTHER UPDATE: Ilya Somin says it’s not as bad as it looks. [...]
July 26, 2010, 8:04 amTC says:
A friend, who was a lawyer for almost 50 years always did some private practice but wound up spending most of his time advising gov’t bodies (school boards, town council) on issues of regulation compliance and liability avoidance.
What percentage of JDs wind up salaried bureaucrats writing regulations for the gov’t or for other gov’t bodies & corporations, advising them on how to comply? I doubt this is the dream of many as they enter law school.
July 26, 2010, 8:26 amDG says:
I am not a lawyer, but have worked with many over the years. A couple points are being missed here. First, there are a non-trivial number of law school graduates who work in non-law fields, of their own choice. I know a couple of technology company CEOs who have made that jump, usually by doing a tech startup. While these folks have voluntarily “selected out”, the number is not small, and its certainly a mark against law graduate placement placement.
As a society, we need to get people out of the idea that liberal arts degrees are a good idea in general, as opposed to a reasonable goal for a few very talented folks in specific areas. Degrees in history or sociology are, as a rule, a very bad idea and a very bad investment for almost everyone, unless there is a clear path to some sort of career (social worker, as an example). Of course, if it was easier for history majors to become history teachers or english majors to become english teachers, things might be more sensible.
July 26, 2010, 8:27 amPeter says:
Ilya: “No doubt, this finding will lead to renewed claims that lawyer salaries are too low,. . . ”
Clients, I would think, are far more likely to claim that starting salaries at the higher end of the scale for lawyers who really can’t do much in the way of actual lawyering are too high.
July 26, 2010, 8:35 amConnecticut Lawyer says:
If it’s any consolation to the law students reading this blog, the Dodd-Frank law is likely to increase demand for lawyers substantially. It will take thousands of lawyers thousands of hours to figure out what the law means, to write comments on the still-to-come regulations, to advise clients on compliance, and to litigate over all the unintended consequences.
Of course, that won’t necessarily help those students in the classes of 2009 and 2010 who may never make it onto the big law track.
July 26, 2010, 8:41 amFloridan says:
What is being described here is similar to many other professions. Students at culinary schools expect to be the next Bobby Flay, sociology doctoral students anticipate teaching at Harvard, West Point cadets believe they will become generals. Few do; many, if not most, end up in other fields.
That being said, the happiest law shool grads I know are those who do not [directly] practice law.
July 26, 2010, 9:03 amMike C. says:
I would like to go to law school because I find it a fascinating subject and because I feel every reasonably informed person should be interested in it since it has such a massive impact on our lives, regardless of profession. That’s why this blog is one I check daily. Almost made it once – got a good LSAT score, got accepted, my employer would have paid the freight, etc. Life got in the way, unfortunately (first house, first child, work duties that were 24/7/365.) I had no intention of practicing law, I just wanted to learn more about it. I suppose the chance has passed, but I won’t miss it again should it ever present itself in the future.
The person I report to on my current contract (a geologist, as am I, sort of) did exactly what I didn’t – got that JD. As he so eloquently put it, “I just had to get it out of my system.” I don’t think he ever bothered to take the bar exam – he just wanted to learn. Never heard a better reason than that.
July 26, 2010, 9:06 amHouston Lawyer says:
Last year during a lull in work, I tried to look up a number of my classmates who graduated from the University of Texas in 1985. All of these people had good legal jobs waiting when they left law school. I looked them up through the Texas Bar website, which contains a search function for all attorneys licensed in the State of Texas. About 40% of the people I tried to look up were no longer in the database, meaning that they were no longer practicing law in the State of Texas.
Only a hand full were still practicing law at big law firms. The number of people who initially got a job at a big law firm is ten to twenty times the number who succeed there and made partner. Now most of these people go on and have successful careers in the corporate area, but law schools have never made this clear to their graduates.
In addition, the majority of those who I couldn’t locate were women. I was in the last class to graduate from Texas with tuition at $4.00 per hour, or basically free. Anyone counseling prospective law students about to shell out $40,000 grand or more per year should ask how they intend to pay back those loans. Women who plan on having children before the age of 35 should think hard about that question.
July 26, 2010, 9:21 amErikF says:
What is lost in this is the fact that those people making $160,000 a year have a very high attrition rate. Maybe 1 in 10 gets equity in a law firm where the first years make $160,000. Many do not make it past year 5 or 6. The rest are on the exit track to lesser firms, in-house counsel positions, hanging up a shingle, and yes, leaving law.
So getting that initial plum may pay off the law school debts. But it is not destiny.
July 26, 2010, 9:34 amNicholas Sarwark says:
Yeah, but have a look at a blog post I wrote in September 2007 about the 2006 data. The same bimodal curve has been around for a long time and is most definitely not a function of the 2009 downturn.
July 26, 2010, 9:38 amAmerican Psikhushka says:
Mike-
I agree with much of what you, “anonymous”, and “burned” say.
CEOs are now paid 300–500 times more than regular workers. This is the case even when CEOs do not add value.
Most industries are becoming bimodal. “Winners” — who most often get their jobs by politics and connections — get huge pay. Screw everyone else. Who cares if the Middle Class dies?
Wealth inequality within the law will only grow. As with inequality overall. This is bad for society, despite what parasitic libertarians claim.
On this I disagree. As you and “anonymous” mentioned, government subsidized student loans allow the schools to churn out many more graduates than there are available jobs. But the other part of that equation is that high taxes stifle the growth of the private economy and job creation. The push for more of the “equality” you mention would most likely result in higher taxes and more redistributionalism, which would result in even fewer private sector jobs, making the problem worse.
There will always be some inequality from clubbishness* and nepotism*, that is unavoidable.(Although that is no excuse for directly stealing from people, exploiting them, ruining several careers/occupations, etc.) The trick is to have an economy so healthy and growing that the hardworking, creative, and innovative can still get ahead as well. The way there is lower taxes and spending, not higher taxes, spending, and redistributionalism in the name of “equality”.
Also, taking shots at Ilya is all well and good, I’m sure he can take it. But I’d rather have a bunch of Ilyas out there supporting freedom and sound economics than a bunch of socialists, totalitarians, and nannystatists. If they are successful we’ll have a much stronger economy and they will have taught themselves out of a job.(Which would be fine because with the more robust economy that would result there would be plenty of jobs and opportunities.)
* Also, the market for upper business management and their compensation is highly distorted, but those are separate issues.
July 26, 2010, 9:48 amunperson says:
GIGO means Garbage In, Garbage Out.
The bimodal graph is based on faulty, manipulated, deceptive data.
Specifically, a very large percent of the reported data are from students who get temporary jobs at relatively high pay rates and then cannot find a way into a permanent job. But the survey is taken while they still have these temp jobs.
Also, the entire data set is SELF REPORTED. It is common knowledge that self reported data that is involved with the subject’s self esteem or sense of self worth is INACCURATE. Scientists would laugh at this data set because it is clearly going to be inflated by the reporters.
Also, a high percentage of law school grads are not even surveyed. Many of the lower ranked schools DO NOT PARTICIPATE IN THE SURVEY.
Also, many of the surveyed grads do not RETURN their surveys.
Also, the people who collect the data depend on that data for a living. If the data is not good, they lose their cushy jobs. Wow, talk about a conflict of interest. And never has any school been audited when it comes to these survey result.
Therefore your entire blog post is garbage.
July 26, 2010, 9:57 amCornellian says:
anonymous is dead on. The dirty secret here is all the people who never even make it into the stats because they can never find ANY law work to begin with. This was actually the MAJORITY of my graduating class (a tier 3 school in 2005).
If that was the case in 2005, when the economy was good, I’d hate to think of what things are like there now, in the worst economy for lawyers I’ve ever seen.
