They dnt make much. The lawyers that make the big money are the ones that help ya sue after a accident. personal injury

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-- just a thought--

I would think that any lawyer in this would be there for the civil rights part of the defense, and would be doing it mostly because it's an unfair law. I think it's like working for the ACLU or NORML?
Just a guess.

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I'd giva ya everything I got . . . for little piece of mind

For a criminal defense attorney defending drug offenses is one of the best paying, but Dirtyboy is right about other sectors of the law paying more. The biggest factors is how good you are and since a lot of how good you are stems from how much you like doing something then if you would enjoy defending people for this cause then you will be more into doing your job then something you don't enjoy. Even though the payout for defending someone is a lot less than a attorney winning a lawsuit for millions of dollars it is a steadier income stream because the amount of drug cases and you get paid whether you win or lose. Lawsuit cases on the other hand are usually taken by the attorney for a percentage of the winnings so yes you will bank big if you win a $100 million for your client and your cut is 30% of that, but if you don't win you don't get paid. Not to mention lawsuits take years usually to finish. Defense attorneys usually make $10,000 to hundreds of thousands defending a client from a felony drug charge and they get paid win or lose. Federal cases usually pay more than state cases and you can do both.

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"It does the sheep no good to preach the goodness of a diet of grass, if the wolves are of a different mind"

Not true. Most drug offenses that criminal defense attornies get are for petty possession, or small sale claims. In nearly all of these, the individuals don't have much money, and you can't charge too much for it anyway, unless it's a very rich person with a very large possession charge.

I don't know where you are getting those facts from, but that is certainly not he case around here. If you have a felony drug possession charge, the lawyer would be lucky to get $2-4,000. Usually, they have to pay paralegals, secretaries, and court documents, so all and all after defending that one case, spending a few days working on it, they walk away with about $500, not really worth it in my opinion.

Not all civil cases work off of a contingency. And you choose which ones you get to represent. So if you get a case that you don't think you can win, then you don't take it and you don't miss out. If you take the case and don't win, it's your own fault. If one out of every five cases you win in civil cases, that means out of five cases you get like $100,000-$1 Mill. If you defend felony possession charges and you get what noumenon claims, then you would make $50,000 off the same five charges. Nearly half the payout.

Personally, for lawyers at least, I think the money is in business law. But that's me.

If you want to become a lawyer just for the money, don't do it. Three years of lawschool is murder, and if you are only sticking through it for a paycheck you won't make it. You actually have to be interested in the material and want to go to class every day, want to read the cases. Because if you don't, even if you get your JD, you'll get a massive case of depression and suicidal tendancies.