LegoMan wrote:Doctors and Lawyers live in places like Mississauga Road and Kleinburg. They have Aston Martins and M6s on their driveways. AC pilots drive Hondas and only the old AC guys even come close to having a house anywhere near there.... So even tho the doctors and lawyers have larger debts... after 10 years they are doing very well for themselves. Unlike, pilots after 10 years they are just getting into an airline and starting from the bottom again.
Not spoiling to pick a fight, but I thought I would drop my $0.02 in since I opted out of a career as a lawyer after articling with a Big Seven firm in Toronto...
First off...lawyer's salaries are available on line if you look for the informaton tab on
http://www.zsa.ca.
The wage goes up on a yearly basis until year seven at which point it gets negotiated between the lawyer and the firm. At that point you are on the cusp of becoming a partner. If they love you, then you get more dough, if they don't you are quitely pointed to the nearest exit.
In my day (2001-2002):
- The articling salary at a top level Bay Street firm was $70,000/yr. (This went up to $88,000 for summer students hired during the same time I was there, but the raise was not granted retroactively.) This was my compensation for seven years of university (four years for a BA and three years for my LLB).
- At the time you graduated from school in April and took the bar admission course (essentially law school refresher) over four months to the beginning of September.
- The term of Articles was ten months - September to July the year following.
- During my ten months I worked on average 65hrs per week. I say on average, because I have worked a couple of 37hrs days.
- Articling students are not paid overtime as there is an exception in the labour code covering this.
- When I finished articles in July, I was not permitted to work in law between July and my call to the bar in October.
I note that my friends in other provinces made much less. In Calgary the salary was $60,000 and in Vancouver it was $39,000.
This was always for top tier business oriented firms; which comprised about 30% of my class. If you did Criminal law or Family you made less that half of this.
As a student I had no target for billable hours, but that kicked in during first year. Generally, you had to work ten to eleven hours to bill eight hours a day. My firm's target was 1650hrs billed per year. There was a 10% bonus for each additional 100hrs of billed time to a max of 30% bonus. The guys that billed 1950hrs were ALWAYS there.
As for being a partner...
Just when you thought you had made it, and had been invited to the partnership, it got expensive...
- Being a partner means buying your way into the partnership by ponying up for the firm's share capital.
- Depending on how junior or senior you were this would easily be $100,000s if not $1million dollars or more.
- True, a ten year lawyer who was a junior partner at a firm was probably making $400,000 per year - he also had to pay the $500,000 mortgage on his house in the Annex plus the interest and principal on his $600,000 note to the firm (that walnut paneling in the law library aint cheap).
If you do the math, basically everything over $80,000/yr got hit with Taxes at +40% - so a lot of your take home got eaten up by your expenses.
That said, it wasn't all risk free...
I had a collegue who became a junior partner at a small firm that took a case on a contingent fee basis. After plowing four years of the firm's collective work and $100s of thousands of dollars in expenses into the case they lost, didn't collect the contingent fee. Each partner lost their initial investment in the firm plus had to pony up to cover the firm's debts (a partnership depends on the personal net worth of its partners to backstop the liabilities of the partnership). It cost him $200,000 on top of the $150,000 he put in on the front end. He was probably making $170,000 per year when he got gassed.
The best comparison would be for a senior Air Canada Captain to be required to pledge $1million of his net worth in order to work at Air Canada and make $200,000/year...
Wait a sec...that sounds like buying your job and that is widely frowned upon in these parts.
Ultimately - everyone asks me why didn't I see it through and stay in the law game?
I can just about tell you the turning point... I remember working on a file at 3am on Sunday morning early in the New Year 2002. I was reading and summarizing documents along with four or five of my collegues. Dinner seven hours before was takeout pizza and I think we had Swiss Chalet the night before.
I knew why I was there - bettering my future and "putting in my time" enroute to becoming a full time associate.
Meanwhile the senior partner working on the file, the guy billing $800/yr was in the next room holding the client's hand through the transaction process.
Which is when it hit me. This never gets any better. Sure the pay check might go up and you might get nicer stuff, but you will always be servicing someone else's agenda. Moveover, the aforementioned partner - the guy was a sweatheart of a man, but was through two wives by that point...YUCK!
Just my $0.02.
you're counter intuitive posts are really no use to anyone.
