- law dawg
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What advice or tips would give to others in the legal field about managing finances? What steps did you take to set you up for financial success? Are they replicable in the current economy? What do you wish you would have done? Did any of the cold-calling financial advisors work out for you? Do you even need a financial advisor? What about those of you working for the government–any tips on making the most of PERS? What about those of you who have done both? Are you planning on retiring in Nevada or somewhere else? Does the availability of casinos within driving distance affect your financial future? What is the biggest mistake you’ve made yourself or seen other attorneys make with regard to finances?
Honestly, avoid debt. I know that the in thing right now is leverage yourself intelligently and that avoiding debt seems old fashioned, but I have known very few people that have been able to leverage themselves to riches. It always seems to fall apart at some point. So live below your means until you can pay outright for what you want. Don’t get a fancy office you can’t afford. Don’t hire people that you have to use your line of credit to pay. Drive a buick instead of a BMW. Pay off a reasonable home. It takes discipline and patience, but it is nearly full proof. The only people I have seen fail at this approach are those who are destroyed by a cruel twist of fate, like an unexpected medical event or something. I have seen many people who are over leveraged go down over relatively small bumps in the road that they could have easily overcome if they didn’t owe so much.
I agree wholeheartedly. I sleep well knowing that my house is paid off, college funds set aside and no car payments…….was not easy and there was some luck involved paid it pays off
I used to sleep well without debt and then the real estate market kept climbing and climbing and now I have outgrown the homestead limit. Had to go get some new debt to keep me under the umbrella.
1 – Keep debt LOW or zero, share expenses, not profits, save, save, save.
2 – When you have significant funds, learn to invest for yourself as opposed to getting a financial advisor for a variety of reasons; dividend investing is the self-created ‘PERS’ for those in the private sector.
3- While this may be backward for some, best risk management skills and cash flow management come from first learning to play blackjack (and being able to win) and be a winning player at Poker as well.
4 – Mistakes – while enjoying the climb with income and work – overspending taking on too much personnel when not necessary.
5 – For financial success as a lawyer, find a niche and have that proverbial moat work for you, better than the do whatever else does.
Just a few initial thoughts. Best wishes all
I wish I would have purchased a few rental properties in 2011.
You and everyone else.
Honestly the luckiest thing I ever did was purchase rental properties back at the bottom of the market. (Well I mean “bottom” was a relative term). I would like to tell you that I am a savvy investor. I am a lucky investor. I dont feel like I have done well and then periodically have to do a balance sheet and pleasantly surprise myself.
Refreshing to see someone acknowledge the role that luck plays. You can make all the right textbook moves and do okay, but add a little luck and everything is diferent
Fiore is in more trouble, new indictment filed:
But in a new court filing, prosecutors allege that Fiore’s financial fraud went much further than they previously claimed.
“Fiore has repeatedly defrauded donors to her campaigns, her political action committee, and even her Section 501(c)(3) charity by secretly diverting hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to those entities for her personal use,” prosecutors wrote. “This has enabled the defendant to live beyond her means, using donor money to pay for rent, plastic surgery, vacations, and her daughter’s wedding.”
They raided her YEARS ago. Why did it take so long to bring the indictment? Whatever the answer to that question is feels like the way that M.F. wiggles out of this one.
Anyone else wondering if 10:26 is one of the same folks who were convinced Telles was going to be running circles around the DA and secure an acquittal?
No one seriously thought that. It was just an ongoing joke because he was so obviously guilty.
I think most believed it was a joke, but we probably had at least one true believer too.
Put on your big boy or big girl pants and learn how to make collection calls. It’s the stuff I hate and work I resisted. It goes hand in hand with owning/managing your financial success. I have learned that failure to reach out to clients who owe me money means 2 things. First, they are unilaterally reducing my billable rate, but second, and more importantly, they are stealing from me. My billing practices are excellent (I bill as I go – if you don’t, you never successfully recreate a day, let alone a month). I don’t worry about fee complaints because my billings are precise.
I too hate making these phone calls. I hate dealing with the excuses and accusations that come with why they haven’t paid. The better thing is to cut off these clients as soon as possible. And the best thing is to screen them out and never take them on in the first place.
Oh my sweet child, you are obviously not a solo in one of the areas in which the cabals rule. Precise billings meaning something there … hahaha
If your clients can take advantage (especially the ones that can pay) they will. The single most important lesson I have learned on managing my AR is stick to your guns. Don’t be a dick, but I can promise you that if they take advantage and you let them, they DO NOT respect you, even if they love your work product.