These days, even going to a Tier 1 law school is a risky proposition, given the cost. I’m lucky enough to a job in this economy, but right now I wouldn’t recommend law school to anyone who isn’t getting a full (or nearly full) scholarship or who doesn’t have rich parents paying the cost.
July 26, 2010, 10:09 amrising2l says:
Does anyone have any idea how the graph distribution changes as you limit the schools which are accounted for. Does the same distribution hold true for t-14,t-20 grads. Even though these graduates are far more likely than graduates of the 200 or so other schools to find lucrative employment.
July 26, 2010, 10:13 amCornellian says:
I’d like to see the ABA add a condition for accreditation – no misleading stats about the employment prospects of your graduates. Per an earlier commenter, I suspect a few audits of law school employment stats would turn up massive fraud.
July 26, 2010, 10:14 amMike C. says:
American Psikhushka,
Oh, no – I would not have received any sort of government subsidy/loan to attend law school, or any other school. I worked for a commercial company (Tenneco Oil, for those who remember back when that was a going concern) at the time. Educational subsidies were an employee benefit, or in other words, part of my overall salary, if I wished to take advantage of them. The reservoir engineer that officed across the hall from me was attending Oklahoma City University Law School at night, and I thought I might as well. But engineers didn’t have to run out and “sit” wells on holidays, during family events, at night, in the middle of winter, etc. for maybe a week or two at a crack on no particular schedule as did us lowly G&G types. When I realised it wasn’t going to work (before the start of school), I wrote to OCU and resigned my place – no sense screwing up right off the bat while denying some other deserving person the slot. Sure wish I hadn’t had to do that, though.
Taking the LSAT was a hoot, though. I show up at the test with a slew of other people, almost all new graduates. Standing around and chatting prior to being admitted to the test room, everybody was talking about what undergrad school they had attended and what they had majored in. When it came my turn, I allowed as how I had degrees in geology from years back and was currently working for an oil company. The other folks looked at me as if I had just arrived in a spaceship. At that time (1979), at least in the mid-Continent region, companies were actually running TV ads for G&G and petroleum engineering types – they all thought I was insane. Maybe they were right…
July 26, 2010, 10:20 ammerevaudevillian says:
If I could address what I think might be a few problems with Prof. Somin’s post.
For many lawyers, their earning potential experiences a sharp drop-off after these $160,000 salary peaks. Many lawyers stick with a large firm for a few years before stepping down to a smaller firm and a smaller salary. Yes, overall, salaries may increase, but the statistics for entry-level salaries are quite deceptive. Few in large law firms make partner and can expect their salary to increase constantly.
The BLS data estimate around 550,000 attorneys in the United States. But the ABA reported in 2006 that there were at least 1,000,000 law school graduates, and counting. That shows a serious under-reporting in the BLS data, even if we accept a number of law retirees: there are a lot of people who obtain JDs who cannot obtain employment or are not practicing law (presumably frequently in a less-lucrative field, and, as Prof. Somin notes, “most lawyers earn quite impressive incomes”).
The NALP data is for those (a) working full time and (b) reporting a salary. Over 25% of all law school graduates were not working full-time. NALP noted that there 44,000 law school graduates, but only 42,000 reported data. And for the 42,000 that reported data, the employment status was only available for 40,000 of them. And of those 40,000, only 20,000 reported salary data. That dramatically deflates the meaningfulness of the numbers.
July 26, 2010, 10:25 ambyomtov says:
Data on overall lawyers’ salaries compiled by the Labor Department shows that the median lawyer makes some $113,000 per year (meaning that 50% of lawyers make that much or more). Even lawyers at the 25th percentile of pay in the profession make about $76,000 per year. You have to go to the bottom 10% of the profession to find lawyers making under $55,000 per year.
To add to the other criticisms of these numbers, note that this is a survey of lawyers, not law school graduates. That’s an important selection bias. What about those who are no longer practicing, or never did?
July 26, 2010, 10:33 amWidmerpool says:
Ilya says: “the validity of any argument is independent of advocates’ motives for making it.”
This is a true statement in a world where we have unlimited time and money to investigate a speaker’s argument. However, there is someone who posts regularly on this blog (I wonder who that might be) who is fond of expounding on rational political ignorance. It seems to me that such a notion may be fruitfully applied here to demonstrate the invalidity of the above-quoted sentence. Any takers?
July 26, 2010, 10:41 amWondering ... says:
It seems inconsistent to criticize federal loan programs as contributing to the glut of lawyers while not discussing the contribution of state-funded law schools to the problem. And masks the real issue – that a legal education in the US today is simply too cheap.
Economically, I do not see a role for the state in producing lawyers. The private schools in operation have the capacity to meet the need.
I imagine the academic-industrial complex propoenets would suggest that state-funded law schools are profitable, and return a subsidy to the state university system. The same argument is used in the context of collegiate sports, and is controversial and somewhat discredited because of the difficulty in measuring true cost. Personally, I do not believe that the state can deliver a service like legal education more effectively than the private sector.
And if the states are concerned about educating citizens to run governmental machinery, then select candidates and award scholarships to private institutions coupled with post-graduation service obligations – the military does through relatively successful to produce the bulk of its military officers through ROTC programs at private universities.
It is common for lawyers and law students to criticize the proliferation of private law schools. Some suggest restricting supply by closing schools. Why not start with the state-funded law schools? Taking the individual states out of the game would immediately knock 5-10% of the supply out and substantially increase the cost of a legal education for the remaining students – thereby addressing the real problem, that a legal education is simply too cheap today.
July 26, 2010, 10:43 amMike C. says:
Well, why not just establish a $ 250,000 surcharge on graduates, then?
That’s one of the most anti-American, anti-free enterprise things I have ever read on this blog. Anybody remember when there was only one “scientific” hand calculator and it cost over $ 1000? Or when portable telephones filled a briefcase and cost a fortune?
Just establish a guild system and be done with it. Not that there isn’t already such a thing…
Sheesh.
July 26, 2010, 10:52 amWondering ... says:
Better to take the state out the market rather than further distort the marketplace with additional state action…
July 26, 2010, 11:01 amex parte animal says:
I believe that NALP and others’ publication of the bi-modal pay distribution chart was meant to illustrate — contrary to popular assumption — that strikingly few recent law graduates make the median graduate salary or any similar salary. For the vast majority of grads, it’s either feast or famine and the happy median is merely a pipe dream.
You seem to miss the point, Professor Somin, when you then cite median salary as support for your argument.
July 26, 2010, 11:40 amYant says:
The law school lottery problem is exacerbated by the fact that winning the lottery means one must work many hours. This may hurt one’s quality of life.
Perspective law students should calculate their expected earnings by the hour. If one works 60 hours/week to make $160k/year then one is earning roughly $51 an hour. At the same time, if one works 40 hours/week to make $100k/year then one is earning roughly $48 an hour.
While I am currently in law school, I have many friends who landed jobs with defense contractors after college. Those friends work 40 hours/week and make $70/k per year. Further, those friends do not have student loan debt.
One should decide how much to value one’s free time and plan accordingly.
July 26, 2010, 11:57 amSnaphappy says:
Poor law students! How could they possibly have any idea how difficult it is to find a biglaw job from all of the TTT law schools? If only there were some sort of database, or perhaps a network, where people could post information and opinions about this subject. Unfortunately, I guess these misdirected geniuses have no recourse but to believe everything that the law schools tell them.
July 26, 2010, 11:59 amMaryanna says:
Let’s hear it for us Public Defenders! I’ve been practicing for 6 years, average almost 50 jury trials per year, rarely work less than 50 hours/week and just got a raise to $55,000.
Not complaining – I love my job. If I had wanted to get rich, I would have stayed in sales instead of going to law school.
July 26, 2010, 12:32 pmFrank the Underemployed Profesisonal says:
Professor Somin has a large conflict of interest with potential law students because his income and livelihood depends on a horde of lemmings continuing to flood into the law schools, burdening themselves with huge amounts of student loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Surely the law professors must know that most of these students are condemning themselves to lives of poverty and underemployment. Do more than a handful of them have a conscience?
