is there a chart out there showing how much money lawyers have made as an industry over time?

A doodler and computerer. I like permissive/permissionless open source, smart contracts, p2p systems, room-scale VR, and NixOS.

shazow.net

Currently: WhatsABI

Just a lawyer behind the curtain of /oz building next-generation gamified storytelling, and making arts more accessible with A Stage Reborn™ for everyone. 💜💙

It’s absolutely shrinking I can tell you that. The whole “GPT” lawyer fiasco last year basically set the precedent of “fire your juniors and use free AI but fix it by the time your mistakes are caught in the court.” It opened a big door immediately after all the PPP payout and layoff fraud for firms to downscale but earn more.

Law grad UI is skyrocketing, income curve to class rank and family status is an exponential curve. Junior roles don’t really exist anymore either. 

The secrecy on billable is a law thing about client privacy. It’s why I can’t use a Patreon to run my low bono legal clinic online. Ethics rules don’t allow it (in most States.)

Thank you! Unsurprising that billables are very secret.

I'm mostly curious how we would validate an intuition of whether law as an industry (let's say total billable hours) is growing or shrinking relative to other industries.

Any ideas? Are there good proxies here?

Perhaps looking at unemployment rates within lawyers as a group? Anything else?

There are bar surveys but not anything universal. Billables are pretty protected so other than revenue reports…

I know the NM bar does an earnings survey regularly for example. 

But if you have questions for a lawyer NOT legal advice, poke me, I am one. 🫣

https://www.sbnm.org/News-Publications/Handbooks-and-Whitepapers/Economics-of-Law-Practice-in-NM-Lawyer-Compensation-Surevy

Supplemental- let me know if there's any NM bar stuff I can pull for you too. I do have access to FastCase so if there's any law economics articles there I bet I can pull PDFs. Just nothing Westlaw tier.