Attorney
Career Area: Law, Compliance, and Public Safety
Occupation Group: Legal Professionals
Salary
Percentile wages tell how much a certain percentage of an overall population in a geographic area or within a given industry or field makes. The percentile wage estimate is the value of a wage below which a certain percent of workers fall.
An example would be the 25th percentile, 25 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 75 percent earn more than the estimated wage value. At the 75th percentile, 75 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 25 percent earn more than the estimated wage value.
A typical Attorney earns the following wages (national and state):
State
The average salary in North Carolina for those pursuing this career is $81,071
National
The average salary in the United States for those pursuing this career is $88,386
What Does a Professional in this Career Do?
Represents clients in legal matters or court proceedings, provides legal advice and draws up legal documents. Works on criminal or civil cases, and either specializes in one area or practices broadly across all areas of law.
Employment Trends
The job demand and job growth statistics shown here were derived from job posts over the past year. Expected job growth projections are extrapolated from year-over-year job post listing history.
Job demand and job growth is expected at the following rates:
| Location | Growth | |
|---|---|---|
| North Carolina | 3335 | +7.8% |
| Nationwide | 138770 | +6.1% |
Skills
A professional in this position typically utilizes the following skills in the course of everyday work in this exciting and challenging field:
Baseline Skills
The following are baseline skills every Attorney is expected to have in order to experience success in this field:
- Communication Skills: The ability to convey information to another effectively and efficiently.
- Writing: Experience expressing business messages effectively in written form. This may include planning drafting and revising as necessary.
- Research: Experience performing creative and systematic work to understand a product, market, or customer, either before building a new solution, or to troubleshoot an existing issue
- Teamwork / Collaboration: Experience working in collaborative efforts with a team to achieve a common goal or to complete a task in the most effective and efficient way.
- Detail-Oriented: A detail oriented person is someone who pays attention to the details and can make a conscious effort to understand causes instead of just the effects, and that does this in a second nature type of way.
Specialized Skills
These skills are specific to working in this career:
- Litigation: Working experience of Litigation. Litigation is the term used to describe proceedings initiated between two opposing parties to enforce or defend a legal right. Litigation is typically settled by agreement between the parties, but may also be heard and decided by a jury or judge in court.
- Legal Research: Legal research is the process of identifying and retrieving information necessary to support legal decision-making.
- Legal Documentation: Working experience of Legal Documentation. Documentation is material that provides official information or evidence or that serves as a record.
- Contract Preparation: Experience preparing or assembling contracts.
- Intellectual Property: Intellectual property (IP) refers to creations of the intellect for which a monopoly is assigned to designated owners by law.
Distinguishing Skills
Any Attorney that possesses the following skills will stand out against the competition:
- Mergers and Acquisitions: Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are transactions in which the ownership of companies, other business organizations or their operating units are transferred or combined.
- Civil Litigation: Working experience in the non-criminal stream of actions in law.
- Corporate Governance: Corporate governance is the mechanisms, processes and relations by which corporations are controlled and directed.
- Client Representation:
- Settlement Negotiation: Negotiation is a dialogue between two or more people or parties intended to reach a beneficial outcome over one or more issues where a conflict exists with respect to at least one of these issues.
Salary Boosting Skills
A professional who wishes to excel in this career path may consider developing the following highly valued skills:
- Private Equity: Working experience of Private Equity, which typically refers to investment funds organized as limited partnerships that are not publicly traded and whose investors are typically large institutional investors, university endowments, or wealthy individuals.
Experience
This position typically requires the following level of experience. The numbers presented in the pie charts below were derived from actual job posts over the past year. Not all job postings list experience requirements.
| Experience Required | % |
| 0 to 2 years | 28% |
| 3 to 5 years | 51% |
| 6 to 8 years | 14% |
Many of the programs offered through NC State are designed for working professionals who need additional credentials to enhance existing work experience.
Students who do not have the expected level of experience may wish to look into internship and employment opportunities.
Common Job Titles
It is possible to find work in this field in positions commonly listed as the following job titles:
- Associate Attorney
- Attorney
- Corporate Counsel
- Litigation Attorney
- Staff Attorney
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