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Firms Say Getting a First-Year Job Is Competitive; Salaries in Holding Pattern

Law school graduates are facing a pretty tight job market.

While firms are hiring at a decent pace, salaries have been fairly stagnant for the past few years and law firms said they can afford to be choosy about who they’re hiring.

“I’m seeing a lot of very good resumes crossing my desk unsolicited,” said Tom Newmeyer, co-managing partner of Newport Beach law firm Newmeyer & Dillion LLP. “Traditionally a law firm looking for fresh talent would go to a headhunter. We do use headhunters, as any larger firm does, but we’ve been able to hire people because they’ve been submitting resumes and their resumes are very good. That indicates it’s a tight market out there.”

In 2001, the average salary for first-year associates was $95,000, according to Wilmington, Del.-based Internet Legal Research Group. It dipped to $90,000 in 2002, then rebounded to $97,800 a year later.

Internet Legal Re-search Group hasn’t released its 2004 salary study yet, but law firm officials said the average salary for new recruits hasn’t risen much since 2003.

“I wouldn’t say that it’s a buyer’s market, but salary growth definitely has flattened since the dot-com boom in the late 1990s. There was a real bump in salaries for associates then,” said James Bear, managing partner for Irvine law firm Knobbe, Martens, Olson & Bear LLP. “But for the best students from the best law schools there are still plenty of jobs.”

Some, like Steven Rice, co-managing partner of the Irvine office of Washington, D.C., law firm Crowell & Moring LLP, expect salaries to remain in a holding pattern for the next few years.

“Salaries haven’t changed much in the past several years, and I think that’s probably going to continue,” Rice said.

One law practice bucking the trend: intellectually property.

“The highest demand for lawyers is in the IP area,” he said. “Those lawyers may even be able to command a little bit of a premium.”






Greenberg Traurig’s Schaller: “competing for all the best students from around the country”

Lawyers said technology companies are aggressively protecting their patent turf, and in some cases using their patent portfolios as a big source of growth (see related story, page 13).

It isn’t cheap to attract top lawyers to Orange County, said Gordon Schaller, head of the Costa Mesa office of Miami law firm Greenberg Traurig LLP.

“At the starting level we’re competing for all the best students from around the country,” he said.

Still, Schaller said that law firms here “don’t have to pay what top firms in New York pay.”

The salary situation today is a response to the pay hyperinflation of the tech boom years, Newmeyer said.

“When the big firms really upped their starting salaries in the late 1990s, other folks had to follow suit. But salaries tend to compress after that,” he said. “You’re also seeing far more attorneys per person in the U.S. Back in 1978 there was one lawyer for every 400 people and now it’s about one for every 150.”

Newmeyer said students have to be at the top of their class to get jobs quickly, even if they graduated from top schools.

“If you’re at the bottom of the class,even at Harvard,it’s not so easy,” he said. “You may have to wait until you pass the bar.”

That’s another trend Newmeyer is seeing: lawyers being hired only after they pass the bar.

“And some may go into some other business other than law or even start their own firms,” he said.

One way law firms can justify paying less-than-exorbitant salaries is to promise fewer hours.

“What we try and do at our firm is promise that people won’t have to work insane hours,” Newmeyer said. “But you’re not going to get paid the same wage.”

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