Anonymous User wrote:Anonymous User wrote:What "more lucrative jobs" require a clerkship? You're talking to someone who will be clerking - but I have just about the most lucrative legal paths possible, and it's in spite of the clerkship, not because of it.
Plaintiffs side lit boutiques.
Very hard to land a job with some of the top ones without a clerkship.
But if you can land such a job, odds are pretty you'll be bringing in well over $1 mill before you're 35, with a much higher ceiling than big law (one case that springs to mind from a few years ago...partner who brought it in took home over $30 million).
I don't think you're right. You're citing an individual who took home over $30 million, which is well and good - but the number of LAWYERS who bring home that kind of money is very, very tiny. And a clerkship is no way in hell linked to a $30m payout.
Plaintiff-side contingency firms that are successful can pay off much higher than hours-billed defense side big law firms, but it is a weird thing to say that you should do a clerkship because then you can be a member of one of those firms. I can count on one hand - the number of plaintiff-side boutiques that work on contingency basis, which are successful enough for a young associate to pursue over a traditional defense-side billable-hours model.
Pursuing a clerkship with plaintiff-side in mind is a very bizarre model. Maybe you think that any plaintiff-side firm on account of its structure earns higher than defense-side big law, but if this were the case - top lawyers would just quit their firms and work on contingency. They don't, because litigation is very expensive. I'm flipping through a "law firm business models" book, and they're mentioning exactly what you're talking about, but the way the book describes it - only a handful of firms pull this payment arrangement on the plaintiff side well enough to be attractive enough to walk away from the security of billable defense side big law. Maybe the book, or my read of it, is wrong.