Finally, there’s a number and it’s $75,000. So says the New York Times, based upon a study by the National Academy of Sciences.
In many ways, achieving the right balance depends on one’s values, priorities, family obligations and spending habits. But according to a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, there is something of a magic number when it comes to income and happiness.
Beyond household income of $75,000 a year, money “does nothing for happiness, enjoyment, sadness or stress,” the study concluded.
This can be truly awful news for a lot of us. If that’s as happy as it gets, then we’re in deep trouble. And if you’re one of the many criminal defense lawyers who struggles to make the magic number, suffering the daily beating of a system designed to make your life miserable, you’re now staring squarely at the worst of both worlds.
The point isn’t that money buys happiness, but lack of money buys misery. That’s news to anybody who can’t pay the bills. And surprisingly, this isn’t the number for lawyers in Des Moines, but everywhere.
Where you live and the cost of living there has only a small influence on that number, he added. (That may be a revelation to some Manhattanites.)
Apparently, it’s not the accumulation of toys that makes one happy, but rather the ability to stop and smell the very expensive roses.
“Many people want to make a lot of money, but the benefits of having a high income are ambiguous,” said Professor Kahneman, who is also a Nobel laureate in economics. When you are wealthy you are able to buy more pleasures, he said, but a recent study suggests that wealthier people “seem to be less able to savor the small things in life.”
This makes me wonder whether Professor Kahneman has a mortgage, a kid in college, internet access and pays his taxes. If he’s able to cover his nut with a family income of $75,000, he’s one frugal guy. But the trade-off of money and satisfaction has been an issue lately, particularly with Biglaw associates complaining that they just aren’t happy. This even led to a lawprof, formerly of Chicago’s Kirkland & Ellis, arguing that associates should rate partners on their job satisfaction. as an incentive for law firms to make the lives of their employees funner. After all, associate happiness is the core of a lawyer’s reason for being.
A deeper understanding of the money/satisfaction connection appears via David Lat at ATL :
Last week I had dinner with a friend who used to work at a large law firm and now has a non-legal career. I asked her what, if anything, she missed about life in Biglaw.
“Just one thing: the paycheck,” she said. “I miss being able to go crazy in the shoe department of Bloomingdale’s.”
It’s a common sentiment among people who leave jobs at large law firms (in terms of missing the paycheck; not sure about the shoes). Most people who leave large law firms, with the notable exception of finance folks, end up with lower incomes in their new lines of work. But many refugees of Biglaw report higher job satisfaction, as well as overall happiness.
While the relationship between women, shoes and happiness remains as mystifying now as ever, the point that money brings diminishing returns on the happy scale, with the notable exception of finance folks, is no shock. What is surprising is that $75,000 is the magic number.
Aside from Orange County Public Defenders, who are paid extremely well for their services, as well as provided with plenty of time at the wine bar to sip their Chardonnay while thinking about cases, the really problematic aspect of this magic number is that making it isn’t really that hard a feat for civil lawyers. Biglaw or small, most lawyer jobs pay sufficiently well to hit the mark. If you’re still not happy, then take it up with Professor Kahneman. While the magic number may be sufficient in the wee years of a lawyer’s career, I can’t see it being enough to bring a smile to anyone’s face for very long.
Yet criminal defense lawyers in private practice aren’t bringing in enough loot to make the cut. No, not you n00bs, but lawyers out there with 10 or more years under their belt, surviving on assigned work and the occasional walk-in felony. You’ve got rent to pay and employees who expect a check at the end of the week. The telephone company gets more of your revenue than your children, but won’t wait the three months it takes for the government to end its float on your submitted bills. Your clients bitch that you’re too expensive and your spouse bitches that you’re too cheap.
According to this unsourced eHow post, the median income for a criminal “justice” lawyer in 2006 was $100,000. Whether this is accurate now, or was ever accurate, I dunno, but from what I hear on the streets of Manhattan, there seems to be an awful lot of good lawyers who aren’t coming anywhere near that number, despite Herculean efforts to do so. Civil lawyers fight over the banality of money. Criminal defense lawyers fight over human lives. Clearly, the latter isn’t as societally significant, or the roles would be reversed.
