These types of stats are frequently misleading in that they include people straight out of law school. (Even there, people hired by top tier law firms make the higher amount shown, but starting salaries at smaller firms or especially government are a lot lower.)
More. Starting salary at one of the ten biggest firms (one of which employs me, although IANAL) is around $190,000 per year, plus bonus. At least here in NYC. A seventh-year associate can expect more than $300,000 plus a huge bonus, although at that point it’s up or out – if an associate doesn’t make partner after seven years (more or less, different firms have different expectations), he or she is expected to leave the firm. On friendly terms – it’s not exactly getting fired, and most associates will not make partner.
There are some exceptions. Most of the big firms have a white-collar defense department, and those lawyers are charging the same kind of money as their corporate partners and associates. Of course, once we’re talking about partner compensation, that’s based on billing and (sometimes) bringing in new business, and white-collar defense partners may be making less than, say, the corporate bankruptcy dudes. But the associates are paid the same as the associates in any other department of the firm.
But as for ADA salaries, you’re absolutely right. Also an IT guy, in my case at a law firm, and I make a bit more than an ADA, at least for the first few years of his/her career. Bureau chiefs probably make more than me, but I’m not sure. Seems like they should.
My father, who was (now retired) a US District Court judge, always found it somewhat amusing that a first-year associate at a Wall Street firm made more money than he did. He didn’t mind, he just thought it was funny.
They’re not “misleading” at all. Median salary figures for any occupation include numbers for people new to the field and/or straight out of school. In any case, the next line in my post specifically notes that those numbers are not directly comparable to criminal litigation salaries.
Right. That’s why I said “these types of stats”. But they are misleading to people who don’t appreciate that, and are thinking this is the distribution of salaries for a typical mid-career person in that occupation (which is what I would guess the post preceding yours was about).
That’s a completely separate issue.
I also recall a spate of articles a few years ago about how US law schools are churning out far too many lawyers, to the point where without social connections it was impossible to get even an articling position to begin a law career.
Somewhat true, but it’s a little more complicated. There are too many third-tier (and lower) law schools, basically.
If you graduate with a JD from Harvard or Yale or Columbia, or even NYU, you won’t have any trouble finding a job. You’ll be recruited. The big firms actively court grads from those schools. They send recruiters to campus.
On the other hand, if you graduate from WMU-Cooley, even near the top of the class, you’re up the creek without a paddle.
Cooley’s best-known grad is current Otisville resident and former atttorney (having been disbarred) Michael Cohen.
We don’t have articling positions in the US. Once someone graduates from law school, they just have to pass the bar exam and character and fitness clearance and they are fully qualified to practice law.
There was certainly an oversupply of lawyers for about a decade, but applications have been way down for the last few years and class sizes are also down.
Yes, one article mentioned the cascade effect - lawyer grads from the good schools were so much in oversupply they were taking the jobs the mid-level grads would get, who in turn forced out the low-level schools’ grads.
I think it’s pretty obvious that wealthy people who can afford top flight lawyers are going to have an often decisive advantage in court against government lawyers.
O.J.'s “Dream Team”
Robert Shapiro.
Johnnie Cochran.
Robert Kardashian.
F. Lee Bailey.
Alan Dershowitz.
Barry Scheck.
Peter Neufeld.
Gerald F. Uelmen.Why is that obvious? Is there something about those names that suggests OJ’s attorneys were better qualified than the prosecution team?
Yes, but in a typical criminal case there isn’t much even a good lawyer can do. (O.J., of course, was not a typical case)
I think the thing that drove home to me how some lawyers were not up to the standards of television drama was watching Loreena Bobbit’s trial/snorefest live on TV.
“He did it that way for a while then he turned me the other way up.”
“Which way is up?”
I read recently OJ did not pay a lot of his legal bills for his murder trial. I guess they have given up collecting by now .
One of my brothers is a lawyer, and he claims the advantages of top-tier lawyers as compared to ordinary talent is enormously over-rated. (He thinks there can be a difference, but that it’s very small.) In addition, he believes that prosecutors will often be more likely to throw everything they’ve got and be less inclined to settle if they’re trying to get a feather in their cap by notching a win against a well-known lawyer.
Recent cases involving people like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein (etc. etc. for any number of other famous wealthy people who failed to beat the rap) seem to support that view. These guys could afford top tier legal talent but they were found just as guilty as if they’d been represented by public defenders.
The primary benefit of representing a famous client is the free advertising. Jose Baez (who represented Casey Anthony) didn’t get paid much, but he gets paid quite a lot now (or did when I last checked) to allow a local personal injury firm to list him as “of counsel” (basically, a sort of emeritus lawyer) on their website.
My stepmother (wife of the above-mentioned judge, my father) used to say this all the time, albeit in more emphatic and colorful terms.
She was a lawyer, and a graduate of a fairly low-ranked law school. She was a highly intelligent woman who went to law school late in life (she must have been in her mid-forties or even fifty, can’t remember), and was, by all accounts, a pretty sharp lawyer.
She used to say that she loved getting some associate from, say, Cravath, Swaine & Moore on the other side of a negotiation and ripping him/her to pieces, because they all thought they were so goddamn smart that they didn’t take a middle-aged immigrant woman like her seriously.
And, by all acounts, she was entirely capable of doing just that, and did it fairly often, gleefully.
I was involved with a civil case (never went to court), were the opposition lawyer was paid much more than our lawyer. Our lawyer was a specialist in the technical area, and their lawyer was a specialist in negotiation. They gave up what they had to give up (we had the law on our side), and we gave up all the money (they had the negotiator on there side). So I suspect that there may be some relationship between “highly paid” and “skilled negotiator” as demonstrated by “skilled at getting highly paid”.
In our recent high-profile catholic-church sex-abuse case, the highly paid lawyers couldn’t carry the jury, couldn’t carry the court of first appeal, but could carry the final appeal court. The lawyers I’ve talked to think that is a fair representation of the tactics of the lawyers involved, but lay most of the blame on the defendant for choosing those lawyers.
To be clear, my brother’s point wasn’t really about the relative talents of lawyers from top tier schools vs other schools. Rather, his position was that the outcome of criminal trials is almost entirely determined by the facts and the law which are available to any reasonably qualified lawyer, and whatever added legal arguments or courtroom tactics a top tier lawyer might be able to bring to bear are generally of marginal impact.
It’s my own impression that the real impact of top tier lawyers is not so much in criminal trials but rather in complex legal and civil matters. Even here, not so much in courtroom situations as in structuring contracts and deals upfront. These can frequently be done in extremely complicated ways such that they qualify for various legal loopholes and tax breaks and/or provide enhanced terms and protections for the party being represented, but that’s where you need a lot of creative thinking about very complex matters, which requires fine legal minds; this would be out of the league of run-of-the-mill lawyers.
I agree with this. However, I’d add that the education a lawyer receives at a “top tier” school isn’t much different from a middle tier school. They all use the same curriculum, and have decent professors. Moreover, there is a pretty wide disconnect between learning the law and practicing law. Some school have good clinical programs where students get into real and mock courtroom and learn practical stuff, but most of the classes are academic and many unrelated to what most of us do.
I have a BIL who was planning to attend Rutgers Law School, but was undecided between the Newark campus or the Camden one. Apparently the Newark one is a more prestigious program. But he said he was told that the Camden program focuses more on practical aspects of what lawyers actually do on a day-to-day basis, while the Newark campus focuses more on abstract things like legal theory and such.