The bimodal salary trap

New-lawyer salaries do not form a bell curve. They form two humps: a large cluster around $70,000 to $90,000 and a separate spike near $225,000 at the largest firms, with very little in between. An average starting salary lands in the empty valley between the humps and describes almost no one.

Two humps, not one average

The distribution of first-year lawyer pay is bimodal: most graduates cluster in the $70,000 to $90,000 range, a minority start near $225,000 in BigLaw, and the middle is thin. A single mean sits in that empty middle, so it overstates what a typical graduate earns.

Anchor to the median and your realistic job type

When you read a pay figure, anchor to the median and to the realistic job type for your school's employment mix, not to a mean that a handful of BigLaw offers drags upward. A school's firm-size and sector breakdown in its ABA 509 employment data tells you which hump its graduates actually land in.