Very true! My hours are not much at all. Again, this is not the norm and I'm making no representation that "if it has happened to me, it can happen to you" kind of thing. I'm only stating what MIGHT be possible.

One last example, I have a former high school classmate who went to a regional tier 4 school here in Texas. He just made half a million dollars off of a wrongful death case. He made 733 grand off of a case he had years ago. He is partnered with two other law school classmates of his. I have another high school classmate who went to a regional tier two who is part of the one million dollar verdict club. He works by himself. If you get a 1 million dollar verdict, that's $333,333 or $400,000 depending on whether you practice contracts on a contingency fee basis or personal injury which is all contingency fee at 40%. This is far from the norm, but I seem to know a lot of attorneys who do very well for themselves outside of biglaw, myself included.

big law = firms that do important deals and litigation, often between multinational fortune 100 corps.

ie
AT&T FTC antitrust review
FB IPO

shit law = private for-profit practices that do everything else, typically advertising on billboards, TV, bus stops

ie
insurance defense
DUI defense

I totally agree. I went to Texas. Most of my classmates and most of the people on this site would be bad at relating to a jury and be bad at marketing their own firm.

But your ability definitely contributes to your success if it relates to very good courtroom skills. If you have them, there is a lot you can do to make a very difficult case highly winnable.

Firm would fit in the 2-10 category. Theres two T10 people (ones a partner, ones not) and the rest are T1, sep for one person who I think he went to UT-Knoxville back in the 80s. Most people are from CU-Boulder, where I go, but there is a T2 in the state that offers access to shitlaw as well, it just so happens that none of them work here.

Dude there may not be much of a difference between your school and a T1, just depends on your school. There is a cutoff at 14 then another one probably osculates somewhere around 20, but the rest of the schools are pretty similar in terms of access to regional job markets. Some schools happen to be located in big cities where 500+ law firms hire the grinders from the top of the class to make them money, some schools are located in rural areas where we enjoy "shit-law." There are lots of individual exceptions and a ton of stuff in between and all around that, but that provides a way to think about it. Ha don't worry, if your TTT is in a rural area, you can do shitlaw just like me.

FWIW, no one around here would call what I do shit-law-- that is just some TLS insecure elitist bullshit, unless you are actually talking about literally chasing ambulances or opening up a one man shop an advertising DUI defense in the phone book. Most of what TLS refers to as shit law is actually far from that, just don't tell the trolls because its not worth your time.

So shitlaw is everything else, but the truth is only probably 1% of "shit law" advertises on billboards, TV, or bus stops. Also you don't really think the middle to upper middle class can afford big law? So where do they go to get their legal work done? I guess they only need help with insurance defense/DUI defense.......

Agreed. That is the biggest problem with this site and it is primarily the reason why I am on it. I want to dispel myths for those who are being misled due to the misinformation on this site. There are too many kids on here that comment on the profession that know NOTHING about the profession. Not all banks and smaller corporations can afford or even want to pay for biglaw services. But like I always say, let those who know nothing continue acting on their flawed thinking. It does you no harm if they think that way.

I agree with what everyone says about "sh*tlaw" not really being sh*t. It's just not as prestigious, and you probably won't see a salary of $100k+ in that career unless (1) you get paid from contingent fee cases that have the potential to have significant amount of punitive damages or (2) you start your own firm and actually try to grow it.

As for the upper and middle class - there are many issues that can be resolved without resorting to paying NLJ firms to handle, if for no other reason that there is no added value in using a large firm over a smaller one. Straightforward wills, state law criminal defense (including speeding tickets and DUIs), simple taxation matters (assuming that they do not already have an accountant to do this), and so on are usually performed by small firm lawyers. There is no point in paying a larger (50+) lawyer firm their fees to handle these issues when a smaller firm (>10) lawyers can handle it just fine for a lower fee.

The clients of most large firms are corporations and extremely wealthy people that have many investments, which often include ownership of a corporation/LLC/Partnership/etc.

People on Xo and JDUnderground seem to make it out to be worse than hell though.

It's a byproduct of the changes in law over the past generation. The real income of solo attorneys has gone down 30% over the last generation, from $65k (adjusted for inflation) to $45k. At the same time, tuition has exploded. Consider the lawyers you have encountered in your small town. The ones that are in the middle of their career (~45 y/o) graduated in the early 1990s. At the time, you could get a law degree from the University of Michigan for $22,000 in tuition (in-state), or about $33,000 in today's dollars. Tuition today for the same degree is about $140,000 (in-state). Even at a third-tier in-state school it will be close to $90,000 (in-state).

So back in 1992, when you graduated from a local school with maybe $25,000 in debt and went to go to work for a small firm for $35,000, life wasn't so bad. Yeah, the folks who went to Cravath were making $80,000, but your own personal situation was reasonable. In 2012, most people will graduate from a local school with $100,000 in debt, and will be making $45,000 at a small firm. That's where the "shit" part comes in.

And not everyone wants to go biglaw even if they had the choice. I had the choice at Texas. I graduated 2007 before the economy went bad. Half of the class at UT Law was eligible for biglaw. We have grads that went to New York, DC, and California. And we dominated biglaw in Texas, which happens to pay just as much as biglaw in other states.