For a long time now, I’ve worried that the bulk of the criminal defense bar survives on the largesse of the government, and doesn’t survive all that well. The ramifications of this are dire; Should the government, say in a fit of belt tightening, decide that criminal defense lawyers are living way too well and could do fine on a fraction of what they’re being paid now, they could pull the plug on the flow of money and starve the criminal defense bar out of existence. Sure, it would make it difficult for a week or two for cases to proceed when there’s no one to stand to the side of defendants, but I’ve little doubt that a few stout souls will show up to plead a hundred defendants guilty before lunch so the wheels of justice don’t grind to a halt.
What is it about criminal defense that puts the group at what appears to be a perpetual financial disadvantage to civil lawyers? To find their happy place, civil lawyers take a pay cut. To meet that magic number, criminal defense lawyers need to double their revenue. Lat’s female Biglaw refugee bemoans her inability to go crazy in the Bloomies shoe department. Criminal defense lawyers go crazy trying to cover their nut and feed their kids.
While the magic $75,000 number strikes me as insufficient to meet the necessities of life for most lawyers, the shortfall is most stark for criminal defense lawyers who have no one to stuff their pay envelope every other Friday. Seriously, what are we doing so horribly wrong that so many criminal defense lawyers can’t make the numbers that they need to find happiness?
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That is a real problem. As a solo civil attorney and someone who left Biglaw many years ago I can tell you that your assessment as to the civil practice is pretty much dead-on. Sure I don’t make the $500K+ that I might have made had I stayed and made partner at Biglaw. But I can make double to triple your magic number on a regular basis and I don’t have to put up with all the Biglaw BS. In short, I am happier and make enough money to provide for my family. That’s all most of us want I think.
As to the criminal practice, I am not certain how to fix the system but it is obviously broken. I am sure I am not the only one who finds it strange that the local public defenders office is given a mere fraction of the funds spent on the prosecutors office. That is certainly someplace to start.
I frankly don’t think that private pay is going to ever fix the criminal justice system. The fact of the matter is that the government has a predilection for prosecuting citizens on the poor end of the town. Always have – probably always will. They simply don’t have the money to pay a private attorney what it takes to defend against the government.
Couple of random thoughts (that may be crazy if I put more thought in to them):
– What if contingency fees could be worked into the system somehow so that a NFG verdict equated to a big chunk of funds coming from the prosecutor’s office to the defense lawyer?
– Perhaps private criminal practice is not something that can be practiced in isolation as a specialty anymore. I think a civil practice firm that represents individual plaintiffs in civil matters could possibly mesh nicely with a criminal practice. Civil practice brings in better bucks but civil lawyers don’t get to the courthouse much. Frankly, they could use the courtroom exposure of working on criminal matters. Criminal lawyers could benefit financially from working on civil cases. I know the practices are very different but I don’t think they are completely oil and water. Lawyers did not always specialize to the super-isolated-niche level we do today. Maybe that was a good thing.
Anyway, nice post and food for thought.
I don’t see how $75K does it for anyone, NYC or no. Except maybe for this: that’s the income level on the high side for people who are not responsible for very much. If you get into the six figures, more is expected of you for the salary and that tends to impact your personal life and time.
I’m not sure that CDL’s should expect much in the way of happiness whether they make money or not. It’s not a happy business.
Things would run a lot smoother if CDL’s did trial work for no more than 20 years and after that did strictly appellate work. You can only take on so many people in crisis before you get warped in one way or another. You either become indifferent to it, which is unsatisfactory in one way; or you get eaten up by it, which is unsatisfactory in the opposite way.
In addition, appellate courts desperately need CDL input, people who know what it’s like to represent a criminal defendant at the trial level, and right now they basically don’t have any.
And the last point I’ll make here is that in a free market money flows to those who do the most needed work, but the law business is not a free market and the absolutely most needed work – criminal defense – is generally the most poorly compensated. There are a lot of reasons and I don’t have any clear ideas about how to fix it, or at least none that have even a prayer of becoming a reality.
“Seriously, what are we doing so horribly wrong that so many criminal defense lawyers can’t make the numbers that they need to find happiness?”
