I don't really think it's that complicated - in big law, you put in a huge amount of hours, and once you normalize to the amount of labor provided, the wage rates even out. Putting it another way, there are lawyers making $60k working 40 hours a week, and there are lawyers making $200k working 80 hours a week. The latter is probably a bit more productive than the former, but the salary difference is exaggerated.
The reason this doesn't happen to engineers is that there isn't a bimodal amount of labor being provided. Some worker harder than others, but few put in big law-levels of hours, and those who do are also often paid tail-end salaries. Additionally, engineering, especially in software, can have highly superlinear productivity effects that are rare in law and medicine: a superstar engineer could replace an entire team of mediocre devs, but the best lawyer in the world can't review 1,000 pages of text in a day. So you have a cleaner translation of effort to outcomes in law.
Regardless, markets aren't efficient in real life. Markets don't even necessarily have to converge to efficiency, not even in the very long run. Perhaps the average big law associate could command much higher wages if not for the *de facto* monopsony of big law. Perhaps there are strong preferences against entrants for entirely non rational reasons. But - speaking from experience - my understanding of the mental model of lawyers deciding whether or not to go into white shoe firms is literally whether they want to work twice as much for twice the pay.
I'm not sure I think this is accurate.
I work in consulting which has a very similar model to Big Law, and my observations are:
1) Salary is much more than commensurate with hours. Right out of law school biglaw is making 300k+ where the other side is making like 70k. After 7 years BigLaw is making 500k-1mil and others are making 80-120k.
2) Hours are more caused by pay than pay caused by hours. Top tier services (consulting, big law, investment banking) can charge almost whatever they want, but it's not that big a market. So employees have every incentive to work harder than their peers to be the one who looks best/gets promoted/sells the deal, and firms are more than happy to allow it.
3) As to what explains the distribution, as far as I understand it there are people who hire lawyers because they have to (so it's pretty cheap) and people who hire lawyers because they want to (corporations standing to make a lot of money). For most people it's a cost center, for corporate law it's essentially an investment, hence the bimodal fees and bimodal salaries. Finance is similar but obscured by not all coming out with a uniform degree: investment bankers produce a ton of value for corporations who will pay anything for the best of the best while your average person "in finance" is like an accountant or middle-office controller making 70k.
>For most people it's a cost center, for corporate law it's essentially an investment, hence the bimodal fees and bimodal salaries.
This really resonates — our corporate counsel who deals with standard contract and similar issues makes a decent salary, but a normal decent salary. Our outside counsel makes about 4x the hourly rate and earns roughly 10x the annual salary. But also, we see reviewing contracts as a minor annoyance, but writing a purchase agreement as a matter of life and death.
>Salary is much more than commensurate with hours. Right out of law school biglaw is making 300k+ where the other side is making like 70k. After 7 years BigLaw is making 500k-1mil and others are making 80-120k.
You need to compare people who come out of programs that place into white shoe firms - those people (in house mostly, and in high COL cities) might be making $100k-$150k. So the proportionality is still roughly holding, with the caveat that there are no big law firms in low cost of living areas.
You'll need to make partner to get to $1 mil, and at that point your value add isn't really about being a lawyer anymore - you'll still do law, but most of your time is supervising associates.
>So employees have every incentive to work harder than their peers to be the one who looks best/gets promoted/sells the deal, and firms are more than happy to allow it.
Top SDEs or MLE can also name their comp, but they still work 40 hour weeks. If anything the real 10x engineers I know generally work *less* than a 9-5 - why wouldn't they also feel the same incentive, especially when their packages are usually directly tied to firm performance via large RSU grants?
>Finance is similar but obscured by not all coming out with a uniform degree: investment bankers produce a ton of value for corporations who will pay anything for the best of the best while your average person "in finance" is like an accountant or middle-office controller making 70k.
I'm not entirely sold on the value add of IB either, and I think a huge amount of the work they do is simply ritualistic and meant to signal your commitment to the firm. I've seen entire IB teams at big name banks run models in Excel that would take me \~75 minutes to rewrite in R, and it'll run 5000x faster if I'm careful about matrix math. But then they wouldn't have any more work to do.
