<p>There are Amlaw stats from 09 when people really got screwed. I have a friend at Cornell where the career services office sent out a list of the 2l’s from last year who got summer SA positions (this is how biglaw hiring is done, you get an SA, and then most of the time that leads to an offer). And it was approximately 40% of the class that got SA positions as 2L’s last year. If you allow for a small percentage of those who could get Biglaw but want PI work then you probably have somewhere between 45%-50% of people who could get biglaw from Cornell. Georgetown seems to be worse. It gets a little better the farther up you go. Duke, Northwestern, Penn, Virginia, and Michigan all seem to be just a little north of median can get offers. Someone on TLS posted the same type of email from Duke and it basically stated 50% of last years 2L’s got biglaw SA’s. And then at NYU, Columbia, and Chicago the estimates seem to be anywhere from 60-75%. I would wager it’s probably around 65%. I know personally someone who says they are probably 40th percentile(meaning 60 percent of the class has better grades) and got an offer, although only one callback and ended up lucking out and getting an offer from that callback. Also, at all these schools there is an occasional person with good grades that strikes out, this does happen. But I think it often has to do with bidding poorly at OCI or being a terribly boring person and a bad interviewer. Stanford, Yale, and Harvard graduates can usually pick whatever job they want.</p>
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Probably about the same. Partners do occasionally get de-partnered, but then doctors occasionally get sued badly enough that it harms their career.</p>
<p>I mean, being premed is much riskier than being prelaw. Then being a medical student is much LESS risky than being a law student. That’s one of the tradeoffs.</p>
<p>“And it was approximately 40% of the class that got SA positions as 2L’s last year. If you allow for a small percentage of those who could get Biglaw but want PI work then you probably have somewhere between 45%-50% of people who could get biglaw from Cornell. Georgetown seems to be worse. It gets a little better the farther up you go. Duke, Northwestern, Penn, Virginia, and Michigan all seem to be just a little north of median can get offers. Someone on TLS posted the same type of email from Duke and it basically stated 50% of last years 2L’s got biglaw SA’s. And then at NYU, Columbia, and Chicago the estimates seem to be anywhere from 60-75%.”</p>
<p>thanks for the info… these numbers look really ugly btw. cant believe only 40% of cornell people landed biglaw jobs!? i might need to reconsider going to law school. odds of failure is too big…</p>
<p>^There isn’t anything prelaw though, that’s the issue. Premed there are core classes you need that can’t just work with any major as law school doesn’t care what you major in.</p>
<p>^Yeah Cornell not being placed in biglaw is quite surprising! I mean, what the hell does biglaw expect? God on earth? Any Ivy league law school should have zero difficulty in placing its grads in biglaw. Seriously, the entire law profession seems absolutely pretentious and downright comical, as they only want Harvard/Yale/Stanford grads (Stanford isn’t even Ivy). </p>
<p>The more you research law school and law firms, the more you realize it’s a dubious approach that is focused on nothing but material ends and makes short shrift of everything that is not “at the top of the top”. Such an expectation means more trouble in the law firm down the road once you get in, as the superficiality and uncertainty will only grow and continue to cast doubts as to whether you can have a stable career.</p>
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<p>I’m sure the elite specialists earn comparable money. Several med school professors earn $3+ million.</p>
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<p>Again, I think this dramatically overestimates the pay at most biglaw exit options, though obviously there’s a huge variation, depending on the relationships and expertise you’ve developed as an associate. But making $300K or more is probably pretty uncommon.</p>
<p>fwiw:</p>
<p>the law firms in Orange County promised UCI that they would hire some grads once the school was up and running; it was a near requirement by the Univ of California for approval.</p>
<p>Of course, Latham also hires a grad from Chapman some years – they usually offer the Val.</p>
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Documentation? Outside of elite private practice plastic surgeons, physicians almost never earn more than $1M in their capacity as physicians. (Of course, sometimes people with MD’s go on to venture capital or whatever.)</p>
<p>“Probably about the same. Partners do occasionally get de-partnered, but then doctors occasionally get sued badly enough that it harms their career.”</p>
<p>I don’t agree that it’s about the same. Doctors have way more job stability than biglaw (or mediumlaw) partners. Ten years ago, partners “occasionally” got de-partnered. Nowadays, it happens all the time. The only thing that carries job security for a law firm partner today is relationships with spendy clients. If you don’t have that, or if your clients go under or hop to a different firm, you’re in big trouble. And you can’t just get another job the way most doctors can.</p>
<p>^True that.</p>
<p>Btw, how can MD’s go into venture capital? That seems real unorthodox.</p>
<p>The same way that people with JD’s go on to be CEOs, or investment bankers, or President of the United States. You just go and do something else.</p>
<p>There are MDs working with healthcare/biotech/pharma private equity investors, for example.</p>
<p>According to the physician salary survery linked here, the “maximum” pay for only one medical specialty (spinal surgery) hit the seven figure mark:</p>
<p>[Physician</a> Salary Survey, Salaries - Allied Physicians](<a href=“http://alliedphysicians.com/salary-surveys/physicians/]Physician”>Physician Salary Survey, Salaries - Allied Physicians)</p>
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<p>[Dermatology</a> Professor’s $4.3 Million Rivals College Coach Salaries - Bloomberg](<a href=“Bloomberg - Are you a robot?”>Bloomberg - Are you a robot?)</p>
<p>Now, that’s obviously only a handful of examples, so it’s possible that they’re extreme outliers. It just seems unlikely that the universities are paying them several times the salary they could get elsewhere or that their peers are getting. And sure, the highest-paid biglaw partners are probably making significantly more than the highest-paid doctors. But the bottom line is that specialists generally end up making a lot more than even biglaw associates.</p>
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He’s being paid to manage a laboratory – vaguely related to medicine, but not actually as a doctor. It’s analogous to a physician who eventually becomes CEO of a hospital system.</p>
<p>Would they give that job to somebody who wasn’t a doctor?</p>
<p>Of course having experience in the operation helps. But it’s the equivalent of a bank’s general counsel being appointed to CEO, which happens from time to time. I know plenty of hospital systems with MDs as CEOs, and plenty without.</p>
<p>What med. school can afford to pay their professors $3 million a year?</p>
<p>The best paid M.D. I can remember was Armand Hammer, who was C.E.O. of Occidental Petroleum.</p>
<p>The wealthiest M.D. I have known personally is also an entrepreneur; he opened a surgery center in a small city before a change in law made it difficult for potential competitors to open competing surgery centers. He invested his profits in real estate ventures, and largely cashed out (I believe) before the bubble burst.</p>
<p>My guess is that his net worth is substantially less than that of the wealthiest attorneys I have known, whose money came principally from stock options from the corporations that employed the to work in-house. (I had a boss who cashed in $20 million in options.)</p>
<p>That said, the net worth of the wealthiest attorneys I have known pales in comparison to the net worth of the wealthiest business executives I have known.</p>
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This isn’t really what’s happening. This particular fellow seems to run a very profitable medical laboratory. My guess is that he’s being paid $3M in exchange for the medical school owning the facility.</p>