Our nation has been producing enough new lawyers every year to support having one lawyer for every 172 people since the early 1970′s. The economy can comfortably support perhaps one lawyer for every 500 or 600 people. See:
http://flustercucked.blogspot.com/2010/07/40-years-of-lawyer-overproduction-data.html
Another recent statistical analysis suggests that only 53.8% of all lawyers produced over the past 40 years work in the profession. That number is probably significantly lower than 53.8% for graduates in the past two decades because the market was not as glutted in the Seventies and Eighties. See:
http://flustercucked.blogspot.com/2010/07/statistics-suggest-that-only-538-of-all.html
July 26, 2010, 12:47 pmhattio says:
Avatar says;
It’s not necessary to have pretty good grades from a pretty good school. I had mediocre grades from a mediocre school (at least if you weren’t in engineering…which I wasn’t) and was still accepted to a Tier 2 school. Good LSATs can make up for a lot.
July 26, 2010, 12:49 pmguest1 says:
whit, you forgot to mention the pension plan. forget health care. that’s undoubtedly your richest benefit and one I guaranty no law firm offers.
July 26, 2010, 12:55 pmAll Lawyers Aren’t Rich! says:
[...] Mason lawprof Ilya Somin thinks it’s not so bad. There is no doubt that only a minority of new lawyers will get 160K [...]
July 26, 2010, 1:07 pmlaser haas says:
Have been busy digging up new evidence on our cases. Paul Traub was pushed out of Epstein Becker and Green – landing at Gordon Brothers liquidators.
Over 6 deaths untimely are correlated to the case – including the suicide of a brother of ASST US Attorney who was in on one company that did a$1 billion in fraud.
And the eToys shareholder Robert Alber had to shoot and kill an intruder at his house in Kingman AZ 2 weeks ago.
July 26, 2010, 1:16 pmBama 1L says:
Professor Somin does regularly argue for policies that don’t serve his interests, or for that matter anyone else’s outside libertarian fantasy land. It is very hard to make stick an accusation of self-interest in this particular case.
Also, I don’t think law students apply to George Mason in hopes of getting rich, although maybe its admissions profile has changed.
July 26, 2010, 1:20 pmPassing By says:
This would seem to be important:
July 26, 2010, 1:29 pmanonymous says:
forget about getting “rich” — do law student applicants at George Mason hope to pay the bills? GMU estimates the total cost of attending is $46,222 (in state) / $60,278 (out of state). That’s per year.
So we’re talking about potentially upwards of $180,000, while not earning much if ANY money for three years, on top of whatever undergrad cost. This is financial suicide for all but the absolute top students, and a bad deal for the rest.
the law school apologists like to forget that actually, given the size of the investment in a professional degree, graduates have the right to expect the general availability of employment that would give them a good return on their investment. When vast, vast numbers of law graduates cannot find ANY employment in the legal field, or get clustered into benefit-free wage and hour b.s. barely better than managing a burger king, it’s not always the fault of the students. they were sold a bill of goods.
The saddest thing is that success in law requires critical reasoning skills that, when applied, dissuade application in the first place. What remains are stubborn fantasizers and escapists from reality. 100% of law students expect to be in the top 1%. the only thing true of nearly 100% of these law students is that they will have non-dischargeable debt.
July 26, 2010, 1:49 pmMike C. says:
I’m still not understanding why somebody with a BSc (or BA) in some liberal art and two whole years studying law (great subject though it is), should expect a company to cough up 160 grand a year for them when they probably don’t know how to do anything other than go to school. Doesn’t work that way in many other quite serious fields of endeavor.
We have a congress full of law school graduates who seemingly don’t know the first damned thing about law, or government, or virtually anything else except how to get re-elected. I don’t see that we’ve gained anything by that. A few more folks that have actually worked for a living, in a variety of fields, might be an improvement.
July 26, 2010, 2:00 pmepeeist says:
IAAL, and I agree.
Aside from “prestige” etc., there’s no good reason for law to be a graduate degree. There might be a point to keeping it a graduate degree if, like most medical programs (AFAIK), there was a prescribed set of subjects one had to take before law school, but that’s not the case. That is, make it a “real” graduate degree where one is expected to learn specific preparatory things in undergrad, or don’t bother, return it to being an LL.B. without requiring a first degree. Or maybe have a four-year first-entry law degree and a two-year second entry?
More AFFORDABLE lawyers (affordable because not crippled with debt from two degrees = can afford to compete on prices more, etc.) would I think be a good thing. Great lawyers will continue to command a premium, the merely competent will survive, and people would be able to study law in the same way they study history, psychology, engineering, etc. – as a first degree.
Of course, that will never happen, but it would be a good idea…
I did engineering first and while useful, almost all of what I’d done and the courses I’d taken were wholly irrelevant to the process of studying law – doing problem sets or studying quantum physics or differential equations etc. were irrelevant to the reading, analysis, speaking and writing of law school. I also did much better in law school given the huge difference in skills – the LSAT was a good predictor of performance, not my undergrad marks…
Hmm, I wonder if any U.S. state’s applicable laws and regulations (maybe California!) would allow a law school offering LL.B. degrees as a first undergraduate degree, to produce graduates eligible to write that state’s bar (not other states because not ABA-approved, but still would be interesting…).
July 26, 2010, 2:00 pmMike C. says:
I assume that was a joke. Otherwise, what color is the sky on your planet ?
July 26, 2010, 2:03 pmmyshkingfh says:
I tend to believe lawyer pay must be bimodal because a lot of people, like me, go into law to practice public interest law for non-profit groups. I’m seven years out of law school and figure I’m doing a lot better than many of my environmental law colleagues who work for non-profits with my $50k/yr salary. I figure this because in my last job I made $36k/yr. I’ve seen starting salaries advertised that are under $30k/yr. I went to the top environmental law program in the country, did well, did moot court and clinic and like to think I was a pretty attractive candidate for entry level positions out of law school. It took me four years to find a job in my chosen field. That means there are a lot of people like me out there, clawing and scraping for a $30k/yr job that they’re unlikely to get.
If there’s tons of law students working hard to get a $160k/yr job, and tons of others working hard to get a $40k/yr job, I think that would make the distribution bimodal.
July 26, 2010, 2:04 pmMike C. says:
Law as an undergraduate degree ? Why not ? To be perfectly honest, folks, it doesn’t require any more intellectual horsepower (albeit perhaps different horsepower) than math, engineering or the ‘hard’ sciences.
July 26, 2010, 2:07 pmErikF says:
I have to disagree with Epeeist on there being no reason for law to be a graduate degree.
I obtained a Ph.D in an unrelated field prior to starting a top-20 law school. There were two consequences of this. First, my mental sophistication did not increase materially in law school. Second, it was terribly apparent that the mental sophistication of my classmates was growing by leaps and bounds. Having taken that journey, it was easy to see.
Graduate school adds rigor to thinking. Law school is not unique in this.
July 26, 2010, 2:09 pmMike C. says:
Well, that’s an argument for graduate school to be a ticket to practice, not particularly related to law per se. In many fields, an MSc or PhD is considered necessary. Or an MBA, for that matter.
July 26, 2010, 2:18 pmrageon says:
From my own experience, the bimodal distribution is right on. It’s hard not to see it. Just about everyone I graduated with in 2005 fits into one of two categories: (1) the law review kids who are now working tons of hours for absurd money; or (2) the rest, who are earning $30K to $50K for either small firms or in government jobs. I don’t see a lot of the in-between. Flawed data or bias aside, I believe the overall conclusion of the study — that there are definitely two bumps in the graph of salary data among lawyers.