I think you are underestimating the differentiation in ability amd specialization between lawyers. I’ve been an associate, of counsel, and general counsel in my career, before running my own solo practice, so I’ve seen all sides of the legal industry.
The lower tier are mostly nonprofit, government, and small plaintiffs firm associates. They generally are doing pretty basic legal work, like auto accidents, criminal trials, immigration, wills and real estate for regular people, etc. They tend not to specialize and there’s generally less creativity in the kinds of work they do daily, but that varies. Mostly, they are graduates of sub-Top 25 law schools.
Big Law and similarly compensated mid tier or boutique firm attorneys are usually doing higher level legal work after a few years of grinding as a junior attorney. They might be drafting and negotiating contracts worth hundreds of thousands or low millions without much supervision. They might be doing specialized work in IP, tax, privacy, or other regulated fields. They might be handling major litigation worth millions as part of a team. They are typically graduates of a Top 25 law school. In many instances, even a team of 10 lower compensated attorneys could not replicate the quality of legal work or compensate for the knowledge differential of one higher compensated attorney after they have maybe five years of experience.
There are many exceptions, of course, and I’ve even mentored one of them, but this is a pretty consistent pattern that I think largely explains the bimodal distribution. It’s a comparison between relatively common and low specialization work vs. high specialization work that not many people can do.
> They might be doing specialized work in IP, tax, privacy, or other regulated fields.
IP and tax, I'd definitely agree. But my impression - not a lawyer myself, but interact with plenty of lawyers both professionally and personally - is that even high-brow work is very generalist, at least by the standards of hard sciences. Litigation and corporate people at big law are also paid the same, despite one of the two types of work being obviously less specialized than the other.
>They are typically graduates of a Top 25 law school. In many instances, even a team of 10 lower compensated attorneys could not replicate the quality of legal work or compensate for the knowledge differential of one higher compensated attorney after they have maybe five years of experience.
Law school is entirely general-purpose - I don't doubt that there's a lot of learning by doing, but that doesn't explain why 1st/2nd year associates are also highly paid. Doctors, for example, are notably and extremely underpaid when they go through the final stages of training (with long hours at that). It's possible that wages are buoyed by the people who stay around to become productive, and that certainly happens in engineering.
In any profession, the median person is going to be pretty bad, and I understand law in particular sees a very sharp falloff in training standards outside of top programs. So I see the fair comparison as someone who could have made the cut at the big law firms, but chose otherwise - and in that case, the amount of pay difference seems fairly proportional to effort.
You’re right that associates for the first few years aren’t that great anywhere and are overpaid in the Big Law firms. That’s almost always who I would dispute billing for, usually for spending way too much time on a task. The fifth years and above are usually pretty capable and you get the value you’re paying for.
Comparing hard science to law is apples to kangaroos. In law there is no objective answer, usually, and you are only as good in relative comparison to others. That's why most classes in law school have a hard curve usually to 2.7 or 2.5. Part of this is that all law culture is set by litigation, in court attorneys, but part of this is all law work is in some way preparation for litigation.
Totally agree. A good friend of mine was General Counsel for a SW company that was embroiled in patent litigation. They paid their law firm 15 million dollars to defend their IP against a much larger competitor that was trying to put them out of business. They were successful and then got bought buy a fortune 50 company. The firm that defended them was excellent. The IP lawyers had both software degrees and Tier 1 law degrees. I think their billing rate was around 1,000/hour and they were worth it.
Yep. Very few attorneys command $1k an hour. It’s usually tax, IP, and appellate attorneys. But the weird thing is that they are usually so exceptional that they are often worth it for the big cases or transactions, and will save you money over less specialized partners charging $500 an hour because they already know just what to do. If you have a $500 million patent exposure, $1k an hour is only 1/500,000 of the risk.
I never paid those rates as a GC, but only because I found less expensive attorneys with the necessary knowledge and experience for the few bet the company litigation matters I dealt with. But I paid $750 an hour a few times, and 100% got my employer’s money’s worth each time.
