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The authors study the market for young attorneys. Using data from two surveys of attorneys who passed the bar exam in 2000, they find that attorneys who graduate from law schools ranked in the Top 10 nationally earn considerably more than those without such a qualification, even compared to attorneys who graduate from schools ranked 11–20. The premium to an elite education carries over to an attorney's undergraduate institution as well, and the findings suggest that elite bachelor's degrees and elite law degrees are close substitutes in terms of their relationships to salaries. The elite–law school premium is more robust to various methods for correcting for selection on ability than the widely studied premium to attending a selective undergraduate institution. The authors consider several reasons elite-school premiums may exist in this labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preferences and willingness-to-pay for attributes of law school graduates are examined using a choice experiment. Results suggest preferences for candidates who graduate near the top of their class or from top ranked schools and an aversion to candidates from lower ranked schools and those graduating in the bottom half of their class. Despite the potential for significant economic gains from attending a top ranked school and graduating in the top of the class, students should consider the tradeoffs that hiring firms are willing to make between candidate attributes. Higher class rank can moderate the salary premium associated with university prestige. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The data collected in the national system of monitoring the economic position of graduates (ELA) allows for the analysis of graduates' preparation for the labor market requirements. They also make it possible to rank universities according to the described in the article criterion, using the synthetic information on employment and earnings indicators. This article presents the analysis of graduates of universities that conduct a uniform Master's degree in law studies. It has also been shown that the order based on data from the ELA system is consistent with the ranking published annually by Perspektywy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on attorney compensation. It mentions that attorney compensation can serve any number of purposes in a law firm including reflecting the law firm and attorneys' culture and value, redistributing revenues to accomplish firm goals and values, and recruiting new attorneys, both associates and partners, to the firm.

Civil law is enforced primarily via private litigation. One characteristic of private enforcement is that litigation levels tend to cycle between periods of boom and bust. This article builds a theory for explaining this fluctuation, proposing that plaintiffs' attorneys can be understood as economic migrants. Just as workers cross borders to find jobs, lawyers "move" across case types and jurisdictions to find profitable claims, and case filing numbers increase as a result. Using the recent wage and hour litigation boom as a case study, this article paints an empirical picture of attorney migration and its influence on case filing numbers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the results of the Utah State Bar Paralegal Division's 2020 salary survey to monitor the paralegal salary movements and trends in education, skills, and continuing legal education (CLE) opportunities. Also cited are the membership in the Utah Paralegal Association and National Association of Legal Assistants (NALA), as well as the environmental duties and responsibilities of law firms.

This paper documents the gender gap in performance among highskilled professionals in the United States. On the basis of widely used performance measures in law firms, we find that male lawyers bill 10 percent more hours and bring in more than twice as much new client revenue as female lawyers. The differential impact across genders in the presence of young children and differences in aspirations to become a law firm partner account for a large share of the difference in performance. We show that accounting for performance has important consequences for gender gaps in lawyers' earnings and subsequent promotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the state of attorney fees following the decision of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, Eastern Division in the case Hughes v. McCarthy. Topics discussed are the lodestar method for determining reasonable hourly rate of compensation for attorneys, applicable American Bar Association Model Rules of Professional Conduct, and factors used to calculate hourly rate including number of hours expended on a case and time spent on motions.

While attorneys, alongside insurance adjusters, most often make referrals themselves, on an occasional basis Rehabilitation Counselorsmay be required to evaluate lost wages and loss of wage earning capacity for attorneys that have been injured in the scope of a motor vehicle accident, chemical exposure, product liability, or other circumstances.While traditional evaluations offer the opportunity to evaluate pre-accident and post-accident wages using set wages, attorneys do not offer the same allowance, considering attorney salaries are based on a variety of contingencies, such as settlement amounts, alongside bonuses. Additionally, attorneys work in a sedentary capacity, as opposed to medium or heavy duty capacity, typified of many plaintiffs. As such, novel approaches must be utilized to evaluate lost wages for attorneys. This article addresses the need to evaluate probable wages; consider work life expectancy with identified modifiers; evaluate probable loss of earnings, with the supposition that a client would lose variable years of work life expectancy, as a result of the noted accident or circumstance and address a proposal that work life may be expected decrease with injury or disability, through referenced literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the economic value of a law degree and find that for most law school graduates, the present value of a law degree typically exceeds its cost by hundreds of thousands of dollars. The median and 25th-percentile earnings premiums justify enrollment. We track lifetime earnings of a large sample of law degree holders. Previous studies focused on starting salaries, generic professional degree holders, or the subset of law degree holders who practice law. We incorporate unemployment and disability risk and measure earnings premiums separately for men and for women. After controlling for observable ability sorting, we find that a law degree is associated with median increases of 73 percent in earnings and 60 percent in hourly wages. The mean annual earnings premium is approximately $57,200 in 2013 dollars. Values in recent years are within historical norms. The mean pretax lifetime value of a law degree is approximately $1 million. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on inequality in the legal profession underemphasizes the macro-level factors that structure legal work. This paper introduces two measures that characterize local legal labor markets. The index of gender dissimilarity is the proportion of women required to move into the private law firm sector from the public sector to create gender balance. The index of hierarchical market structure is defined by a concentration of elite law graduates, highly leveraged law firms, lucrative billings, and corporate clients. Women's salaries increase more rapidly than men's in these markets, yet men continue to out-earn women. Furthermore, HLM models indicate that in labor markets with greater gender dissimilarity, women's wages are significantly depressed. We explain this in terms of mechanisms of opportunity hoarding and exploitation (Tilly 1998). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on the views of elites and a reported lack of intellectual diversity on the faculties of U.S. law schools as of January 2014, focusing on the hiring practices for law professors and the impact of those practices on legal academia as a whole. According to the article, a strong plurality of the faculty members at most American law schools are graduates of either Harvard Law School or Yale Law School. Law school tuition and salaries for attorneys are examined.

