Lawyer Salaries

Houston Chronicle reporter Mary Flood has a blog entitled "Legal Trade: A blog about lawyering" (is "to lawyer" a verb anywhere but inTexas?); today's post is about lawyers' salaries in Texas. (Thanks to Luke Gilman for the heads-up.) The median salary for all Texas lawyers is $113,500. The post links to a story in today's Chronicle about the reality of lawyers' salaries -- "first-year graduates from the three Houston law schools make as little as $30,000 a year and have a median salary of around $70,000." If you have a job making the median $70,000 in salary a year right out of law school, you're doing pretty well for yourself. If you're working for someone else and making $30,000 a year in Houston right out of law school, stop pitying yourself, get off your butt and hang out a shingle. If you're self-employed and making $30,000 a year right in Houston right out of law school, you're doing okay. You can look forward to infinite upside potential. Contrast all of that with three big Houston law firms "announcing that they're raising starting pay to $160,000." In Houston, where the cost of living is less than half of New York's. Here's a news flash for new law school graduates: unless you had a career in which you were earning six figures before law school, you're not worth $160,000 a year. If you're one of the few being paid $160,000 a year by a firm, the clients are getting ripped off. An hour of your time is not worth the $240-plus that they're paying for it. But it's not too late to look for honest work.