The National Association for Law Placement (NALP) has issued its latest round of sobering job news, and this time the depressing statistics focus on public-interest lawyer salaries.
Median entry-level public-sector and public-interest lawyer salaries have grown by between 23 and 29 percent since NALP began tracking them in 2004, but that increase has barely kept pace with the rising Consumer Price Index meaning that local prosecutors, public defenders and other public-interest attorneys are essentially earning wages comparable to those paid to lawyers who entered the field close to a decade earlier. Additionally, most of that salary growth occurred before the 2008 recession. Growth in public-interest pay since then has been modest, NALP said.
