Comment by elicksaur | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elicksaur | Hacker News Reader

The author doesn’t understand the reason for the bimodal distribution of attorney compensation. If you look at a distribution of salaries overall, they are not smooth. There will be small peaks at round numbers, $60k, $70k, 80k, etc., rather than a smooth curve from 60->80. People like round numbers.

The top peak in the law is due to human bias just the same.

>Just like how a partner at Cravath likely sketches an outline of how they want to approach a particular case and swarms of largely replaceable lawyers fill in the details…

Except those “replaceable” attorneys at Cravath are the top peak of the distribution. The distribution is caused by social decisions of what firms to compete with. Top salary information is well-publicized and firms who want to be in the category of “BigLaw” basically match each other.

The lower peak of the distribution is more local attorneys. Your local estate law attorney, government workers like district attorneys/public defenders, etc. who are not competing with Cravath for talent or clients.

I would assume this is already what exists in programming with “BigTech” salaries being equivalently publicized and matched across firms concerned with being perceived to be a “FAANG+”. If it doesn’t, I would guess the reason is that not enough positions actually exist in “BigTech” to make a significant blip on a population-wide salary graph. BigLaw attorneys exist in almost every medium-large city in the US, but you can’t say the same about BigTech programmers.

Law is extreme because you have people who went to a relative handful of law schools, clerked for federal court justices including SCOTUS, and work at white shoe big city law firms (like Cravath)--and everyone else. Yes, senior partners make more than junior partners make more than associates at those firms but it's also sort of up or out (and the out associates tend to move on to other things).

And then there are the, as you say, local attorneys doing routine real estate transactions or whatever. Which tend to be pretty middling compensation generally.

The story isn't quite that neat of course. Big company in-house counsels tend to be reasonably well compensated professional jobs and there are successful owners/partners of local law practices but there's a pretty good bimodal narrative in general.

You can imagine why there might be a modality for people who can land jobs at specific tech companies that pay outsized salaries because they're so profitable and can afford to be very selective based on (they hope) relevant criteria but it's certainly based on less clear metrics if nothing else.

> went to a relative handful of law schools, clerked for federal court justices including SCOTUS, and work at white shoe big city law firms

This is the "not what you know, it's WHO you know" pattern. I imagine it's likely to accelerate. It'll still be important to go to the right university and pay expensive tuition - probably even MORE important - but you'll be able to have AI do most of the tedious, irrelevant academic side while you focus on the very important business of going to parties with the right people.

It does seem to me a lawyer's pedigree is as important as the types of arguments they bring to the case.

I imagine this bias exists because law schools are a dime a dozen, and lawyers have created another form of gatekeeping to augment their licensing rules.

At the partner level of big firms, law is at least as much about signing clients as it is doing legal work.

Agreed. I was entering the law field around 2001. 1) During 1990's, silicon valley startups started poaching talented lawyers from west coast law firms. 2) To combat this, some top west coast law firms raised their salaries to retain talent. 3) At the same time, junior lawyers in NYC and CA starting sharing salary information on Internet message boards. 4) Almost over night, top NYC law firms raised their salaries to match the CA salaries. 5) So the bimodal distribution was formed from the "top" law firms all match each other's salaries.

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