Study Finds Experience ‘Sweet Spot’ for Associates Jumping to Corporate Jobs
Young lawyers being tracked in an American Bar Foundation study are extremely mobile, using their law firm experience to find other jobs, most often as corporate lawyers.
The study found 19 percent of the 5,000 lawyers tracked were working in the business sector seven years after passing the bar, compared to 8 percent during the study’s “first-wave” analysis a few years into the lawyers’ careers, the Legal Intelligencer reports. Results released at the ABA Midyear Meeting had more specifics: The number serving as in-house counsel jumped from 4 percent in 2002 to 11 percent in 2007, while the number working as nonlawyers for corporations increased from 4 percent to almost 8 percent.
ABF director Robert Nelson, a principal investigator for the “After the JD” study of lawyers who passed the bar in 2000, talked to the Intelligencer about the trend.
Nelson sees a “mutual suspicion” of mobility between associates fed up with increasing workloads and their law firms, he said. The result is an exodus of some lawyers from private practice. “It has been a growing trend as law firms have grown, raised billable hour expectations, and have moved in a direction of weakened firm cultures,” Nelson told the Legal Intelligencer.
The “sweet spot” for lawyers looking to move is at three to seven years of experience, Nelson said.
About 70 percent of the lawyers studied were working at law firms in the study’s 2003 “first wave” analysis, the story says. The number had dropped to slightly more than half for the lawyers after seven years of experience. The results demonstrate the “increasing fluidity of lawyer careers,” according to a press release.
The study also noted some wage disparities, according to the Intelligencer account. White and Asian lawyers reported earning about $30,000 more than black and Hispanics employed by large law firms, the second-wave study found. Women were more likely to be unemployed or to work part-time, and their average salary was 85 percent of the average male.
The study also found that three out of four lawyers tracked say they are either extremely or moderately satisfied with their decision to become an attorney, according to study results released at the ABA Midyear Meeting.
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