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Notes -
Don't forget the bimodal distribution of lawyer starting salaries.
As recently as 1991, the median for those was $40k (a bit over $90k in 2024 dollars) and the shape of the distribution was the usual vaguely-lognormal looking thing where the modal lawyer made about 10% less but a fat tail made more to make up for it, with the tail steadily decreasing and then basically vanishing around $90k ($210k inflation-adjusted).
Over the next decade, BigLaw firms had decided to really start bidding up their offers for the top lawyers, and the results look like no distribution you'll find in a stat textbook. The median salary was at $50k, basically the same as it had been in 2024 dollars, but was now the balance of a lower (inflation-adjusted) mode and a big spike at $120k (around $225k adjusted), with fewer salaries in between.
In the two decades since, the median has remained a bit over $90k, and the distribution seems to also have basically fixated when controlled for inflation: there's a wide swath of new lawyers making $75K +/- $25K, and then there's a big narrow spike of the new lawyers who "made it" to $220K +/- $10K, and from $105K to $205K there's relatively nobody.
The gap is even more extreme for experienced lawyers where some of the biglaw partners are pulling in $10+ million a year, while a lot of solos are grinding away still only pocketing that $75k with 10 years of experience, a lot of people stuck in document review seemingly for life, etc. For experienced people there is a middle class usually composed of people who work in government compliance or as in house counsel. From time to time some ex-states attorneys (or similar) will go and form a firm in search of more compensation. Sometimes this is a success, but more often they return to government work because criminal clients dont often make good payors.
What befuddles me is why clients ever agreed to this trend in biglaw. This increased compensation is reflected in increased fees basically at a 1:1 ratio, and I'm not really aware of much data that says biglaw firms are all that good at actually, you know, winning. In most cases I've ever been a part of the lawyers make little difference in the outcome of the case. I can't really think of one civil suit where if side A had John Roberts in his prime, and the other had a 50th percentile graduate from an okay state school like Indiana or Samford. Big lititgation is BIG in that it requires a lot of man-hours. But the expensive firms outsource that anyways!
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