Lure Of Higher Salaries Hurts Retention Efforts

From The Miami Herald:

State and district attorneys around the country are complaining they’re having trouble recruiting and retaining young lawyers because they simply can’t pay enough.

Public defenders are having the same problem as the rising cost of a law school education and the cost of living has far outpaced salaries for government criminal lawyers.

Recruiters on both sides of the courtroom aisle are competing with private firms that pay double and triple what they can offer, and even with other government agencies that pay far more.

Locally, the Miami-Dade state attorney’s office starts lawyers out at just under $40,000. The Miami-Dade public defender’s office pays new attorneys $42,000.

Lawyers straight out of law school make about $80,000 at the Miami-Dade County Attorney’s Office. The top private firms have starting salaries of $130,000 or more in Miami.

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle and Broward State Attorney Mike Satz have been lobbying the Legislature for more money.

”You have to at least make it so that they can pay their bills. None of these new lawyers believe that they’re going to get rich. And frankly we’re not talking about necessarily even competing with the private law firms. We’re talking about competing with other public sector jobs,” Fernández Rundle said.

Fernández Rundle wants to raise starting salaries to $50,000 and add a pay differential to take into account South Florida’s higher cost of living compared to the rest of the state.

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