Salary.sg Forums - View Single Post - Lawyer Salary
Thread: Lawyer Salary
View Single Post
  #13410 (permalink)  
Old 10-09-2021, 09:13 PM
Unregistered
Guest
 
Posts: n/a
Default

The way you rank people and box people into linear categories according to their school achievements is telling.

How much someone is paid is dependent on the type of market they are in, and not what grade academics give them in school

It is a function of simply serving the singapore market, and law being very jurisdictional, that local firms aren’t making a lot. Big 4, neither, they are making too little. The point the previous posters are making is simply showing the dysfunctional side of the Singapore legal market vis a vis others

And 210k for international firms are simply starting salaries, junior pay. Because these firms are making bank. There is no point taking out some partner salary to say oh this partner is also making 210k a year, millions a year!

The way the Singapore market is unfortunately means that since the pie is already so small, and the partners keep most of it to themselves, very little trickles down to the juniors.
This is all relative, no one should be making comparisons to wholly irrelevant industries.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Unregistered View Post
Umm...the point I was making is that even less than cream-of-crop lawyers will eventually get fairly good optimal outcomes if they stick it out long enough?

The same can't be said for many other industries who will be stuck in low pay and dead-end roles if they start at lousy small SME companies, and literally only way out of the rut is to start your own business (with no guarantee of success).

OK if you wanna compare apples to apples, then let's compare:

The top lawyers working in international law firms earning US$210K per annum Cravath salaries, are to be compared against IB, Private Equity, and FAANG people. These are the top fresh grads/juniors in their respective fields.

The mediocre lawyers who didn't study that hard/pad their CVs that much and go into local Big 4 firms, are to be compared against business grads going into your typical DBS, OCBC, UOB management associate track, or some non-FAANG tech firm.

The bottom level lawyers, who didn't study at all and graduated with Second Lower/2:2 and go into Chinatown firms, are to be compared against business grads going into SMEs, small local companies, or small tech sweatshops.

Not sure what is so difficult to comprehend?

Also don't understand why you keep whining on and on about small Chinatown firms. Sure, their junior assocs are paid depressingly low compared to an average Big 4 grad. But that's how the market is. In fact, juxtaposed against other (non-law) industries, even a Chinatown salary isn't even that low.

In every industry, there are the brightest grads who go on to take the most coveted roles. The least desired spots are filled with the least competitive grads. If they really wanted that sweet biglaw dollar, then they only have themselves to blame for not studying harder or making their CV more attractive by joining moot competitions or whatever.
Reply With Quote