July 26, 2010, 2:19 pmScott says:
Why the gloom and doom? A law degree opens up doors that very few degrees can. Government, politics, business ownership, private practice, etc. The bottom 10% at over 50k+ a year. In this economy, in this free country, that ain’t all bad.
July 26, 2010, 2:24 pmanonymous says:
the sky here is blue, mike c.
People investing deep into the six figures of non-dischargeable debt have an expectation that there will be a ROI. Not a guaranteed, specific job, but entry to an environment in which generally speaking, the degree is valued by the job market in a manner commensurate with its cost. Law schools could not get away with charging what they charge if they had accurate, audited outcomes for the last five graduating classes, with no fake temporary make-work on campus jobs 9 months out
“open doors” is the biggest crock. It is exactly this kind of totally vague, meaningless drivel that people tell themselves without the benefit of actually having tried to “open doors.” Nobody wants to hire JDs outside the law. Have you not heard, all JDs are rich and powerful!!!! And everyone hates lawyers. Any JD who just wants a jobby-middle-class-job is a failure and un-hireable.
You want to open doors? Go be a doorman! It doesn’t require an expensive professional degree.
July 26, 2010, 2:46 pmMike C. says:
Well, expect in one hand, defecate in the other, and see which one fills up first.
You do realise, I hope, that others spend just as much money getting degrees in in subjects that have no worth whatsoever outside academia, and from the very same prestigious universities at essentially the same prices, yes ?
If you don’t get a decent ROI, then YOU screwed up. Lots of people do that, in lots of different ways, all the time. Attending a top-dollar law or buisness or any other field you can think of school is no different. You make a bet. You have absolutely no right to win that bet. If you were too stupid to realise that, maybe you shouldn’t be betting that kind of money. Law students have no more “right” to be protected from reality than anybody else. Pray tell, which other degrees should have the “right” to being “adequately compensated” in the eyes of the degree holder ? Why ?
If the odds are bad, and you chose to take them anyway, then don’t be surprised if you lose. And at the least, don’t whine about it. Perhaps an undergraduate degree in statistics should be a requirement…
July 26, 2010, 3:14 pmSomin's 100-Percent Real Snake Oil says:
Well said. Of course, this explains Professor Somin’s irrational argument that more law students with more government-sponsored debt and valueless skills and diplomas are needed – he knows his targets/potential law students will not recognize the irrationality.
July 26, 2010, 3:14 pmwhit says:
pension plan is PRETTY good. WA state is not that good (LEOFF-2) . LEOFF-I was excellent but that went out many years ago.
i make it a point to put at least 11k a year into a deferred comp plan expressly because i am NOT going to rely solely on the pension.
we have a few JD’s in my agency, fwiw.
July 26, 2010, 3:15 pmMike C. says:
ADDENDUM – Oh, and I don’t hate JDs – wish I were one myself, as I mentioned previously. And I know quite a few JDs in the oil biz who are not attorneys but who were hired, in part, because they had a JD. Mostly “landmen” in the international end of the business. Tend to have specialized in contract law.
July 26, 2010, 3:18 pmwhit says:
JD’s are also useful for those wishing to join the FBI, and probably several other agencies (State Dept). I know for a fact that FBI gives JD’s a lot of consideration, up there with accountants and those who speak a desired language fluently (farsi, etc.).
July 26, 2010, 3:19 pmanonymous says:
Mike C.,
Professional schools are not casinos, where everyone knows the odds. People are lured into schools with very specific, but utterly fraudulent representations about outcomes. We don’t allow unfounded medical claims about drugs, or unfounded claims of any sort about the stock market.
Would you be opposed to forcing all law schools to publish independently audited outcomes for their previous five years? When law schools start telling THE TRUTH about the VALUE of what they are SELLING, it would be easier to criticize people for going.
July 26, 2010, 3:29 pmL says:
I appreciate Professor Ilya Somin’s discussion. I also admire his willingness to advocate view points that may against the interests of law professors in general, such as reducing the complexity of government regulation and eliminating the requirement to attend law school prior to becoming a lawyer.
I’d like to add some points he doesn’t address on this discussion.
1) The BLS average salary distribution may not be representative of what a law grad may make later in his/her career. There are several sources of selection bias. First, lawyers who are not doing well financially in the profession are more likely to leave, thus skewing the results towards higher-earners. Surveys indicate somewhere between 25-50% of law grads leave the profession entirely over the next decade, thus having a substantial impact on statistics that measure only those who remained. For someone considering law school, a salary survey of all law school grads, not just those who did well enough to continue practicing law, is what is most relevant.
Second, lawyers who are making smaller salaries tend to be harder to locate and may be self-conscious about admitting to only getting meager earnings. I know of several small attorneys who work hard to create image of success, but have privately admitted that many months they worry about having enough to pay their secretaries and mortgages, hardly signs of someone with a healthy income.
2) When looking at lawyer salaries, neither the general population nor even college graduates at large are good comparison targets. Those who attend college are more academically talented and motivated than the population at large. Likewise, those entering law school normally are more ambitious and brighter than college graduates at large. The control group should be people who could have attended a similar-tier law school, but chose not to. Since people only take the LSAT if they are considering law school, it may be hard to find a control group – perhaps those who scored well but instead are doing something else.
For a prospective law student, the question is how someone with his/her ability and ambition will fare going to law school as opposed to not going. How will he do 10 years from now – as a lawyer with 7 years experience versus a non-lawyer with 10 years experience? How will his earnings compare after deducting monthly debt payments, malpractice insurance, and other expenses lawyers pay that may not apply to non-lawyers.
3) Regarding the recession: the legal recession may be temporary, but its effects on recent and near-future graduates may not be. Current graduates who take lower-paying jobs are frequently not on track to get higher salaries later. A recent graduate who wanted to be a corporate lawyer but instead volunteers at a legal aid or public defender’s office while working retail is not getting the type of experience that corporate law practices will want. They are more likely to hire someone fresh out of law school when the economy improves. That is what I have been told numerous times while networking.
Demographic researchers have found that people who begin their careers during a bleak economy typically have significantly lower incomes even years later. Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers discusses this trend in detail.
Those born during a demographic bulge also make less over their careers, due in part to increased competition for good positions taht lead to higher earnings later. There will be more people who fail to get those positions, and the pay will be lower for those who do get good positions. There were far more people born in the late 1980′s than a decade or two prior, so there are more college graduates now, and more people applying to law schools. This increased competition for law school slots means that a particular applicant will get into a lower-tier law school than in the past. The bad economy has only further increased the number of applicants, thus accentuating this problem.
I appreciate his bringing up this topic for discussion. And I also applaud him for being willing to advocate some views that are not necessarily in the best interest of law professors at large.
July 26, 2010, 3:49 pmskibum3157 says:
One wonders whether the author of this post actually hopes to convince his readers, or whether it’s attempt to convince himself.
NALP data? Give me a break.
July 26, 2010, 3:52 pmCJColucci says:
Mike says:
That salary distribution is becoming true of most career tracks. This is not an issue unique to law.
Not that I’m doubting you, Mike, but I’d be interested in some further information on this. I was struck by the bi-modal distribution for lawyers, but I can figure out how it happens. I can’t see how it happens in other industries. Can you enlighten me?
July 26, 2010, 3:53 pmDonna says:
The majority of law school graduates do not find work in the first year. To say that law school is a panacea for a useless liberal arts degree is just encouraging more saturation and more unemployment.
July 26, 2010, 3:54 pmLN says:
Eh? Who does this and in what fields? Paying for a PhD is a really stupid thing to do.
July 26, 2010, 3:59 pmMike C. says:
Sigh… I’m not criticizing anybody for going to law school – wish I had been able to pull it off myself, as I previously stated, even though I have no desire to be an attorney. What I objected to was your use of the term “right” in regard to a return on investment. Please.
