Starting salaries at large US law firms stagnate

A new report from NALP shows that associate starting salaries have grown stagnant in New York and across the US, according to this article at AboveTheLaw. The hallowed $160K salary for first-year lawyers is becoming rarer, and now represents just 46 per cent of first-year salaries in firms with more than 700 lawyers — a percentage that has been dropping since 2009. The median salary for firms with more than 700 lawyers has now slipped back to $145,000. Jim Leipold, NALP’s Executive Director, said: “We would not expect to see much widespread upward movement in associate salaries until the demand for legal services in North America picks up considerably from where we are today.” And, as AboveTheLaw suggests, the stagnancy in first-year salaries is also due to the fact that clients are increasingly refusing to pay for their work preferring that the scut work be outsourced at a lower cost.

Starting salaries at large US law firms stagnate abovethelaw.com Sun, Sep 23, 2012