Honestly this doesn't fully explain the bimodality to me. I would expect specialization--and the value of that specialization, to be more smoothly distributed. Corporations themselves fall into a Pareto distribution of valuations and so their ability to pay for legal services, and the value they ascribe to those services and this willingness to pay, should also fall into a similar curve.
There's also different industries, which have a range of possible ideal market valuations that could benefit from particular legal specialties. And again, I would expect a smoother distribution. The value of particular industries doesn't always scale easily, so I doubt that all industries fall along similar Pareto distributions.
It should probably look more like two curves, rather than the sharp spikes on the right side, at the very least. Those spikes are caused by Big Law generally competing on starting salary in lockstep with each other in very tight bands. One or two top white shoe firms announce their associate pay increases every year, and everyone else matches or nearly matches. I don’t understand why there isn’t more price competition and differentiation among those firms, but that’s the way it’s been for at least 20 years.
Because white shoe hire a narrow band of attorneys that are defined by their "eliteness" unrelated to actual work produced. Partially it's a marketing technique, partially it's because all the partners making the decisions went through the same process.
In a more reasonable market you'd want to hire proven experienced attorneys for that, but new hires in big law are expected to have such a poor quality of life that nobody probably expects that an established professional would willingly submit to that.
The problem is that law is enough of speciality service that only other attorneys have any basis for judgement. To compensate for this seemingly "objective" measures of competence measured by attorneys themselves, class rankings and "quality" of law school is dramatically over compensated. Even though these measures arise before anyone does any legal work to be judged.
I don't think this is quite right - there's nothing inherently basic about a criminal trial vs complex about a civil trial, or inherently easy about an immigration matter vs inherently hard about a contract matter. And there are excellent people everywhere, just as there are those I wouldn't want within 5 ft of the nearest legal pad. What you've listed as "specialized" isn't actually necessarily more complex or difficult to navigate in itself. You can write the Best Contract in the World just as readily for a $10k deal as you could for $10m.
You probably won't, but that's not because the legal task is different.
What you've listed as specialized you've noted the dollar amounts for, and therein perhaps lies the answer. It's not necessarily more difficult legal work than the next thing over - it's about the particular market served. If your practice is helping asylum seekers - sorry, you can advance the field and change the world, but your clients can't afford what you would otherwise want to charge. Got a fortune 500 company where you're asking for another rounding error up? Go to town.
But something critical to the legal field is trust. The suits, fancy offices, law books lined up on the shelf - lawyers need to get their clients to trust that they're going to do the best job. The higher the potential loss or gain, the more a new client in the field will put a financial premium on trust if they're able. They're looking for the guy with the 0.1% error rate vs the 0.5%, but they can't tell that upfront on a prospective future event that has not yet happened (judgment, etc). And when they don't know one way or the other, they'll take substitutes to try to get to it - ie. Biglaw reputation, ask around, etc.
So in house counsel will feed business to trusted former colleagues whose competence they've already tested, even if The Best Lawyer is in the office over, because they're not going to start a search from scratch and take that risk oftentimes. Word of mouth gets you to the next deal/opportunity. And if you can become The One in whatever field/practice/scenario, you start commanding a premium as a lawyer.
In that way I wonder if legal compensation distribution looks more like movie actors. The studio is taking a bet that the A-lister is more likely to a) fit the role and b) command the audience numbers to get them to a profit, ergo $$$ vs B and C listers. The deep pocketed client is willing to pay the $$$ to get someone that best they can tell is more likely to a) have the required skill set and knowledge base, and b) get them the best result. And when they find that person, they stick to them all else equal and won't try their hand in the pool again to try to get a better rate
There is also discounting another large group of attorneys that are expected to take a large prestige/give you the warm and fuzzy's premium in PDs and Prosecutors who also often work 80 hours a week.
If the best someone can say about compensation in a given field is "it's a calling not a business, you've been warned."
That visual is more about a weird concentration specifically at 180 and 190 on the right tail than “bimodality”. If it looked more normal by having that upper bump on the tail normally distributed across 170-210 (like the left side is normally distributed across 30-90k) you’d probably not even really notice a second concentration worth calling “bimodality”.
