Where Is The Best Place To Live For A Lawyer?

Are you looking to relocate? According to one study, these are some of the best places a lawyer can settle.

While big cities like New York and Washington may boast the most lawyers with the best “big ticket” legal work, they may not offer the best balance between professional success and quality of life. Apparently, that matters to some people.

So a group known as GoodCall set out to chart the best small cities for law school graduates. Just in case you’ve decided to go all Green Acres with your bad self and move to Hooterville.

But before you call the moving company, let’s take a gander at this methodology:

The average lawyer salary was taken from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment Statistics tool and represents the annual mean wage for lawyers (Occupation Code 23-1011) in 2013. This represents 40% of our overall score.

I call shenanigans on this measurement right out of the gate. It strikes me that some of the cities on this list wouldn’t have such an attractive “mean wage” if it weren’t for some reclusive Gerry Spence-type kicking back in a small town and taking occasional swims in his Money Bin.

It also lends itself to conflating “small towns with solid legal jobs” and “suburbs just close enough to a major hub that a senior partner can still commute.” The latter makes for a much different list than the former.

Not that this skews all the findings, but it definitely got my guard up.

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Beyond that the methodology is pretty straightforward:

The employment attractiveness rank is based on a combination of law job density, which was taken from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and law job availability and competition (resumes per available law job), which were taken from Indeed.com. This metric, which shows how attractive an area is for job seekers, represents 35% of our overall score.

The housing affordability index was taken from the U.S. Census American Fact Finder. This is the average percentage of income spent on housing, and represents 15% of our overall score.

The amenities score was calculated using data from the U.S. Census American Fact Finder. This is the number of amenities per 1,000 households. It includes arts, entertainment and recreation, and represents 10% of our overall score.

All right, where should you live? Let’s count ’em down. Drum roll. Number 10…

Number 10: Cheyenne, WY

The relative paucity of shootouts on Main Street these days have turned it into a lawyers’ paradise. GoodCall says the average lawyer salary is $109,540, which would probably go a long way in the wide open spaces of Wyoming.

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The key to Cheyenne’s success? Oil, gas, and mining. The Rocky Mountain trifecta pumps good money into the otherwise rural area. And you’d think the senior partners at these energy sector firms would be wildly out-earning their associates, to say nothing of the local prosecutors and public defenders, but a quick job search reveals that working as a lawyer for the state pulls down over $98K. Not bad at all.

Number 9: Fairbanks, AK

I hope you like it cold. Average winter temperatures range from −15 to −25 °F and can run as low as −60 to −75 °F. But there’s some oil money to be made up there — average lawyer salary of $112,930 — if you’re fine with bridges to nowhere and saying “snow machine” when you mean “snowmobile.”

8. Canton, IL

This was the best picture of Canton I could find on the city’s website. Parked cars and no people. The rest of the pictures, ostensibly of the town, featured ducks and old men in boats, which appear to be the main attractions.

Now this is a small town — a mere 15,288, according to the 2000 Census. The average lawyer salary is $99,160, which is pretty remarkable for a city with fully 10 percent of its families below the poverty line.

It’s not entirely clear what Canton lawyers do. There’s some ethanol in the area — energy is becoming a theme on this list — and a medical device factory.

7. Barre, VT

ATL Research Director Brian Dalton, and Middlebury graduate, said of this selection, “I don’t even think there’s a stoplight in Barre.” Well, it does look like there’s at least one stoplight in that picture.

Indeed, with almost 60,000 residents, Barre is pretty big — at least as far as this list is concerned — with only Cheyenne boasting a larger population of the cities profiled so far.

It’s also kind of a cheat, since Barre is sort of a twin city with Vermont’s capital of Montpelier, making Barre the likely home of the gaggle of lawyers that congregate around state capitals as government functionaries and lobbyists. The average lawyer salary is a healthy $106,700 to live in the quaint little town.

6. Shelby, NC

I do not know who Earl Scruggs is. However, it appears he performed the theme song to The Beverly Hillbillies, which is apt since this whole list is basically the opposite of that show’s premise.

Why Shelby? Other than it being “A City of Pleasant Living”? It’s about an hour’s drive from the booming banking town of Charlotte. Consider this an extended suburb. That’s how you get to an average lawyer salary of $105,680.

The top 5 on the next page…