Quote:
Originally Posted by Unregistered
I dunno why yall talking like mcm civil servants, all these woolly notions of salary must go up just cos some time has passed, must beat inflation, etc. Like apropos of nothing, and simply by virtue of being an employee, can talk about salary in the abstract, divorced from any value it is supposed to be commensurate with
Yall forgetting you sell legal services. Sell being the operative word, if not each one of you got charge out rate and do time sheets for what
Not a single post has addressed the value contributed point. So I'll repeat it - in this day and age, wtf does a lawyer do to justify the salary they draw. Why is the argument for more, and not less. Why isn't NQ pay $2,500
|
This guy must be a salty non-lawyer. Only people who wanted to, but failed to, become a lawyer will ever use "apropos of nothing" in their writing (in an attempt to look clever).
It's very simple. Legal fees for a freshly called associate is $300+/h. On average you should be billing 2000+ hours a year, but let's count it as 2000. That's $600,000 a year. That's the value you are providing to your firm/customers (also, because the OP is evidently not an economist, value is determined by market forces that deem your work at a certain pricepoint --> stupidly saying that lawyers have not addressed their value proposition is an argument that can be transposed to any vocation - why doctors demand high salary? why bankers demand high salary? why xxx demand high salary? - because that's the value society is willing to ascribe to the work that they do).
Again, since the OP evidently does not know how the legal industry works, the breakeven point for hiring a fresh lawyer is estimated at 3x their pay. I.e. if you are paid 6k/mth, you should be billing 18k/mth. That's only $216,000. Meaning that the firm, excluding overheads and related costs, are taking around 400k while giving you 72k (and whatever bonus for that year - which is pegged to higher billings). All these extra fees go to the partner's pocket. Generally the partner's only achievement is being born at the right time (when law was not so competitive) and being older and therefore more "experienced".
Telling everyone there is a "glut" of lawyers, and then artificially suppressing wages without a corresponding drop in legal fees tells us that this is merely profiteering by the firms. But we will always have idiots like the OP who are salty of the salaries of NQ lawyers, without understanding the amount of value an NQ lawyer brings to the firm.