Empirical Legal Studies Blog points us to the most recent edition of NALP's Jobs & JD's. Below is a graph charting the salary distribution the graduating law school class of 2006. Click for a bigger view.

As you can see, the graph is pretty extreme in its distributions on the far ends of the scale. It's important for those thinking about attending law school to understand this graph.

Basically, a bunch of law school graduates started at salaries somewhere between $40,000 and $50,000 while another bunch started somewhere around $135,000 with very little in betweens. More below on what this means...

According to the post's author, Indiana Professor Bill Henderson, for law students this means...

Let's face it: $40K to $55K per year is just not enough to pay down the avg. $85,000 debt (especially as interest rates climb) and still enjoy any kind of lifestyle that a professional degree is presumed to confer. The national median starting salary for a 2 to 10 lawyer firm is $50,000. There are a lot of struggling alumni out there. And do we really need more law schools? For many, getting a JD is a very risky financial proposition, especially when you factor in bar passage.

To me this means when choosing a law school, you really need to consider what you're going to pay if you can't get into a top school.

Once you're out of the top 25 or so law schools, the chances of being in that second hump in the graph shoots down dramatically. In fact, it's extremely likely that you're going to end up in that first hump if you don't go to one of the law schools with brand name recognition.

So tution cost, cost of living, and scholarship money should be weighed greatly when choosing a school if you, like most, must pay for law school on loans are not accepted into an upper tier school.

In US News rankings lingo, that means sometimes it might be a better choice to take a full-ride scholarship package from a third tier school than to go to a second tier school on loans. Or to choose a lower 2nd tier state school over an upper 2nd tier private school. You get the drift.

But if you can get into a top school, these financial factors deserve less weight because, as Prof. Henderson points out, "On the other hand, if you are Georgetown, NYU, Northwestern, Harvard, Columbia, et al., your current model works just fine." That is, those types of schools can continue to charge high tuition (which, by the way, is often not that far off from lower reputation private schools) because almost all of their students will always have the option to be in that second hump in the graph should they choose.

His thoughts on implications for law schools and law firms are worth a read too.

Update: Here's a nice roundup from The Chronicle of Higher Education of what some bloggers are saying about the two-humped salary distribution. Especially nice because it linked The Pre-Law Blog's post!