A question recently posted on our website – not sure why – but here’s our answer!
Yes but only if you reach the top of your game, or if you are a businessman as well as a lawyer.
There is a myth around law that the vast majority of lawyers are all multimillionaires, earn huge amounts of money from their legal practice and creaming in huge amounts of money from their clients all the time. Nothing could be further from the truth. The overwhelming majority of the 120,000 or so qualified solicitors in the UK will never earn more than £45-50k per annum in their careers, with the vast majority lacking any job security or quality pension provision.
A small minority of solicitors work in City of London law firms and it is these lawyers who earn large amounts of money, but this is the minority rather than the majority. RollonFriday.com is a good source of information on the salaries paid in this sector of law.
Outside of London it is extremely rare to see salaries like this, and these are likely to only be in law firms where an entrepreneur has developed a niche service on a large scale, or the lawyer is working for a large regional or multinational law firm in one of their other offices than London.
So how is it possible for a solicitor to be a millionaire? The answer is that it is almost certain to be tied up with business interests as well as law. We suspect that the overwhelming majority of millionaires who are lawyers will have managed to gain millionaire status because of business interests rather than their legal practice.