By the time a student gets an undergraduate degree, he/she is probably 20/21 years old. An adult. And supposedly capable of making adult decisions. If this adult is an American, they should, by that time, be more than well aware of decptive advertising and the follies of buying the proverbial “pig in a poke.” If they haven’t learned by then, they have to learn sometime.
What your inital statement sounded like to me was akin to a hypothetical statement saying every home buyer had the “right” to expect that his/her property would continue to increase in value. Oops.
People make choices. Normal people make some good choices and some bad choices. The idea that somehow people should be sheltered from the bad choices (inevitably at someone else’s expense) I find repulsive. If you don’t know enough to research opportunities and probabilities of success in your field of endeavor, that’s your problem. Caveat emptor.
July 26, 2010, 4:00 pmMike C. says:
??? Lots of very successful people have PhDs. Lots of less-successful people do as well, but I would be hesitant to say obtaining one is stupid.
July 26, 2010, 4:09 pmklp85 says:
I read LN as meaning that getting a PhD without funding (i.e., paying out of pocket or via loans) is stupid.
July 26, 2010, 4:16 pmMike C. says:
So PhDs should be obtained only by those with wealthy parents/contributors or some sort of institutional funding? Really ? Nobody should actually bet their own money on such an endeavor?
What an odd premise…
July 26, 2010, 4:22 pmSeaDrive says:
Based on what I’ve heard from a family member who may be sitting for her bar exams as I write, law students are very aware of tuition, salary opportunities, the work expected for a given salary, the grades required for various opportunities, prestige accrued by various kinds of work, the opportunities for having tuition waived or subsidized for public service, etc. I doubt you could find a better informed cohort.
July 26, 2010, 4:24 pmLN says:
Yes Mike C, PhDs should only be obtained by those with institutional funding or wealthy people. If you are unable to secure funding as a graduate student, you are unlikely to succeed at establishing an academic career — in short, you should be very wary of paying money to an institution that does not believe you will succeed and is unwilling to invest (fairly minimal) resources in you.
I mean, a second ago you were lecturing prospective law students on how people blow hundreds of thousands of dollars on pursuing doctorates. Are you saying you’re not truly familiar with how academia works? How odd, given your authoritative tone.
July 26, 2010, 4:32 pmJim O'Sullivan says:
Wow! $113,000 per year. That’s what a cop (AA degree from the local community college required) makes here in Suffolk County, New York. And there’s liitle crime to fight. Oh, and no student loans of $100k+ to follow you through life. Law school is such a deal!
July 26, 2010, 4:36 pmLike the dot.com bubble and the housing bubble, the law school bubble shall pop. It’s popping right now. But keep rearranging those deck chairs, Ilya!
ohwilleke says:
“The demand for lawyers is inevitably closely tied to the growth of government and law.”
Doubtful. The lion’s share of legal practice is private law, not public law. It concerns the rights of private parties vis-a-vis each other, not primarily the relationship between government and private parties.
The demand for lawyers has much more to do with economic growth than it does with the growth of government and law. Firms are bigger and more complex than they used to be. They operate in more places with more parties. They are financed in much more complex ways. Most of the demand for legal services is cyclic, rather than driven by legislation trends.
A lot of what lawyers are doing now, particularly in “big law” which has a large component of plain old fashion transactional drafting and due diligence that wouldn’t be grossly unfamiliar to lawyers of the 1950s participating in the rise of big manufacturing, or even the 1870s (when the modern American legal profession came into being) coinciding with the rise of big railroads. Indeed, law students are still studying many of the cases and most of the same subjects that they did in 1870. The deals are different, but it is deals and not government regulation that is the biggest driver of the legal workforce.
Changes in criminal law have not meaningfully expanded the size of the criminal law bar on a per capita basis. The development of the income tax definitely expanded the scope of legal work, but the various twists and turns that the tax code have taken haven’t had that much of an impact. Certainly, there are new kinds of regulatory law (e.g. environmental law) that simply didn’t exist fifty years ago; but those make up a much smaller proportion of the bar than you might expect. But, old issues that used to be the life blood of legal practice, like screwed up real estate titles, have become much less important as institutions, like title insurance companies, have sprung up to prevent them from arising.
July 26, 2010, 4:50 pmMike C. says:
Well, first of all, not all PhDs work in academia, believe it or not. I have many colleagues who hold PhDs and who work in industry.
Secondly, what I was referring to was obtaining degrees ONLY useful in academia for the purpose of teaching other people to obtain similar degrees. Peoplke get advanced degrees in feminist studies, transgender studies, etc., etc. Not exactly in great demand by either industry or the general public, yes ? People do blow big bucks on such things, and most of them wind up dissapointed. A very few get to teach such drivel at prestigious universities, including every Ivy League school. Goody for them.
And finally, no – I am blessedly ignorant (other than from a student perspective, and that was long ago) of how academia works. 35 years in an industrial occupation here, and counting… I had some good professors, and two that were absolutely brilliant, and I am greatful to have had them, but academia is not to my taste. Or to my ability, frankly. And those two brilliant profs I had also made big bucks via industry.
July 26, 2010, 4:54 pmLN says:
Mike C, all these people you’re talking about who get PhDs, whether they end up in industry or as humanities professors? They get funding. Virtually none of them go into debt for their doctorates.
People who go into debt for a PhD are badly misinformed.
You’re very welcome, but there’s no need to thank me for teaching you something today.
July 26, 2010, 5:00 pmAnon says:
SeaDrive,
You mean more MISinformed cohort. The numbers bandied about by the lemmings bear no relation to reality. They readily devour all the B.S. fed to them by the schools. If we had SarbOx type requirements for law school “career” placement people, with jail time to back it up, maybe there would be fewer people sitting for the bar right now.
Mike C.,
Someone getting a Ph.D in philosophy or medievel feminist studies is acutely aware of their job prospects.
Caveat emptor is an old part of our legal system to be sure.
July 26, 2010, 5:03 pmSo is jail time for FRAUD.
Apperception says:
“You have to go to the bottom 10% of the profession to find lawyers making under $55,000 per year.”
Half my class is somehow in the bottom 10% of the profession? Dang, that sucks.
$0 < $55k
July 26, 2010, 5:10 pmMike C. says:
Since I have a number of successful colleagues and old friends who went rather deeply (or what was considered so at the time) into debt for their advanced degrees, and who later dug out of that debt, you have taught me absolutely zero today.
But I do appreciate the interchange, and am sorry it has wandered so far off my inital point. And my apologies to the blog and it’s owners. It’s like eating peanuts – hard to stop. But stop I shall, and now. I’ve wandered far enough off the reservation for one thread. My bad.
July 26, 2010, 5:19 pmwhit says:
fwiw, as a libertarian i believe the burden rests primarily on law school applicants to do their own research, not on law schools to offer some kind of unbiased expose on the perils of getting a law degree. law schools are selling a product. why would ANYBODY rely on them to be truthful, open, and unbiased about all the negatives , salaries, etc. that one expects upon graduating from law school?
caveat emptor and all…
fwiw, when i was in college, i managed to find some lawyers (not that difficult) and ask them what they felt about the profession, whether law school was “worth it” etc. etc.
based on what they told me, i decided – no way.
i spoke to several, and the general consensus i got was – it’s drudgery, the pay is not that good, etc.
i decided to go the police route, and am very happy with my decision. i LOVE my job.
if a law school applicant isn’t willing to do some BASIC research before he plops himself down in law school, sorry – but the fault lies with him, not the law schools.
i would expect that the seller of a product ( a law degree) would not be some sort of unbiased source of info about that product.
that’s true of every other product i am aware of. why should a law degree be any different?
July 26, 2010, 6:04 pmAdam says:
Conservatives should consider becoming lawyers: If the growth of government leads to growth in demand for lawyers, becoming a practicing lawyer is a good hedge against the harm of bigger government (in addition to creating potential opportunities to fight it).
