What Do Law Graduates Really Earn?

The National Association for Law Placement (NALP) is the professional organization for law school career services offices and large employer recruiting offices. One of NALP's missions is to collect employment data from the nation's law schools, analyze it, and issue reports to help law schools, law students, and legal employers see a national legal employment picture.

This month, in its monthly bulletin, NALP reported on the salary figures from over 22,000 law graduates in the class of 2006. For the class of 2006, the vast majority of graduates started work in small firms of 50 or fewer lawyers, or in non-firm settings, such as government, public interest, or business. Just 20% of all law students in the country took jobs in firms of more than 100 lawyers. The earnings reality for class of 2006 graduates is that there were two clusters of salaries, one in the $40,000-$50,000 range (the larger cluster) and the other in the $135,000 range. The median salary was $62,000, meaning half of the salaries were higher and half were lower than $62,000.

A picture really is worth a thousand words. Go here to see a graph of the 2006 salary figures.