It’s not what I expected to see. After all of the publicity surrounding the move to $180,000, I fully expected to see the national median starting salary for law firms move upwards, but what the data reveal is that for the most part only the largest firms in the largest legal markets made that move, and while many offices are paying $180,000 to start, many are not. The result is upward movement in some law firm size bands while the national median has remained unchanged.
— James Leipold, executive director of the National Association for Law Placement, commenting on the overall median salary for first-year attorneys as of January 1, 2017. That salary was $135,000, the same as was reported by NALP in 2015. It’s important to note that the same thing happened in 2007; even though Biglaw firms moved to a starting salary of $160,000, it took a few years for that salary to become the prevailing rate to push the overall median salary higher.
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Staci Zaretsky has been an editor at Above the Law since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.