Thursday, September 06, 2007

Starting Salaries for Class of 2006 Law School

Bill Henderson:
The most recent edition of NALP's serial publication, Jobs & JD's, includes the chart excerpted below [click-on to enlarge]. It is the distribution of full-time salaries for all members of the Class of 2006 who reported income data to their respective law school (22,665 graduates). If you were looking for a single graphic to illustrate the most vexing problems facing law firms, law students, and law schools, this would be it. A more dramatic bimodal distribution you will not find.



The sample includes--in order of size--private practice (55.8%), business (14.2%), government (10.6%), judicial clerks (9.6%), public interest (5.4%), and other (2.8%). Half of the graduates make less than the $62,000 per year median--but remarkably, there is no clustering there. Over a quarter (27.5%) make between $40k-$55k per year, and another quarter (27.8%) have an annual salary of $100K plus.

If the chart were a flipbook of the last twenty years, the first mode would be relatively stationary, barely tracking inflation, while the second mode would be moving quickly to the right--i.e., the salary wars. In fact, because of the recent jump to $160K in the major markets, the second mode has already moved even more to the right.
Read the whole thing to get a better understanding of the implications of this chart.

Also read these two posts about what kind of job situation students can expect after law school:
(HT Patently-O)

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