Three factors. First, there are too many lawyers. Second, even with a glut of supply of lawyers, the vast majority of potential clients can’t afford lawyers (they can barely afford their regular bills, much less professional services of any sort). Third, protecting the constitutional rights of people that most everyone presumes are guilty (put aside whether or not they are guilty) is not as high a priority as buying important stuff from well-connected government contractors like surplus trucks that don’t work in the desert.
Good lord. Don’t any of these people have family money? $75 K hardly covers Captain Martinez living on the boat we keep in the islands.
You’re right, and yet you realize the irony of your first and second points. The problem is whether the private criminal defense bar can continue to exist while serving an impoverished clientele, or whether the function must be financed by the government, and thus potentially subject to the government’s authority/control.
Contingent fees create an irreconciliable conflict in criminal law, and while people outside urban areas already tend to do both civil and criminal practice of necessity, the nature of criminal practice in more urban areas, coupled with the competition for work in more urban areas generally, doesn’t allow for lawyers to effectively handle a general practice. Trying to be a jack of all trades in an area inundated with specialists makes a lawyer very lonely.
Capt. Martinez has retained me to represent him in salary negotiations. He wants a raise. A big one.
We’d wondered. The Captain and his wife recently refused to sing 50-year-old Bolivian military marching songs for a male Irish boat guest at 4:00 AM as their 5 daughters provided lap dances to the others. We’ll just find more appreciative and grateful servants.
Just to give us civil lawyers a point of reference – What types of fees are criminal lawyers getting for assigned matters? Is it an hourly fee model or flat fee based on what charges are filed or what?
I don’t see any way around this problem that does not depend on government funding. The problem is in getting this fee structure from the gov’t up where it should be and in implementing protections against gov’t control. I know I know – “Oh, is that all?”
Not to quelch your interest, but you’re about a million miles behind the learning curve on the problems involved, and it really wasn’t my purpose to teach indigent defense financing 101 in the comments. But appreciate your interest.
It’d be a lot easier for me to make $75k if we could encourage wealthier people to commit more crimes.
There are plenty of wealthy people committing crimes. They just aren’t hiring you.
Nicely done. Always tell looters the truth and they will go away.
But this is an insurmountable problem, is it not? Or do you think that government financing can be somehow accomplished without the corresponding control, since you use the word “potentially”?
If a lawyer didn’t need to make a living from his work – which after all, is what “Esq.” implied at one time – the problem wouldn’t be there. But that time is long gone.
Ethical rules, which stem from that long ago era, thus arguably require you to impoverish yourself on behalf of a criminal defendant if need be. You can always ask to get out of a case for economic hardship reasons, but there’s no guarantee that would be permitted.
I know this much: there’s plenty of criminal defense work for laid off lawyers, but it’s quite another thing to get paid to do it.
The best I can think to do is to set up something like the Legal Services Corporation, except make it the vehicle by which public defenders and, where appropriate, private criminal defense attorneys, are funded. On big plus is that it would probably do a lot to shape up the utterly-atrocious, never-funded public defender systems in rural areas.
That is of course nowhere near an ideal solution. Just as a tiny example, the Legal Services Corporation is perennially underfunded, and their money comes with a lot of political strings, such as how they cannot come anywhere near anything that happens to involve family planning.
Maybe set up some sort of “prevailing party” statute in which criminal defendants get their attorneys fees and costs reimbursed for the defense of claims for which the jury found them not guilty. (In addition to the zero chance of such a thing being established, it obviously has a lot of its own problems, but, hey, got any better ideas?)
Besides I don’t think it’s about indigent defense, though that’s a factor. The prosecutor’s budget of $Infinity versus the defendants of, um, how much equity is left in the house, dear? makes all but the highest flyers “indigent” faster than anything but Family Court.
“Civil lawyers fight over the banality of money. Criminal defense lawyers fight over human lives. Clearly, the latter isn’t as societally significant, or the roles would be reversed.”
Well, part of the problem is the premise demonstrated above. “Societal significance” or any other abstract conception of moral “value” has never been correlated to income particularly well. See, Oprah Winfrey v. Fireman; accord, Jamie Gorelick v. Buck Private in Afghanistan.
Evidently there is not only not-enough-dollars chasing CDA’s. There are too-man-CDA’s getting caught relatively easily.
