[johnadams121212]

Now, I understand demand and supply and realise that there will undoubtedly be geographic differences in the labour market for lawyers, but how much can they vary?

I keep reading about how people are being discouraged from attending law school in the US, because you rack up a lot of debt and can make more money plumbing. However, I've seen some countries in the middle east where even entry level lawyers make insane money.

Does the state of the market really vary that much? I imagine lawyers will be in greater demand in less developed countries?

[GR3YFOXXX]

Yes, it matters immensely. Even within the UK, NQ salaries in Belfast are atrocious in comparison to a similar sized city in England.

[jacketpotato]

Its not just about geography. A debt capital markets specialist will have a much higher salary than a personal injury lawyer. PI lawyers don't know how to do DCM, and to be fair the DCM lawyer would struggle to run a PI claim. This can even apply within the same practice area. A corporate lawyer at a top firm in London will be working longer hours and doing much larger deals than a corporate lawyer based in Manchester - the largest deals are all done out of London and the largest civil cases are heard in the London High Court, and the market prices accordingly.

On a global scale, of course the salary for high-street type work will vary enormously depending on how easy it is to become a lawyer in that country, what living costs are like and what the local population are able to pay.

I don't think the salaries for high-end commercial work vary that much, all things considered. The largest international firms tend to be headquartered in New York or Chicago and base the salaries of lawyers in their foreign offices on London or NY rates. For example, a first year attorney in the Abu Dhabi office of a white shoe firm gets something like New York rates (US$ 160,000) and an NQ at a Magic Circle firm starting in Hong Kong would broadly be getting London rates (£60-70k).