The Lawyer's Golden Mean
I caught up with a law school friend over bagels and coffee recently. It had been a while. Seven years, in fact. We talked about the things that thirty- and forty-somethings talk about: work and our families, particularly our kids.
Jobs are always a dicey subject with lawyers. An alarming percentage of our profession either slogs through legal work or outright detests it. Many have left the profession entirely. So, I was happy for my friend when I learned that he now enjoys working for a respected government agency. He's been there about six years. His benefits are great, his job is secure, his schedule is flexible—remote, forty hours a week, structured however he wants as long as the work gets done, with every other Friday off—his work is interesting, and his colleagues are nice.
For many, it sounds like the dream. Lawyers aren't always so lucky. Certain legal jobs—including many well-paying ones—combine stress and boredom in ways that produce attrition rates seldom seen in other fields. Yet my friend has found a gig that works exceedingly well for him. It's the screwdriver of law jobs. His salary? He started around $95,000 and now makes $180,000.
Something about that number, when I heard him say it, struck me like lightning. It seemed like I'd stumbled onto a simple but irrefutable law of legal-profession physics: if you want the other benefits I just listed—great healthcare, job security, consistent hours, reasonably interesting work, and nice colleagues, all while being home in time for dinner—$180,000 is a realistic spot to think about topping out, salary-wise, in 2026.
Lots of these jobs are in government. Others are in truly collegial smaller firms with stable client bases and practice areas resistant to wildly undulating scheduling demands. If you're lucky, you might even score one—with a considerably higher salary to boot—in a company's in-house legal department. This is, of course, light years from those eye-popping (but easily fudgeable) profits-per-partner figures flashed all over the internet. But my friend, despite not earning a number that ambitious pre-law and law students would consider breathtaking, has hit a career home run given the rest of his perks.
Starry-eyed pre-laws, law students, and early-career lawyers are prone to looking at top-paying legal jobs and seeing themselves there someday. But it is especially difficult to make a one-percenter income and achieve a rich quality of life in law. Many lawyers in a position to choose will one day have to choose between their money and their life.
True, there are rich—filthy, stinking, ultra-high-net-worth rich—lawyers, and some of them are surely so happy they tap-dance to work every morning. But they comprise a narrower slice of the profession than you'd think, and in my experience, they fall into three buckets: people who get Big Law jobs, thrive, and make partner; people who hit the in-house jackpot; and entrepreneurial trial lawyers. The Big Law survivors have won a decade-long, grueling billable-hours tournament and impressed all the right people in the process. The in-house winners spotted an opportunity with serious upside (or fell into it by happenstance) and were in the right place when it rained stock options. The trial lawyers live and breathe the courtroom in ways few other lawyers do, wedding a rare talent to a craft that happens to reward working alone—and pays out spectacularly when the talent is real.
If these three careers were described in weight-loss-infomercial terms, a wordy "results not typical" disclaimer would be flashing across your screen right now. They're great jobs for the right people. But if you go to law school, please don't bank on being one of those people—especially if you're paying with loans. And if you're already practicing and meh about it, it's at least worth questioning whether tolerating the job for the money is worthwhile.
That's especially true because, if you've realized you're ambivalent about law but still count making real money chiefly among your career goals, other fields are simply better vehicles. Finance, business management, and entrepreneurship are orders of magnitude better for wealth creation—faster, arguably more enjoyable, perhaps even less stressful. It's telling that, for years, out of the three or four dozen law-degree holders scattered across the Forbes 400, exactly one got there by practicing law: the late tort king Joe Jamail. Everyone else made their fortune somewhere other than the courtroom. Far more lawyers have gotten rich by leaving law for business; The Carlyle Group's David Rubenstein, himself a law grad, comes to mind. I'll go out on a limb and venture that Rubenstein and others like him are content with how things unfolded after they left firm life behind.
But if what you want from law isn't riches so much as a comfortable, rewarding, and often intellectually stimulating career, consider my friend's path. He loves his life in law. And encouragingly, his route to that government gig is notable for how pedestrian it was.
Before the government, he worked at a law firm. It was his first job out of school, and the type of place any graduate ranked somewhere in the middle of basically any class could reasonably land, especially with a little networking groundwork or the ability to speak intelligently about one of the firm's practice areas. Like so many young associates, he found the experience frustrating. So, eight months in, he went looking for the government job and quit the firm within the year. He shook off a rocky start and forged a path to a rich life in law. I know for a fact he couldn't care less that it tops out well short of a one-percent income.
My friend, my other classmates, and I have seen a wide range of outcomes—everything from clerking for the Supreme Court and other federal judges and then succeeding at megafirms, to leaving the profession entirely. Among those I've kept up with, career satisfaction does not correlate strongly with prestige and earnings. If anything, the two may be inversely related. And as the years pass, one bagel-and-coffee breakfast at a time, I've come to think that right around $180,000, lawyers can reach a kind of golden mean: interesting work, nice colleagues, great benefits, sane and predictable hours, and a flexible schedule. So, if you're a burnt-out associate hunting for greener pastures, or an ambitious student who could use a dose of reality, take note. Building your long-term expectations around $180,000 a year—not twenty times that—might just be the healthiest and most rewarding approach you can take.