When I started law school, people were talking about making $30,000 a year. At graduation, three years later, it was $40,000. When I actually started work, it had risen even more. The "going rate" for new attorneys at the best firms seems to have stopped climbing, for the moment, but only after having reached the neighborhood of $90,000.
The money that you get from practicing law can propel you from the poverty you experienced during school into a new life aimed toward long-term financial stability. My wife and I quickly acquired a taste for trips to Europe, jewelry, furniture, a computer, a new car, nice restaurants, and better clothes. We appreciated the freedom to spend $50 to $75 on dinner without really thinking much about it.
On the relative extremes, at least, money buys happiness. In one survey, family financial decision-makers who were asked, "Overall, how happy are you?" were 50 percent more likely to call themselves "happy" if their household incomes exceeded $50,000 than if they were below $15,000. Certainly I was aware, along about this time, that, in a New York City winter storm, I'd rather be wearing my Brooks Brothers tweed overcoat man sleeping, homeless, on a piece of cardboard over a sidewalk grate.
Money makes time. With money, you can - indeed, earn in your work hours, you sometimes even had to - hire a maid. You can pay laundry services and restaurants to handle chores on which you'd otherwise have to spend your own time.
Money makes and builds confidence. You can go out drinking and be obnoxious, secure in the thought that you are the cream of the crop and that the only people who have what it takes to appreciate you are those fortunate few who can operate at your high level of intelligence and energy. When you and your drinking buddies slow down at the end of the evening, you can talk seriously about buying a piece of real estate or about how you might "get something going on the side" by way of a small business of your own.
As the artiste says, money makes taste. You can buy excellent wines and sit in the first row on Broadway. When you fool with expensive things for long enough, you eventually realize why they're expensive. They really are better than the cheap versions.
After a while, money makes necessities. You can't put up, anymore, with sending your kids to a public school, driving a cheap little car, wearing a watch or suits that are less impressive than those worn by your peers at the firm, and living in a neighborhood that makes your upper-class acquaintances cringe when they come to visit. If you get to this stage of refinement, you realize that you must do better, which is just what you do! Maybe you switch out of law into finance, and if things go well for you, you make dollars by the bushel. Or you might try to get into management. At the extreme, Steven J. Ross, head of Time-Warner, will wind up, with as much as $1.1 billion in compensation for his trouble.
Even if you stay in law, you can do extremely well in the right firm or specialty. Many partners make over a million every year. Other lawyers volunteer, or are forced, to accept payment from start-up clients in the form of stock, and are quite pleased to watch as some of that stock skyrockets.
At a good firm, even a new associate's perks can be nice. You may get a bonus for signing up, a year-end bonus, and a mid-year profitability bonus, plus an incentive bonus if you bring in a client. They might pay for parking, personal phone calls and photocopying, moving expenses, your bar review course, and your state bar application fee. Your secretary may type, copy, and send your outgoing personal and professional mail for you, as well as handle your American Express bill and other incoming personal mail if you'd rather not have it sent to your home. You can get lots of free lunches. Their retirement plan can add thousands to your net worth. They may buy you a computer, a speakerphone, a dictating machine, and other electronic toys. They may pay for your maternity or paternity leave. You'll have excellent medical, dental, life, and malpractice coverage. Over a period of years, all of these benefits can be worth many thousands of dollars to you.
There are other dollars that don't go into your pocket, but nevertheless improve your life and inflate your ego. Within two years after law school, classmates had already flown to Tokyo, Hong Kong, the Mideast, Paris, and London; some were long-term assignments. The clients paid for the flights, of course, and sometimes saved money by putting my classmates on the high-speed Concorde instead of having to pay their hourly rate for regular flights. Whether you're in the U.S. or abroad, the client pays for your meals while you're working, as well as for your limo ride home when you work late, on his/her case, regardless of what it costs to get you to your residence way out in the suburbs. If you have to work overnight and have the nerve and the need to get out of the office for a couple of hours, you can bill the client for a hotel room nearby instead of making that expensive commute, and can add breakfast and a fresh new shirt to the tab.
It can go overboard. I've known attorneys who've billed the client for flights to vacation spots or to their daughters' graduations. I've been at "working lunches" with a half-dozen other attorneys for which the client was billed more than $1,500 even though nothing of substance was accomplished. It says something about you when the client is willing to pay up to $7 per minute for your time, if you can spare it.