The article discusses the Germany Bundesfinanzhof court case dealing with the professional liability insurance of a law firm for the benefit of its employed lawyers. The court held that the inclusion of a salaried lawyer in the pecuniary loss liability insurance of a partnership leads to wages in the amount of the premium portion that is applicable to the minimum assessment.

The article offers the author's insights regarding the crisis of the law profession and legal education in the U.S. The author says that legal profession has experienced crisis rhetoric due to the permanent lost of legal business outside the profession, stagnant market, and higher tuition fee. He mentions that the profession has lost its power but is still a college degree which attracts the biggest portion of talented students in the country. He notes that lawyers are practicing in small firms, solo practice, or government offices before moving into big law firms. He adds that lawyers working outside corporate firms have received higher salary increase than those working in corporate sector.

This article asks how cultural frameworks of status influence the evaluation of performance including compensation and advancement of lawyers who were seven years into their practice. We borrow from the work on status expectations that goes beyond gender distinctions and assesses whether the concept of motherhood has a negative impact on assessment of female lawyers. Status expectations theory hypothesizes that mothers are valued less because they are less committed to the workplace and thus receive a motherhood penalty while men receive a fatherhood bonus in compensation decisions. Employing data from the After The JD study, we test the impact of parenthood on compensation decisions. Our analysis reveals that gender matters more than parenthood status in compensation. Thus we conclude that parenthood is not found to have a significant effect on credentials, orientation to work, or practice setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the impact of economic slowdown on the legal profession in the U.S. and also discusses the changes occurring in law practice. It states that lawyers need to be creative and innovative to adapt changes in the legal market. It mentions that the recession in 2007 was the longest since the Great Depression of 1929-1932 in the U.S. and has affected the working of legal system as the law firms have also cut their costs, salaries, and reduced annual payouts to partners.

The paper aims at highlighting the main features of the procedure before European Court of Justice. The Amsterdam Treaty explicitly conferred jurisdiction on the European Court of Justice to check that Community instruments respect fundamental tights and its functions are constitutional, civil, administrative and arbitration. The role of the Court and its exclusive powers are to ensure that in the interpretation and application of the Treaty, the law is observed and to decide on the validity of instruments enacted by all other institutions. The rules of the European Court of Justice are set out in the TEC Art. 220-245, as well as in the Statutes (attached to the Treaty as a Protocol) and in the Rules of Procedure. As the actions before the court may be divided into two categories: judgments and opinions, judgments are handled in preliminary rulings and in direct actions. We present an overview of the following stages in the ECJ procedure: admissibility of a case, written and oral procedures, and preliminary report of the Judge Rapporteur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work of legal professionals is changing rapidly, but the changes have not yet been thoroughly investigated from the perspective of the sociology of work. This paper draws on a research project that examined the work of solicitors in private practice in Melbourne, Australia. It uses in-depth interviews, results of secondary surveys and other data sources in order to describe the dominant working-time patterns. The evidence points to a common pattern of rigid and demanding schedules, which can be traced back to the indirect pressures exerted by the widespread system of ‘billable hours’. The paper takes up the challenge to examine the operation of this system. We argue that the billable hours system, initially just a technique for billing clients, has been transformed into a tool for measuring and controlling the work of salaried solicitors, through setting of targets, close time recording, careful monitoring, and a supple set of sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on civil legal services organizations and discusses how they can help equalize justice administration in the U.S. Topics include legal advocacy for the poor and the rising cost of law school tuition in the U.S. The author examines the importance of adequate salaries for legal aid attorneys.