But if you want to be a trial lawyer, you just do not go biglaw because you may NEVER see a courtroom. Plus, not everyone is content with having not much of a life. This site acts as though biglaw is the main goal of everyone who goes to a biglaw eligible law school. And that is far from the case. Again, I'm one of those individuals who did not want biglaw, but could have gotten it.

All I can say is that the OP may not be able to get a law firm job, depending on how well he does in school. But you can always hang your own shingle. My best friend's step dad does transactional work and bankruptcies by himself. I would hardly categorize what he does as sh@#t law. He makes 150k a year. I would say that is very good, especially considering the fact that 150k goes a lot further in Texas than 160k does in New York or California.

Haha I think my favorite is he put "for-profit" by shitlaw and not big law. Yeah those altruists who work for the very richest people on the planet, god love em.

I imagine those sites are self selected for students who took out high loans not really originally interested in law, but moreso interested in having a high profile skyrise office job. A lot of them have probably never worked in the real world outside higher education so don't get how the real world really is (i.e. nobody gives you money for participating or getting an A on a test).

However, I actually like a lot of what's on JDU. The new admin has really cleaned it up and I have found lots of great advice from practicing lawyers on there. It's not nearly as bad as it used to be.

I agree that law school is too expensive, but the shit part in your analysis can certainly be applied to big law. Most people don't realize how long it would take to grind it out in big law and pay off that 200k, considering by the time most of us are 30 yrs old we don't want to live like we're in college.

We get it. Things are so much harder now and it's not fair.

Edit: not everyone is taking out ridiculous loans. There are ways to get around those tuition hikes...scholarships, etc.

Just do bootstraps bro (shitboomer).

Except you don't need punitive damages to make more than 100k off of one case. The contingency part is correct. Punitive damages are hardly awarded in most cases in Texas. Besides, they are capped. They are virtually never awarded in contracts cases. But I have a contract case right now that has a good chance of making us 200k total without punitive damages.

And there are a quite a few criminal attorneys that make more than 100k. The ceiling for trial lawyers, both criminal and especially civil is just really high.

I always thought this. I mean yeah big law is great but there's no way it services any more than 10% of the population of people who purchase legal services.

I also kind of wonder what percentage of people start out in shit law and then just quit the legal profession altogether.

Any thoughts on the path to being a successful shit law attorney?

I'm not a boomer, but a lot of them are right by the way. we are the whiniest generation of all generations to ever be in this country. It makes me want to vomit sometimes.

Loans are an issue, but nobody forces anybody to take out those kinds of loans. Even though I agree with this aspect of a typical boomer argument, I will concede boomers can annoy the hell out of me too sometimes.

It's not a matter of fairness or not. I'm simply explaining why "shit law" is perceived the way it is perceived. Also, it is irrelevant that "not everyone" is taking out loans. I'm making a point about the whole industry, not specific peoples' choices. The vast majority of students at low-ranked schools will not be receiving scholarships.

The other problem with this study, even though I don't think it's necessarily wrong, is that it's hard to know what a solo is making. There are a lot of solos that won't be included in statistics. It's the same issue of why people criticize placement stats. And placement stats, incomplete as they are, tell us even more than solo average salary does.

Congratulations. You are the second one on this site to imply I haven't a clue about my own personal professional experiences. I'm a practicing lawyer. And you want to point to some statistics that combine transactional law practices with trial law practices. Furthermore, you kids need to understand that not all practice areas of law are created equal. And then on top of that, not all industries of a given practice area are created equal. I said earlier that you need to work smart when you have your own practice. Relying on statistics that fail to distinguish different practice areas and fail to distinguish different industries among the same practice area is not working smartly to put it politely.

I never said that my experiences are the norm. But, one can help change their fortune by approaching this matter smartly. It's not easy. But to just give up because the stats say one thing and those stats make no important distinctions is a defeatist mentality that will get you nowhere.

The boomers are utterly wrong on this issue. Take the moralizing ("nobody is forcing you to take loans") out of the equation. That's irrelevant shit. Look at the underlying mechanics of the system. In 1985 (when a boomer might have graduated), tuition and fees at the University of Virginia was $1,800. In 2011 it was $11,600. That means in 1985, you could pay your year's tuition at a top-notch public school for about 550 hours of minimum wage work (basically working weekends). Today, you have to put in about 1,600 hours of minimum wage work (almost a full-time job the whole year).

It's not a matter of fairness or not. I'm simply explaining why "shit law" is perceived the way it is perceived. Also, it is irrelevant that "not everyone" is taking out loans. I'm making a point about the whole industry, not specific peoples' choices. The vast majority of students at low-ranked schools will not be receiving scholarships.[/quote]

Fair enough, I agree here. My point is, the discussion for prospectives should almost always be about how much debt they are taking on and for what (aside from top top schools). As others have mentioned, I also want to dispel the myth that shitlaw is shit in of itself (it absolutely isn't). Again, very few of this countries lawyers work in big firms.

Also, it is relevant to those that MADE the CHOICE not to incur high debt from a non top law school.