Monthly Archives: September 2007

I was amazed to learn that the ABA apparently withdrew — or at least delayed — the controversial proposed bar pass standard, aka Interpretation 301-6, more than two weeks ago.

Here are some Comments sent to the ABA regarding Proposed Interpretation 301-6: (comments1); (comments2); (comments3); (comments4); and (comments5).

I’ve been unable to find an official notice of the withdrawal, but it’s reported in this Press Release from the National Lawyers Guild.

Previous posts:

• ABA Proposes Bar Pass Rate Standard
• More on Proposed ABA Standard on Bar Pass Rates
• Other Perspectives on the ABA’s Proposed Bar Pass Standard
• The ABA‘s Proposed New Standard: Predicting Effects

Bill Henderson has a really interesting chart up at Empirical Legal Studies: Distribution of 2006 Starting Salaries: Best Graphic Chart of the Year which shows a very bimodal distribution of starting lawyer saleries. As he says,

The sample includes—in order of size—private practice (55.8%), business (14.2%), government (10.6%), judicial clerks (9.6%), public interest (5.4%), and other (2.8%). Half of the graduates make less than the $62,000 per year median—but remarkably, there is no clustering there. Over a quarter (27.5%) make between $40k-$55k per year, and another quarter (27.8%) have an annual salary of $100K plus.

If the chart were a flipbook of the last twenty years, the first mode would be relatively stationary, barely tracking inflation, while the second mode would be moving quickly to the right—i.e., the salary wars. In fact, because of the recent jump to $160K in the major markets, the second mode has already moved even more to the right.

Lots of other interesting comments there too.