July 26, 2010, 6:39 pmohwilleke says:
Definitely true. Small and medium sized firms and corporate law departments are full of lawyers who did a few years as associates in Big Law and then left and became partners in smaller firms, generally with a pay cut involved. Attrition after five years is something on the order of 80% in the large firms that are paying the big starting salaries.
Even for those who go on and become partner, increases from year to year as an associate are often pretty modest, followed by a one time big jump upon becoming partner, which caps off quickly except for the decreasing share of partners who are bringing in new business and becoming equity partners.
Overall, I suspect that there is migration towards the mean from both ends over time among those who don’t leave the profession.
Then again, I also suspect that a pretty significant large share of those leaving the profession are doing so temporarily to have and raise kids and will return to the profession in time. Non-profit boards and PTAs are full of people in this situation and many do return to practicing law in some capacity eventually, although frequently in lower paying positions as opposed to as partners in big firms.
July 26, 2010, 7:10 pmohwilleke says:
There are much less expensive ways to satisfy your curiosity. For example, it is often possible to get a tuition waiver and even a modest stipend in a PhD program that allows you to learn the same material (e.g. business management, criminal justice, political science, sociology). In contrast, a J.D. will cost more than $100,000 in tuition, room and board with no financial aid other than loans.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to learn about the law. But, the J.D. isn’t a very cost effective way to do so, and if your goal is simply to learn, rather than to prepare to be employed as a lawyer, you are likely to find the quality of instruction less than satisfying, because law school classes aren’t primarily designed to teach their purported subject matter, especially in the first year.
July 26, 2010, 7:20 pmohwilleke says:
FWIW, the bimodal distribution is not new, although it seems to get more extreme each year. It has been around for decades, and emerged no earlier than the 1970s. The big question is presents from the perspective of an economist is why there is so little demand in the middle.
There is little indication that all of those who are in the top peak are really materially more qualified than the rest in the kind of tasks that new associates in large law firms are called upon to do. Certainly, there is the mindset that law is like war where the best means winning and second best means losing, but it isn’t at all obvious that this mindset has to apply to every single member of a team on a project, or to what big firms call “commodity work.”
Yet, for some reason, a business model that offers clients lower fees and pays salaries between the two modes has never succeeded.
The heuristic answer seems to be that clients are very deeply divided into those who can afford to pay unreasonably large amount to large law firms to do “save the company” kind of work, and those who cannot, and that lawyer pay is largely derivative of the ability to pay of the client, rather than being based upon “efficiency” or “productivity” the way that Econ 101 says that it should be. In other words, big firms pay associates big salaries because investment banks and burgeoning tech firms do the same thing with their incoming employees and don’t mind indirectly paying comparable fees to new lawyers.
A related mystery is why big firms have their new lawyers work such long hours (2200 billable hours a year translates into far more total hours worked, particularly at red tape intensive big firms where it takes three signatures to requisition a new ream of paper). This is deeply embedded in the business model, but there is no really obvious reason that these firms don’t hire more lawyers to work fewer hours. Indeed, in theory, the practice of law is an area where you need slack in the organization so that you ramp up to do very large projects at the last minute that hadn’t been anticipated. Operating flat out all the time would seem to destroy the benefit of being big.
My intuition is that this was the produce of a shortage of qualified lawyers as big firms were ramping up and smaller pay premiums meant that big firms got a smaller share of the total crop of new lawyers in the 1980s, and then became embedded in the business model, but that is just a guess. It wasn’t part of the original model of big firms like Cravath, Swaine and Moore.
July 26, 2010, 7:36 pmwhit says:
hey, become a cop.
you can learn about the law, appy it and GET PAID doing so…
July 26, 2010, 7:39 pmhattio says:
Fixed that for you….
July 26, 2010, 8:49 pmBama 1L says:
Plus one.
Also, do you really want all lawyers to be people who decided at the age of 18 (or so) to be lawyers? Making law school a graduate degree makes it more likely that people will come back to law school. Who, already having a degree, would ever apply to a bachelor’s program and take classes with fraternity guys, etc.?
Huh? What are you talking about? There are plenty of scholarships for law school given entirely on the basis of “merit” (how bad the school wants to report your LSAT/UGPA to U.S. News). They pay your tuition and you don’t have to do anything but keep your grades up. Just do well in college, get a high enough LSAT to go to an excellent law school, then apply to law schools that are merely good. I found it significantly easier to get a full ride to law school than to grad school, and of course grad school makes you teach classes, apply for outside funding, spend your summers working on your thesis, etc.
A few years ago many law students could make a lot of money as summer associates. Big firms pay their summers what they pay their real associates, even though the summers are being taken out to lunch and baseball games and not doing any real work. There are not as many summer spots these days, but the money is still good for those who get them.
Funding for law students, on the whole, is a rich-get-richer system. The best-qualified applicants get scholarships, do well (because they are well-qualified and don’t have as many money worries), get paid summer jobs (in part because these are handed out so early that the same signals that led to the scholarship offer lead to the job offer), and get high-paying firm jobs (because these flow from the summer jobs).
My one piece of advice to applicants is to find out how many students at the law schools you are considering get “merit” scholarships. (Forget about other types of scholarships; they don’t matter.) Don’t take the admissions officer’s word for it; find independent verification. If everyone else is on scholarship and you aren’t, don’t go there. If you get an exploding scholarship offer (stay in the top X% or lose the scholarship), compare that to the percentage of students on scholarship and assess your chances.
July 26, 2010, 9:15 pmBama 1L says:
I am glad to hear they beat the odds. Even if you “win” grad school (tenure-track job), the pay is not high enough to keep up with significant debt.
If any of my colleagues in grad school, or professors I know today, went into debt to fund their graduate education, they kept quiet about it and ignored the advice being given out by every department I know. You get a Ph.D. only if someone is paying for it (tuition plus stipend) or because you already have money (say because you got fed up with practicing law or you have decided to spend your inheritance on expanding your mind).
I would never advise anyone to take out a single student loan for a Ph.D. in a humanities field.
July 26, 2010, 9:22 pmwhit says:
hattio:”hey, become a cop.
you can learn about the law, MISAPPLY it and GET PAID doing so…”
don’t be so hard on yourself, hattio. i am sure after about 10 yrs you might get it right.
not that lawyers don’t misapply the law too. and they (at least in the case of prosecutors) get immunity when they do, unlike cops.
July 26, 2010, 9:30 pmDuffy Pratt says:
First, benefits paid per employee tend to remain linear. So fewer employees means lower costs.
Second, one of the main benefits of working associates so hard is that it gives a pretty good assessment of which associates have the right stuff (or are willing to eat the most shit, depending on how you want to look at it).
Third, at least at some firms, the extra hour requirement gives an indication of which lawyers have the desired ethical qualities. Some places either cast a blind eye at padding, at best, or quietly encourage and approve of it, at worst.
Finally, in many places, the extra hours simply mean extra profits. Hiring more people would add costs, without necessarily increasing gross income.
July 26, 2010, 9:53 pmDuffy Pratt says:
Lawyers don’t misapply the law. They encourage others to misapply it. It’s a subtle difference, but it is a difference.
July 26, 2010, 9:55 pmwhit says:
um, a prosecutor APPLIES the law.
but i’m not about to get into a semantical wank about what “applies” means.
July 26, 2010, 10:09 pmAMG says:
I wish I could be on that list. I graduated from a solid tier 2 school with good grades ($170k cost, all borrowed), and went to the best LLM program in the country ($70k, same). Well now with interest my loan balance is up to $300k. Of course I passed the bar on the first try but that’s worth nothing on the market. In fact both of my degrees are worth nothing. I’ve been told this by people I network with after building rapport. Basically my life was ruined by law schools, and my only joy is that I literally have zero assets or income, which will make it a lot easier when the deferments end and the bill collectors start calling.
