How Much Money Does A Lawyer Make 2019

I gave a little presentation to my local bar association a couple weeks ago. Among other things, I talked about attorney salaries and how they differ regionally, and I sifted through a lot of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Turns out the BLS gathers a lot of helpful information about lawyers.

Really, it's not all bad news. The BLS estimated mean annual wage for lawyers is a respectable $144,230. While $144,230 a year doesn't even scratch the bottom of the Milbank/Simpson/Cravath scale, this is a national average. In most parts of the country, an annual salary of $144,230 is more than enough to live a comfortable life and have a reasonable shot at paying off your student loan debt.

Of course, like a lot of averages, this one is inflated by the top end of the market. The median annual wage for lawyers, $120,910, is substantially lower than their mean annual wage. At the 75^th percentile for salary, lawyers are making $182,490 annually — meaning that anyone starting out on the Cravath scale is earning, in the first year, more than three out of every four of their colleagues nationwide. But at the 25^th percentile, lawyers are only making $79,160 a year. Those at the 10^th percentile are pulling in an annual salary of just $58,220.

That's a bit of a problem for those at the lower end of the spectrum. U.S. News puts the average debt load of a J.D. student who graduated from a private school in 2018 at $123,511 (we know the real average is probably a bit higher, considering that the U.S. News debt data leaves out some schools where student debt loads are likely to be higher than average). Students who got a J.D. from a public school reportedly carried a slightly more manageable average debt of $86,747 at graduation, according to U.S. News. The interest rates on federal student loans range from just over 4.5 percent to a smidge above 7 percent. The lowest interest rate is for undergraduate loans; the best interest rate you can hope to get right now for graduate or professional federal student loans is a hair over 6 percent. Even at 6 percent, a new lawyer with the average debt load from a private law school is accumulating $7,410.66 per year in extra debt from interest alone. A lawyer at the 25^th percentile for salary, after paying taxes, would have to set aside more than 10 percent of his or her income just to tread water and make the interest payments.

Now, you might say that the relatively measly salaries are only for recent graduates, and that as an attorney builds a practice and progresses in his or her career, the salary will increase accordingly. That is surely true, to an extent, and BLS does not break down its salary data by age or years of practice to give us a more complete picture of the work experience factor. However, BLS does have a separate occupational category for "Judges, Magistrate Judges, and Magistrates," and folks in the judicial branch seem to be making, on average, even less than the attorneys appearing before them (which I don't think is a surprise to any litigators).

The mean annual wage for judges is $121,130. This doesn't include administrative law judges, who have their own BLS category and their own even lower average salary. In my home jurisdiction, although I don't think it's written down anywhere as an actual rule, the conventional wisdom is that one need not even apply for a judicial position without at least 10 years of prior substantive practice experience. To become a judge, one must apparently have a core dedication to public service, a wealthy family, or, in very recent history, a pathological compulsion to shamelessly promote far-right ideology.

Attorneys and judges are, on average, doing alright after having clawed their way through seven years of post-secondary education, even within a legal job market that has resembled a World War I battlefield for most of the past decade. Still, around a quarter of us are drowning financially. As a profession, we should browbeat anyone even considering going to law school with that fact. And maybe those of us who are doing fine loan-wise should also keep it in mind when the urge to get snippy with opposing counsel inevitably bubbles up.

Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn't want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.