Which Lawyer Makes The Most Money?
The lawyer with the best grades from the best law school makes the most money
. The guy with the ivy covered diploma makes ten times what the public school graduate makes...every year for his entire career. The difference spreads geometrically as the years pass.
Three fundamental choices largely determine how much an attorney will earn in a lifetime. First, by far most importantly, a student's choice among law schools dramatically influences his or her income potential. Second, a law student's grades and class standing contribute substantially to his or her leverage on a handsome salary or staggering hourly rate. Third, an attorney's choice of specialty has tremendous impact on how much money he or she will make.
Although choosing strictly for the money probably counts as the very worst reason for becoming an attorney, if the earnings make or break your choice, then plan to graduate #1 in your class at Harvard Law School, going on to become a partner in a Wall Street law firm. Learn all about the practice of corporate law, mastering contracts, property, and securities. Then, with command of the statutes and case law in those areas, become a litigator and build-up a jaw-dropping winning percentage.
Satisfy the gatekeepers. Get the grades.
Long before you start ordering custom-made clothing for courtroom appearances, though, you must learn to meet and exceed the gatekeeper's standard, the one principle that determines all in preparation for the practice of law: Grades are everything. It's all about the grades. Grades make or break. How many different ways can anyone phrase it? If you intend to make the big money, you had better earn the big-big glow-in-the-dark grades. Straight A's are nice. Straight A's in "honours" and "advanced placement" courses are better. Straight A's in those courses at an elite school are better still. And, really, if you intend to make enough to pay the mortgage on a Fifth Avenue penthouse, you had better deliver straight A-plusses in those highly competitive classes at Exeter.
Keep in mind that earning good grades has very little to do with intellect. Einstein was a terrible student. All the American writers who won the Nobel Prize for Literature during the twentieth century either failed freshman English in college or never bothered attending college in the first place. The same holds true for successful law students. No one ever has established any correspondence between genius and good grades. Commanding those A-plusses has far more to do with stamina, pit-bull determination, and negotiating skill than it has to do with an IQ that wins admission to Mensa. Most importantly, earning straight A's in law school requires that you learn to think like a lawyer. Most practically, commanding the top grades depends most on your command of language. If you really and truly can read and write, you always can compete at an advantage. Not that you know all the vocabulary words; instead, that you genuinely command the language.
In practice, an attorney's specialty determines which lawyer makes the most money.
In America's ten largest cities, the average attorney makes just a little more than the average teacher's salary, landing solidly in the middle of the middle class. Among attorneys who work in large, prestigious firms, successful litigators command the highest salaries-often in excess of $750(US) per billable hour. Not surprisingly, though, they work the longest hours, and they have the highest rates of burn-out, clinical depression, alcoholism, and suicide. The big money comes at a high price. Literary scholars stress that the United States will support only fifty truly great writers in any generation. Legal scholars insist that the same applies to great litigators.
by: Tony Philip
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