July 26, 2010, 10:57 pmbartman says:
About the paying for doctorates argument, when I did my doctorate (at a large state university, in econ) everybody in our program had a tuition waiver and at least a quarter stipend, and most had some sort of scholarship or fellowship on top of that. I had a half stipend, which paid about $1300/month, which was enough to live on in a Midwest college town. One year I also had a fellowship, which boosted my take home to about $2,500/month. t wasn’t ritzy living, but I wasn’t reduced to living on dogfood and ramen. I usually made more ($3k/month) in the summers working as an RA, getting paid out of some professor’s grant to crunch numbers or write code, which the profs didn’t like doing.
Where I went to school the ONLY department that did not fund all of its grad students was the English department. They made students pay the full tab, with no stipend or tuition waiver, for at least their first year, as a way to root people out. To the best of my knowledge, and I know a bit because I was involved in student government and talked to a broad swath of people, just about every other doctoral student on campus (>4,000 people) was getting a waiver and some funding. Departments basically had a policy of not bringing in more students than they could support. I was told in no uncertain terms that I’d only have four years of support, which motivated me to get my butt out the door on time, no way in hell I wanted to shell out for school out of my own pocket.
And I topped the $115k number mentioned here within a year of leaving school. I’m amazed lawyers make so little – who knew. I do know the corporate and regulatory lawyers at my last firm made about 30-50% more money than me while being in the same classification bracket.
July 26, 2010, 11:44 pmDave Hardy says:
Egad, the changes from my time (early 1970s). I lived with my parents, went to a state school (tuition was under $500 per semester, and yes it’s top-tier) and got out with, as I recall, 5,000 in student loan debt. Went to work for $10,000 in a small firm. (Not inflation corrected, of course; I drove a VW bug I’d bought for $600, gas was 40 cents a gallon, and a decent two bedroom house rented for $175/month). My uncle was partner in one of the bigger insurance defense firms. He had a nice house, and in his 50s splurged and bought a sports car and a tuxedo, after three decades of practice. That would define the returns of the more lucrative end of things.
I know several attorneys practicing solo who were (recently) making modest pay, I’d guess closer to 50 than to 100K. But they liked practicing law, found trial work fun, and were satisfied. They were looking to practice and make a decent income, hadn’t gone for law because it offered the highest money return. I know docs in family practice who do the same (albeit with higher student loan debt and higher pay).
July 27, 2010, 12:43 amAnon II says:
I’m with 11:17. You take federally guaranteed loans out of the equation and many law schools would not exist. Also, tuition sure as heck wouldn’t be 30-40k a year at all but maybe the very top schools.
July 27, 2010, 4:46 amThe Awful Truth says:
In case nobody else says it AMG, I feel your pain. The world is becoming harder and colder.
July 27, 2010, 4:47 amWidmerpool says:
I agree with Awful Truth–when people wonder why demand has not picked up in this economy, one need only point to folks like AMG and the millions like him who are saddled with non-dischargeable debt that renders their purchase power nil. This situation creates an underclass of very smart and motivated but disaffected people who are disconnected from this government/culture. If you want to know how this ends, I suggest you ask the French, say, 1789.
July 27, 2010, 8:34 amLaser Haas says:
Efforts 4 justice never cease
July 27, 2010, 10:57 amepeeist says:
(replying to e.g. Bama1L and ErikF et al. in a general sense)
I took a high school course in law and it was better preparation for law school than 4 years of undergrad. My undergrad was excellent, it was just excellent preparation for working as an engineer.
Assuming arguendo that “maturity” (I mean in the life experience/wisdom sense, not necessarily age) is a good thing to have for law school, insisting upon an undergraduate degree as a proxy for maturity is silly. Just as using a college degree as a proxy for an IQ test is incredibly wasteful (“we prefer to hire college graduates, from any program including ones totally irrelevant to the job, because IQ testing of hig school graduates or those with GEDs would be considered discriminatory”).
We consider 18-year-olds capable to decide to join the military and risk their lives (and even younger in the past, including commanding others!), California recently (ABA Journal) admitted an 18-year-old lawyer (finished high school and college degree as a teenager), etc. Read Bill Gates’ bio. Etc. Lots of people at 18 or 19 are more mature and have more life experience and are more disciplined and would be as good or better law students than many others with an undergraduate degree and good LSAT are at 21.
If “maturity” is necessary/important for law school, you could require people to have worked full-time for at least a year (analogous to many MBA programs requiring work experience, but I’m suggesting ANY full-time work, including/especially hourly work, would do!). That would not only be cheaper, it seemed to make a bigger difference to maturity among law students and junior lawyers from what I saw; everyone having a 1st degree did NOT make them noticeably more “mature” and wise than some seniors in high school. I went directly from undergrad to law school, and think I was pretty mature, but that’s my point: setting one hard-and-fast rule is ridiculous.
July 27, 2010, 11:32 amJohn425 says:
Let’s have the medical doctors craft a governmental administering of legal fees. After all- turnabout is fair play. We can call it Legalcare. Modeled after Medicare fee schedules, a simple Last Will will be $79 and discounted according to prevailing rates to say, $49. Complex battles, not unlike major surgery, will also be paid according to billing formulas. General law practitioners will net about $70-$80K and top corporate legal eagles will make about $250-$300K tops. Oh, and the docs want you to do away with contingency fees.
July 27, 2010, 1:17 pmAnon says:
John425,
That would be an improvement for most lawyers. Most general practitioners would LOVE to net $70-80k from the government. It is about $70-80k more than what a majority of law grads will ever see from the practice of law. And anything the government wants to pay for legal services is usually more than what consumers want to pay for legal services, because consumers all have rights that were violated and they shouldn’t have to pay some lawyer to help them, after all, lawyers are all rich and greedy. On TV they always show the lawyers wealthy, nice clothes, nice cars, tasteful offices, hot chicks… they never show a lawyer calling about an unpaid bill.
July 27, 2010, 2:44 pmzippypinhead says:
Let’s compare Officer Whit’s employer with what starting Federal agency attorneys in the Seattle metropolitan area make. Better than a typical new solo practitioner may do, but not all that great compared with a cop: 2010 salary range of $50,628 (GS-9/1) to $61,255 (GS-11/1). Only 12 days/year vacation (goes to 18/year after 3 years, but sick leave stays at 12, with no short-term disability available). You’ll be self-funding 30% of your typical family health insurance plan premium, and you pay 100% of dental/vision coverage out of your own pocket. FERS defined benefit plan pays only about 1/3 of base salary after 30 years (although there’s a good match on the TSP defined contribution plan). Plus you usually have to pay for your own bar dues and CLE expenses. After 5 years, most Federal attorneys would be around a GS-13, starting at $87,306 (GS-13/1). Some fast-starters might have a shot at GS-14 after 5 years, starting at $103,169 (GS-14/1). It’s a living wage, but nowhere close to Perkins Coe’s starting salary (let alone what they pay 5th year associates).
An FBI special agent with a J.D. can also get to GS-13 after 5 years. Plus, he gets availability pay. And LEO retirement, which calculates to the same FERS annuity after 20 years as a non-LEO retiree gets for 30.
July 27, 2010, 2:57 pmhelene edwards says:
Whenever you run one of these lawyer income items, you should accompany it with some real-life vignette about lawyer discontent, usually cullable from one of the “Daily Journal” type publications. For example, back around 2000 there was a billing scandal involving a partner at Latham’s SF office. He was making 600K/yr. at the time, but was quoted as saying, “my partners are screwing me.”
July 27, 2010, 3:23 pmohwilleke says:
Why? Loaning money to law students for law school is surely a commercially reasonable thing to at some interest rate, law students are certainly better credit risks than most undergrads.
Simply by finishing their undergraduate degrees and applying to law school and being admitted (proof that they have decent grades) they have shown that they aren’t that flaky. The drop out rate in law schools is very low compared to almost any other kind of program (med school possibly excepted), and the percentage of admitted law students who ultimately pass the bar exam is very high (more than 90% after all tries). Also, law students have demonstrated that they have made a career choice.