Why is that? While answering, bear in mind that notwithstanding the fact that a “good” civil lawyer can make a “good” income, there are plenty — PLENTY — of lawyers in civil practice, or who would like to be, who are unemployed or severely underemployed and will never hit this preposterous “magic number.” But let’s say the “good ones” in civil work equal the “good ones,” quality wise, doing CD. Isn’t there still a supply side to the pricing equation? Or is demand just that inelastic?
If “private lawyers” only exist by virtue of the largesse of the state, then how would they still be private lawyers? As for prevailing party, aside from the absurdity of the state paying back the prevailing defendant (and bearing in mind that the plea rate is 97%, making this only applicable to the 3%, and only those of the 3% who prevail), what better incentive to lie, cheat and steal to a conviction. If constitutional rights are ignored now, can you imagine what a financial incentive to the state would do?
Funny how it always comes back to the government paying the freight.
More true than you know. Between the scoundrels (making good money) and the kids doing felonies for $1500 and starving, combined with the pervasive belief that nobody wins (and hence it’s throwing good money after bad) and that lawyers are fungible, this is all too true.
And you think it’s easy to find 5 lap-dancing daughters willing to toy with an Irish male?
Nah. We don’t even have wealthy people here, much less wealthy criminals.
“Lat’s female Biglaw refugee bemoans her inability to go crazy in the Bloomies shoe department. Criminal defense lawyers go crazy trying to cover their nut and feed their kids.” -The vast vast majority of biglaw associates will not make partner at a biglaw firm and will take a paycut at their next job. Associates leaving biglaw often make the $75k (or thereabout) that you’re bemoaning when they leave biglaw and work for the government or US Attorney’s Office, try to start their own company, work on the Hill, go to small law, in house for a small or startup company, etc. You agree that that’s not enough for lawyers with mortgages, student loans, kids, etc. to make. So why even bother with the snide biglaw associate comments?
Now that’s pathetic. But remember, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
The “vast, vast majority?” Nah. Some losers get jettisoned, or become permanent associates. Former AUSAs come back as partners, and most manage to eke out a better living than a CDL with 20 jury trials to verdict. So cut the whining. The few who fail miserably had every advantage and opportunity and blew it. Some people lose because they’re just losers.
No offense taken, but whiny comments like this tell me you’re probably in the wrong place. Go elsewhere.
Lol. I think you proved my point.
Just thinking aloud. I don’t know if it’d really increase the misbehaving among prosecutors; all the institutional incentives (e.g., getting ahead, establishing reputation, etc) are already there, and it wouldn’t be their money.
You got a better idea? The best idea is “criminal defendants need to be wealthy enough to fund their own robust defenses,” but, well, that’s not happening any time soon.
Is 20 a lot, in your neck of the woods?
Proved your point? Kid, go away.
The institutional pressures would be overwhelming, as opposed to the individual pressures that now apply to some (not all, but some) prosecutors. Do I have a better idea? Not really, aside from eliminating those people who get a PD but can afford private counsel, and getting private lawyers to stop undermining themselves by charging cut rates to make a quick buck, and CDLs in general from pleading ’em out rather than doing their job properly. Essentially, much of the solution is in the hands of CDLs and the private defense bar itself.
That said, I don’t the answer to one problem is to exacerbate another problem.
Get a grip. I’m talking to Mr. Biglaw here, trying to give him a number he can wrap his head around. You want to make his head explode with real numbers?
That said, I would venture that if a CDL doesn’t count the trials he did when he was formerly a prosecutor or pd, and doesn’t count the times he helped out a friend by showing up to argue a speeding ticket, 20 jury trials to verdict for paying clients is on the high side in the New York neck of the woods. Maybe not high, there are plenty of accomplished people with way more, but its substantial enough to differentiate someone as a trial man from the vast majority of CDL’s who just kinda stand next to the defendant while the prosecutor makes an offer.
Don’t feed his Texas ego. I’ll never hear the end of it.
Sure thing, but they mostly do cow-tipping trials down there anyway, right?
Yeah, but cow-tipping is punishable by death in Texas. They take their cows very seriously.
Your slander aside (white wine is for women), I find it very hard to believe that cost of living doesn’t play a part. I could live very comfortably and happily on 75K in Cleveland. In Orange County, I’d have trouble anything more than food, shelter and clothing for my family of 3.