Do not hesitate to drop that Motion to Withdraw and Perfect an Attorneys lien.
I had a longtime client decline (initially to pay). It was a commercial real estate project from several years ago. I recorded the Attorneys lien when he stopped answering my calls. He then proceeded to attempt to nickel and dime me over interest, late fees, recording fees and the other things allowed by my retainer agreement.
I stopped taking HIS calls and got paid 100% from escrow. Then I went to Cancun on his money.
The Rule of 72 is both your best friend and worst enemy.
Why is it your worst enemy?
Think un/under paid debt where interest is assessed.
fair enough – I was only thinking of the appreciation/dividend yield –
Before work this morning, my 10 year old son came into my home office and said kids at school were making fun of him because our family doesn’t go on a lot of vacations (we do go on vacation, 2-3x a year, but it’s nothing fancy, usually California or somewhere in the western US).
I told him that while I was a missionary, I would go knocking doors in rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods. I told him I noticed something very strange early on. The nicest cars were in the poorest neighborhoods. Super rich people drove luxury cars, sure, but well-off people usually drove very modest, very old cars. I told him to start paying attention to who buys and wears expensive clothing. It isn’t wealthy people. I explained that I make more money each year than 95% of his classmates parents, but yeah, we definitely don’t go on the same big vacations that they do, and our (paid off) cars are certainly not as impressive (or impressive at all, frankly). But we have a nice home, we have financial security. Things don’t bring lasting joy, but family does. Money can provide a family with security, time and opportunity. That’s true wealth.
My biggest regret with finances as it relates to law was not maxing out my 401k and Roth contributions earlier. I didn’t for the first 7 years, but could have. This will be the 7th year I’ve maxed. You can’t beat the tax advantaged accounts or the free money in the employer match. This is our number one goal every year. All other financial decisions are subsequent to our plan to max out.
Lewis Roca has approved a combination with Womble Bond Dickinson (US), a full-service Am Law 100 firm. Together, they will have more than 1,300 attorneys throughout 37 offices in the United States and the United Kingdom. Planned effective date of January 1, 2025.
Womble is HUGE. Hopefully it works out for all at L&R.
A couple of weeks ago a judge told me that someone had been caught engaged in “manual override” while on Zoom during a hearing. The video went around the supreme court building. I haven’t heard about it anywhere else, can anyone provide more detail?
Was the person in question one of the Yankees? Who was their favorite Little Rascal, Alfalfa or Spanky?
I heard about it. I even got a name.
Name please?
There was porn zoomed over the zoom during voir dire for the guy who attacked Judge Holthus. Probably what they are referring to. I believe only the court clerk saw it though because zoom wasn’t active for the potential jurors to see and because the “hackers” used gifs the audio wasn’t really an issue. So if you happened to be watching on zoom instead of courttv you probably saw it.
That isn’t what they are referring to, this was an attorney during a calendar. It was brought up on the blog prior to the Judge Holthus case
Is this the Department 17 case? I checked the attorneys who were on the docket that morning and there was one attorney in question who has had self-control issues in other contexts in the past who I wondered if that was who it was.
Amongst a number of other reasons, don’t drink excessively
Don’t depend on the bonus ever being part of your annual budgeting and please do not rely on it for something necessary. I have seen far too many times where one seems to have squarely fit within all the firms confines and by some twist of an algorithm or an unexpected write down a hard working associate is out a bonus or in a different tier than all reasonable metrics would suggest. Or sometimes you do hit and the firm doesn’t make as much as last year so the screws are tightened as we all tighten the belts.
I’m at Boyd rn and am curious about attorney salaries in Vegas. What is the average starting rate for a first year attorney?
it depends
This very lawyerly answer is probably the most correct. It’s hard to reach an average because different areas of law have different scales. That said you can look at the government jobs (which tend to be lower paying than private practice as a good reference point). Currently, you can start as a deputy attorney general with pay at $91,224.72. (That is with you contributing to PERS so this is actually less money than it looks like on paper.) There will be jobs that will try to pay you less than that, but you should avoid those if you can unless you want the specific circumstances that come with them or you just can’t get anything else. If you work at one of the larger national firms like say Wilson Elser, you could expect to start at around $110K. National firms that have to comply with Colorado or California law will include the salary range. They usually have a floor and then have a max for associates. Your years of experience determines where you fall in that range. If I were starting over coming fresh out of law school and having passed the bar, I would generally ignore any jobs that start out lower than $85K.
it’s better than for most of your predecessors but probably has cooled a little from last year. What area of law because i really could just say $65K-$160K and be accurate.