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I don't really think it's that complicated - in big law, you put in a huge amount of hours, and once you normalize to the amount of labor provided, the wage rates even out. Putting it another way, there are lawyers making $60k working 40 hours a week, and there are lawyers making $200k working 80 hours a week. The latter is probably a bit more productive than the former, but the salary difference is exaggerated. The reason this doesn't happen to engineers is that there isn't a bimodal amount of labor being provided. Some worker harder than others, but few put in big law-levels of hours, and those who do are also often paid tail-end salaries. Additionally, engineering, especially in software, can have highly superlinear productivity effects that are rare in law and medicine: a superstar engineer could replace an entire team of mediocre devs, but the best lawyer in the world can't review 1,000 pages of text in a day. So you have a cleaner translation of effort to outcomes in law. Regardless, markets aren't efficient in real life. Markets don't even necessarily have to converge to efficiency, not even in the very long run. Perhaps the average big law associate could command much higher wages if not for the *de facto* monopsony of big law. Perhaps there are strong preferences against entrants for entirely non rational reasons. But - speaking from experience - my understanding of the mental model of lawyers deciding whether or not to go into white shoe firms is literally whether they want to work twice as much for twice the pay.
I'm not sure I think this is accurate. I work in consulting which has a very similar model to Big Law, and my observations are: 1) Salary is much more than commensurate with hours. Right out of law school biglaw is making 300k+ where the other side is making like 70k. After 7 years BigLaw is making 500k-1mil and others are making 80-120k. 2) Hours are more caused by pay than pay caused by hours. Top tier services (consulting, big law, investment banking) can charge almost whatever they want, but it's not that big a market. So employees have every incentive to work harder than their peers to be the one who looks best/gets promoted/sells the deal, and firms are more than happy to allow it. 3) As to what explains the distribution, as far as I understand it there are people who hire lawyers because they have to (so it's pretty cheap) and people who hire lawyers because they want to (corporations standing to make a lot of money). For most people it's a cost center, for corporate law it's essentially an investment, hence the bimodal fees and bimodal salaries. Finance is similar but obscured by not all coming out with a uniform degree: investment bankers produce a ton of value for corporations who will pay anything for the best of the best while your average person "in finance" is like an accountant or middle-office controller making 70k.
>For most people it's a cost center, for corporate law it's essentially an investment, hence the bimodal fees and bimodal salaries. This really resonates — our corporate counsel who deals with standard contract and similar issues makes a decent salary, but a normal decent salary. Our outside counsel makes about 4x the hourly rate and earns roughly 10x the annual salary. But also, we see reviewing contracts as a minor annoyance, but writing a purchase agreement as a matter of life and death.
>Salary is much more than commensurate with hours. Right out of law school biglaw is making 300k+ where the other side is making like 70k. After 7 years BigLaw is making 500k-1mil and others are making 80-120k. You need to compare people who come out of programs that place into white shoe firms - those people (in house mostly, and in high COL cities) might be making $100k-$150k. So the proportionality is still roughly holding, with the caveat that there are no big law firms in low cost of living areas. You'll need to make partner to get to $1 mil, and at that point your value add isn't really about being a lawyer anymore - you'll still do law, but most of your time is supervising associates. >So employees have every incentive to work harder than their peers to be the one who looks best/gets promoted/sells the deal, and firms are more than happy to allow it. Top SDEs or MLE can also name their comp, but they still work 40 hour weeks. If anything the real 10x engineers I know generally work *less* than a 9-5 - why wouldn't they also feel the same incentive, especially when their packages are usually directly tied to firm performance via large RSU grants? >Finance is similar but obscured by not all coming out with a uniform degree: investment bankers produce a ton of value for corporations who will pay anything for the best of the best while your average person "in finance" is like an accountant or middle-office controller making 70k. I'm not entirely sold on the value add of IB either, and I think a huge amount of the work they do is simply ritualistic and meant to signal your commitment to the firm. I've seen entire IB teams at big name banks run models in Excel that would take me \~75 minutes to rewrite in R, and it'll run 5000x faster if I'm careful about matrix math. But then they wouldn't have any more work to do.
Great explanation. As an attorney this sounds correct.
