Lawyering Data: US Bureau of Labor Stats

<p>The general statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which include only salaried attorneys, are shown here: <a href="http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes231011.htm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes231011.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>The statistics for all lawyers can be seen if you follow the links from here:
<a href="http://data.bls.gov/oep/servlet/oep.noeted.servlet.ActionServlet?Action=empoccp%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://data.bls.gov/oep/servlet/oep.noeted.servlet.ActionServlet?Action=empoccp&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>The median salary for the 529,190 attorneys who are not self-employed is $110,520. When you include the self-employed, the total number of attorneys jumps to 735,000, and the median for annual earnings drops to $94,930.</p>

<p>the site lists both hourly and annual wages and notes:</p>

<p>
[quote]
Annual wages have been calculated by multiplying the hourly mean wage by a "year-round, full-time" hours figure of 2,080 hours

[/quote]
</p>

<p>this raises methodology questions to me -- how did they get at the hourly wage to begin with? and for lawyers there can be a vast difference between hours worked in the sense of hours actually at the workplace vs. hours worked in the sense of billable hours. 2080 is 40 hours a week times 52 weeks -- makes sense as a standard for many areas of employment, but there just seem to be a lot of problem with using that in comparing lawyer salaries.</p>

<p>do you know anything more about the methodology?</p>

<p>and also, i thought lawyers worked much more than 2,000 hours a year, so wouldn't that hourly wage be very inflated?</p>

<p>that was part of my question -- in fact the range of hours probably varies tremendously along with the annual salary -- which is why this type of comparison raises so many questions for me. this seems to assume every one works the same number of hours in order compare hourly and annual rates. there could be in fact be awide variance between apparent hourly rate (using 2080) and real hourly rate based on real hours worked.</p>