November 23, 2007

What This Job Pays: attorney

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Pay: The median pay for an attorney in the Seattle area is $93,100 annually, with most earning from $73,900 to $117,000 a year, according to PayScale, a Seattle company that tracks compensation and benefits.

Demand: Employment of lawyers is expected to grow about as fast as average for all occupations through 2014, primarily as a result of growth in the population and in the general level of business activity. Job growth among lawyers also will result from increasing demand for legal services in such areas as health-care, intellectual-property, venture-capital, energy, elder, antitrust and environmental law. In addition, the wider availability and affordability of legal clinics should result in increased use of legal services by middle-income people. However, growth in demand for lawyers will be limited as businesses, in an effort to reduce costs, increasingly use large accounting firms and paralegals to perform some of the same functions that lawyers do. Also, mediation and dispute resolution increasingly are being used as alternatives to litigation.

Need to know: The required college and law-school education usually takes seven years of full-time study after high school – four years of undergraduate study, followed by three years of law school. Law-school applicants must have a bachelor's degree to qualify for admission. Prospective lawyers should develop proficiency in writing and speaking, reading, researching, analyzing, and thinking logically – skills needed to succeed both in law school and in the profession. To practice law in the courts of any state or other jurisdiction, a person must be licensed, or admitted to its bar, under rules established by the jurisdiction's highest court. All states require that applicants for admission to the bar pass a written bar examination; most states also require applicants to pass a separate written ethics examination. To qualify for the bar examination in most states, an applicant usually must earn a college degree and graduate from a law school accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA) or the proper state authorities.

PayScale, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

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