Many Attorneys Struggle Financially, as Paychecks Fatten for a Few
Jeanne Wrenn loves her job as an assistant Cook County prosecutor in Chicago. But she isn’t as thrilled about her $59,000 salary.
A single mother seven years out of law school, which she borrowed $100,000 to attend, the 36-year-old Wrenn has a part-time job as a bartender to help make ends meet, reports the Chicago Tribune.
“Most Fridays, after a long week at the county prosecutor’s office, she’s behind the bar at Lizzie McNeill’s Irish Pub downtown. Clad in a black polo shirt and dark jeans, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, she pours a mean Guinness, handling the pints with the same dexterity she uses to juggle folders and legal pads during her day job,” the newspaper writes.
While Wrenn earns more than most teachers, and the average pay for a lawyer nationally is $113,600 annually—almost triple the $39,190 average pay for all Americans—she, like many other attorneys, has to wonder sometimes what her life would have been like had she managed to score one of the profession’s top salaries. The Trib notes, for instance, that a Boston lawyer, Kirsten Wolf, became an Internet celebrity earlier this year, after she pointed out that she had received little economic benefit from her law school education. (Her situation is discussed in an earlier ABAJournal.com post.)
As the salary gap between the bottom three-quarters and the top 25 percent of Chicago lawyers has widened in recent decades, the highest-paid associates at major firms are starting fresh out of law school at salaries of $160,000 plus an annual bonus and some equity partners earn seven figures. “A recent University of Chicago study found that at the top 50 U.S. law firms, profits per partner have soared by a factor of four, from $310,000 in 1983 to $1.26 million as of 2004. That far exceeds wage growth in the economy at large,” the Tribune writes.
However, even lawyers in the upper echelons of the profession complain that they make less and lack the social status of those at the top of their game in other fields, as another ABAJournal.com post discusses.
And, increasingly, in the law as in other fields, attorneys must choose between working harder for less money, at a job that perhaps isn’t what they anticipated or would have wished to pursue when they opted to attend law school, or finding a way to cut costs in order to put a priority on the quality of their lives.
This situation has created tension between the haves and have-nots of the legal profession. And that tension will only worsen, predicts Harvard Law School academic John Coates, as regulation of law schools and legal practice eventually eases, allowing more attorneys to practice and non-attorney ownership of law firms.
Thus, at least potentially, there could be a further reduction in the compensation that lawyers can expect to earn for their work, he says, as the profession is separated into three compensation categories. They will be, as the article describes them: “The super-highly-paid, a middle tier of the highly paid and, by far the biggest group, everybody else.”