165K
There’s probably fewer than 10 firms in the valley where this will be your starting salary.
165k as a first year? probably less than 5…
which ones. asking for a friend.
The ones in big buildings. Schreck, Brownstein, Snell&Wilmer etc.
To be honest, if you’re interested in Biglaw/transactional stuff like that, Las Vegas is not the city to go down that route. At that point, I’d just move to LA, Chicago, etc.
You’ll be lucky to make $40k.
Get out now.
How much do you like your family/spouse/Hobbies? When I left law school my first law job offered me 60k to be an legal clerk. I wrote briefs for a couple months until Covid trigger a round of layoffs. My second job I fell into through a connection into an area of law I had never heard of or thought about practicing previously and was paid slightly more than that. After several years I am now making a little over 100k, which amounts to the starting salary of other, more time consuming areas of law. I am also 100% office remote, attend hearings as needed at court, and get everything done in more or less 40 hours a week.
The first year of experience will be the hardest to get. After that you have a lot more options. Law school does not train you to be an actual attorney, just to understand the law and many firms may want to prey on that to trade experience for lower salary or worse conditions. They get you in the door and hope you never leave, or they just thrive on a revolving door of new blood that stays for 3 months and then quits. My first year I had a workload that present me would never have accepted.
Figure out where you are at on the amount of money you want to make scale versus the BS you want to deal with scale. Before my first job I had two different unrelated PI attorneys tell me they bought a sports car because the only time they get to themselves is when they are going to and from court and they might as well enjoy it. Alternatively I have worked with older attorneys who are comfortable picking up the occasional case and doing some appearance work to keep the lights on while working the cases they are interested in.
If the BS outweighs the money, find a new job. If you can handle more BS in exchange for more money, find a new job or get promoted.
what is the highest paying firm in LV right now?
i also want to know
YOU are the highest paying firm in town.
IF
You have the balls, the skills, the work ethic and the personality.
lol
For first year associates, my guess would be Greenberg Traurig.
if you sidestep clerkships and get right to work in private practice not including DA or PD’s offices, you should be making $90k at the VERY least. In my limited experience and anecdotal evidence, I’d say average is $95,000 – $115,000 starting at a small to mid-sized firm.
Boyd’s NALP data for the class of 2023 puts the median starting salary at like 75k-90k
do with that info what you will
NALP is garbage.
tl;dr: Consider holding Bitcoin in a Roth IRA for tax-free growth. If you’re ineligible for a direct Roth IRA, use a backdoor Roth strategy. Unchained Capital and iTrust Capital are top options for this.
Bitcoin is a meme investment until someone finds a unique product that everybody wants and only accepts crypto. Like drugs.
Keep telling yourself that and relying on your PERS.
I am actually making more in crypto trading this last 8 months(±90 minutes a day) than I made in practice for many years. Can’t wait for retirement, even though I am not ready to give it up yet.
It’s easy to exchange to USD and to claim as regular income. Just advanced my timeline by 3 years.
What platform or exchange are you trading on?
Crypto is gambling, much like day trading, futures trading or winning big at the casino. You only hear about the wins, not the many losses.
Thats what meme investors tell everyone. Gamblers only recount their winnings in their tales.
Crypto is gambling. You may roll snake eyes.
Just like the people that go broke day trading, or futures trading, or win big at a casino. You only hear the stories about winning.
Regarding sound financial management, stay away from any blood sucking ex wives. Writing this for a friend.
Unless u get a really cushy jobs there is no better way to learn the law than clerking. When u see the bullshit u learn what it’s really like. Yay talking bout u family law.
Don’t do employer employee PERS, do employer only and max Deferred Comp.
Trump won the debate almost as well as when he beat Biden. She did do better than I expected though.
Trump won the debate just as much as he won the 2020 election.
THEY’RE EATING PETS!
I actually heard the audio of a police report a woman was filing about a car being eaten. Also on YouTube is a video of man confronting person n the act of eating cat. You’re a lawyer friend – look at the facts.
I watched the news report where the woman that ate the cat was arrested.
Is one person eating a cat newsworthy? We’ve got dudes eating other dudes’ faces in Vegas and Florida.
Not as newsworthy as the rape and murder of an american college student by an illegal alien. But yeah, with our current immigration problems, its newsworthy.