Sure, there would be losses, but those losses are probably not so great that higher interest rates couldn’t compensate for them.
Also, in many cases, a parent or spouse co-signer would be available.
Some law school loans are already offered on a commercial basis without federal guarantees, and it isn’t at all obvious that the current law school business model couldn’t be maintained if all law school loans were offered on that business.
The credit market might tighten for students at schools with high drop out rates, low bar passage rates, and strong default histories (basically, bottom tier), without federal guarantees. But, on the whole it would simply increase the interest rates a little.
July 27, 2010, 3:48 pmwhit says:
and correct me if i’m wrong, but do these federal attorneys get overtime?
i would assume not. i know the local attorneys (county and city level) do not.
and if they are at all honest with me :) they are working well in excess of 40 hrs/wk.
if we are working more than 10-15 minutes past the end of our shift, we are putting in for OT (in 1/4 hr increments).
my O/T rate is close to $60, and if i can get the position i am waiting for an opening for, and they are smart enough to hire me :) i’ll get another 10% on top of that for all my hourly
but the medical is just phenomenal. and it doesn’t cost anything extra when you get married and.or have kids. no cost to add on dependants.
July 27, 2010, 3:58 pmzippypinhead says:
Federal attorneys getting overtime? Maybe if they’re with the Postal Service?
Seriously, my knowledge may be dated, but the best deal I know of is that in lieu of overtime pay some – but not all – Federal agencies are authorized to award comp time to attorneys (effectively, extra vacation days), but the total # of hours one can get is tightly capped. Quite a few years ago USDOJ attorneys filed a class action in U.S. Claims Court seeking overtime, but after a lot of litigation, the Fed. Circuit ruled that there was no FEPA violation to refuse to pay overtime to DOJ attorneys, notwithstanding that they are routinely “expected and induced” to work extra hours. And just to be certain, Congress also then passed a law prohibiting USDOJ from paying overtime.
July 27, 2010, 4:36 pmCareless says:
I’m reminded of recent stories about for-profit schools paying homeless people to take classes.
July 27, 2010, 10:07 pmBurned says:
Prof. Somin seems sadly immune to counterargument here, as evidenced by his “update” to this post which apparently just hand-wavingly assumes we all must be fabricating our many accounts of massive unemployment and/or non-law employment (among JD holders). As many of us have noted, it is indeed a MAJORITY!
He similarly seems to disregard the various other cogent expositions (above, and elsewhere) as to why the typically-reported statistics are so drastically misleading.
July 28, 2010, 1:05 amanonymous says:
Burned,
Agreed. I’ve talked to many people here in Minnesota that don’t have a job, can’t find a job, aren’t hearing back from employers at all. During the bar examination break yesterday I heard one person saying she heard that firms are getting over a hundred applicants per position offered…
Sure I would like to start out on my own, but there are up-front costs and I am dirt poor. Professor Somin, ask yourself how the unemployed lawyer who doesn’t have the money to start an office and can’t get hired is supposed to find employment as a lawyer??
July 29, 2010, 12:55 amanonymous says:
The lawyers have no bread?
July 29, 2010, 9:26 am“Let them
eat cakepractice solo!”Dave says:
The NALP numbers are as accurate as Enron’s financial statements. The only difference is that Enron was discovered as a fraud, whereas the gross distortion and fabrication of employment stats will unfortunately continue for some time.
August 1, 2010, 4:16 pmShould You Be A Lawyer says:
I appreciate the professor’s posting of an update. It still doesn’t answer the question of how to deal with law school graduates who aren’t included in the BLS or NALP statistics. He notes that the 10th percentile of lawyers in the BLS data are at $55k, and hypothesizes that this figure would be lower if there was a large pool of unemployed lawyers sitting around to drag down salaries.
The fact that the bottom 10% is as low as that may indicate some downward pressure from unemployed graduates. He notes that this figure is about the same as in 2007 – back then the legal job market outside of top law firms was already not too good.
So why aren’t the bottom legal salaries even lower? $55k is not alot of money for a college graduate 3 years out from undergrad, and who apparently had good enough grades, test scores, and motivation to pursue law school. It may be that there aren’t too many lawyers working below that salary level because they will simply leave the legal profession and go into non-legal jobs. These non-legal jobs will therefore reduce the downward pressure on wages.
If they have been out of legal employment for more than a brief amount of time, they are unlikely to be attractive job prospects for legal employers compared to other laterals or even new grads, and they may not even be looking for legal jobs anymore. Maintaining active bar membership status involves paying dues and attending CLE courses, which also have fees. If the attorney is trying to practice on his own, he may need malpractice insurance. These costs, just for maintaining the possibility of practicing law, may be too much for someone in non-legal employment – therefore these people may let their memberships lapse or switch to inactive status. Doing so makes it less likely these people will change their minds and return to law, and removes them from the pool of people who could put downward pressure on lawyer salaries.
There also is still the issue of salary reporting. It may be harder to locate attorneys making less money as they tend to be isolated. And of course law school grads who long ago left law are not included in this data. Yet the salaries of these groups of people are very relevant to a prospective law student wondering where law school graduates end up.
Even with the 10th percentile at $55k, it is still possible for there to be many unemployed or underemployed law school graduates.
August 2, 2010, 4:45 pmLaser Haas says:
As one who is both highly critical of ethical issues; but one that also understands the quintessential need for counsel – we have often found the remarks on gainful employment and educational cost incongruous.
Every day – we see a line at probate court or criminal court of counsels seeing what bones (cases) a clerk will throw their way at a measy $125 per hour.
All solo practioners we talk to seek $280 and up; whilst becoming Evergreen Retainer PRO’s.
There is plenty of work out there to be had – what all the banter is really about is the arduous and highly unlikely pathway to the million (or multi million dollar partnership pathways).
There are plenty need for attorneys and always will be. The reality is – the pathway to a “good” earning is subjective. With the fact of the matter – good fundamentals, a “current” set of case books and hardwork will make any/all a good living.
I am asked every day by persons at court to help them and I am NOT an attorney at law.
August 3, 2010, 8:18 pmLaser Haas says:
Hey Administrator the WP Ajax edit comment tool sucks!
What I really enjoy are those that I have met who have some sense of ethical decency.
Honorable men and women – who love the Law – are rare!
Do yourself and your country a solid and hold true to principals above avarice!
August 3, 2010, 8:22 pmwhat's the difference? says:
End of discussion.
I love GMU. It’s such a mind-bendingly strange place.
I’m a lawyer who recently graduated from there with a technical grad degree and took a related regulatory law course at their newly-expanded law school for shits and giggles (and to fulfill a BS non-technical requirement).
So let me tell you something.
It’s amazing to be in a room full of young law students funding their educations via federal student loans who all believe that they are Exceptions To The Rule in a course taught by a federal government attorney at an institution that survives off of federal money directly and indirectly (e.g. military members and other federal employees taking courses on the government’s dime or paying for them via their federal salaries, contractors sucking off the federal tit taking courses at night, federal grants and other forms of monetary and non-monetary support, etc. etc. etc.) and yet the place still chugs the anti-regulation, free market über alles, “law and economics” kool aid. Who needs LSD with that kind of weirdness, especially after the last ten years of uncontrolled federal spending on wars all over the world and its concomitant boom in the DC economy?
Frankly it was difficult to hear about policy and morality arguments after working in the legal and political arenas. “Should” has nothing to do with anything in DC and I heard the professor and students say that particular word a whole lot. As someone pointed out earlier, the old Southern colloquialism “crap in one hand and should in the other then tell me which one fills up first” fit the bill exactly.
It was difficult to keep quiet but I did it and forced my way through the BS to finish the class. It feels great scraping the crap off my shoes after leaving GMU with my new poster.
August 9, 2010, 9:55 am