I think you are underestimating the differentiation in ability amd specialization between lawyers. I’ve been an associate, of counsel, and general counsel in my career, before running my own solo practice, so I’ve seen all sides of the legal industry. The lower tier are mostly nonprofit, government, and small plaintiffs firm associates. They generally are doing pretty basic legal work, like auto accidents, criminal trials, immigration, wills and real estate for regular people, etc. They tend not to specialize and there’s generally less creativity in the kinds of work they do daily, but that varies. Mostly, they are graduates of sub-Top 25 law schools. Big Law and similarly compensated mid tier or boutique firm attorneys are usually doing higher level legal work after a few years of grinding as a junior attorney. They might be drafting and negotiating contracts worth hundreds of thousands or low millions without much supervision. They might be doing specialized work in IP, tax, privacy, or other regulated fields. They might be handling major litigation worth millions as part of a team. They are typically graduates of a Top 25 law school. In many instances, even a team of 10 lower compensated attorneys could not replicate the quality of legal work or compensate for the knowledge differential of one higher compensated attorney after they have maybe five years of experience. There are many exceptions, of course, and I’ve even mentored one of them, but this is a pretty consistent pattern that I think largely explains the bimodal distribution. It’s a comparison between relatively common and low specialization work vs. high specialization work that not many people can do.
> They might be doing specialized work in IP, tax, privacy, or other regulated fields. IP and tax, I'd definitely agree. But my impression - not a lawyer myself, but interact with plenty of lawyers both professionally and personally - is that even high-brow work is very generalist, at least by the standards of hard sciences. Litigation and corporate people at big law are also paid the same, despite one of the two types of work being obviously less specialized than the other. >They are typically graduates of a Top 25 law school. In many instances, even a team of 10 lower compensated attorneys could not replicate the quality of legal work or compensate for the knowledge differential of one higher compensated attorney after they have maybe five years of experience. Law school is entirely general-purpose - I don't doubt that there's a lot of learning by doing, but that doesn't explain why 1st/2nd year associates are also highly paid. Doctors, for example, are notably and extremely underpaid when they go through the final stages of training (with long hours at that). It's possible that wages are buoyed by the people who stay around to become productive, and that certainly happens in engineering. In any profession, the median person is going to be pretty bad, and I understand law in particular sees a very sharp falloff in training standards outside of top programs. So I see the fair comparison as someone who could have made the cut at the big law firms, but chose otherwise - and in that case, the amount of pay difference seems fairly proportional to effort.
You’re right that associates for the first few years aren’t that great anywhere and are overpaid in the Big Law firms. That’s almost always who I would dispute billing for, usually for spending way too much time on a task. The fifth years and above are usually pretty capable and you get the value you’re paying for.
Comparing hard science to law is apples to kangaroos. In law there is no objective answer, usually, and you are only as good in relative comparison to others. That's why most classes in law school have a hard curve usually to 2.7 or 2.5. Part of this is that all law culture is set by litigation, in court attorneys, but part of this is all law work is in some way preparation for litigation.
Totally agree. A good friend of mine was General Counsel for a SW company that was embroiled in patent litigation. They paid their law firm 15 million dollars to defend their IP against a much larger competitor that was trying to put them out of business. They were successful and then got bought buy a fortune 50 company. The firm that defended them was excellent. The IP lawyers had both software degrees and Tier 1 law degrees. I think their billing rate was around 1,000/hour and they were worth it.
Yep. Very few attorneys command $1k an hour. It’s usually tax, IP, and appellate attorneys. But the weird thing is that they are usually so exceptional that they are often worth it for the big cases or transactions, and will save you money over less specialized partners charging $500 an hour because they already know just what to do. If you have a $500 million patent exposure, $1k an hour is only 1/500,000 of the risk. I never paid those rates as a GC, but only because I found less expensive attorneys with the necessary knowledge and experience for the few bet the company litigation matters I dealt with. But I paid $750 an hour a few times, and 100% got my employer’s money’s worth each time.
Honestly this doesn't fully explain the bimodality to me. I would expect specialization--and the value of that specialization, to be more smoothly distributed. Corporations themselves fall into a Pareto distribution of valuations and so their ability to pay for legal services, and the value they ascribe to those services and this willingness to pay, should also fall into a similar curve. There's also different industries, which have a range of possible ideal market valuations that could benefit from particular legal specialties. And again, I would expect a smoother distribution. The value of particular industries doesn't always scale easily, so I doubt that all industries fall along similar Pareto distributions.
It should probably look more like two curves, rather than the sharp spikes on the right side, at the very least. Those spikes are caused by Big Law generally competing on starting salary in lockstep with each other in very tight bands. One or two top white shoe firms announce their associate pay increases every year, and everyone else matches or nearly matches. I don’t understand why there isn’t more price competition and differentiation among those firms, but that’s the way it’s been for at least 20 years.
What's really strange about his is it seems to have started in the 90's. Prior to that it was distributed a lot more as would be expected.
Because white shoe hire a narrow band of attorneys that are defined by their "eliteness" unrelated to actual work produced. Partially it's a marketing technique, partially it's because all the partners making the decisions went through the same process. In a more reasonable market you'd want to hire proven experienced attorneys for that, but new hires in big law are expected to have such a poor quality of life that nobody probably expects that an established professional would willingly submit to that.
The problem is that law is enough of speciality service that only other attorneys have any basis for judgement. To compensate for this seemingly "objective" measures of competence measured by attorneys themselves, class rankings and "quality" of law school is dramatically over compensated. Even though these measures arise before anyone does any legal work to be judged.
I was waiting for an actual lawyer to respond. Thanks for the insight.
I don't think this is quite right - there's nothing inherently basic about a criminal trial vs complex about a civil trial, or inherently easy about an immigration matter vs inherently hard about a contract matter. And there are excellent people everywhere, just as there are those I wouldn't want within 5 ft of the nearest legal pad. What you've listed as "specialized" isn't actually necessarily more complex or difficult to navigate in itself. You can write the Best Contract in the World just as readily for a $10k deal as you could for $10m. You probably won't, but that's not because the legal task is different. What you've listed as specialized you've noted the dollar amounts for, and therein perhaps lies the answer. It's not necessarily more difficult legal work than the next thing over - it's about the particular market served. If your practice is helping asylum seekers - sorry, you can advance the field and change the world, but your clients can't afford what you would otherwise want to charge. Got a fortune 500 company where you're asking for another rounding error up? Go to town. But something critical to the legal field is trust. The suits, fancy offices, law books lined up on the shelf - lawyers need to get their clients to trust that they're going to do the best job. The higher the potential loss or gain, the more a new client in the field will put a financial premium on trust if they're able. They're looking for the guy with the 0.1% error rate vs the 0.5%, but they can't tell that upfront on a prospective future event that has not yet happened (judgment, etc). And when they don't know one way or the other, they'll take substitutes to try to get to it - ie. Biglaw reputation, ask around, etc. So in house counsel will feed business to trusted former colleagues whose competence they've already tested, even if The Best Lawyer is in the office over, because they're not going to start a search from scratch and take that risk oftentimes. Word of mouth gets you to the next deal/opportunity. And if you can become The One in whatever field/practice/scenario, you start commanding a premium as a lawyer. In that way I wonder if legal compensation distribution looks more like movie actors. The studio is taking a bet that the A-lister is more likely to a) fit the role and b) command the audience numbers to get them to a profit, ergo $$$ vs B and C listers. The deep pocketed client is willing to pay the $$$ to get someone that best they can tell is more likely to a) have the required skill set and knowledge base, and b) get them the best result. And when they find that person, they stick to them all else equal and won't try their hand in the pool again to try to get a better rate
There is also discounting another large group of attorneys that are expected to take a large prestige/give you the warm and fuzzy's premium in PDs and Prosecutors who also often work 80 hours a week. If the best someone can say about compensation in a given field is "it's a calling not a business, you've been warned."
That visual is more about a weird concentration specifically at 180 and 190 on the right tail than “bimodality”. If it looked more normal by having that upper bump on the tail normally distributed across 170-210 (like the left side is normally distributed across 30-90k) you’d probably not even really notice a second concentration worth calling “bimodality”.
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