What people like you are making now in Dallas

D Magazine, Nov 01, 1998

Do you make enough money? We know, we know: It's not really your salary that matters most, but personal satisfaction with your job. And we've all been taught that it's better to give than to receive. But let's face it: Dallas is a big-money city, and we all feel the occasional flash of greed. (Just how much would that second home in Tuscany really cost?)

We posed the question mother told us never to ask: How much money do you make? Naturally, no one answered. So we went to the public record to select nearly a hundred professionals from corporate lawyers to marketing directors--people just like you. We also visited with four professionals who made a career move at the right time--and stand to make a bundle now. Then we asked top local headhunters about tips for getting a raise, how to know when you're in a dead-end job, whether to accept a counter-offer, and more. The numbers we compiled--and the answers we received--might surprise you.

In one of the hottest summers on record, no one in Dallas was hotter than Melissa Mitchell. The city's most desirable suitors were falling over themselves to court her. They wined and dined her, desperate to impress. They dressed in their best duds, invited her to the choicest spots, pleaded with her.

No, Melissa Mitchell isn't a prom queen. She's a law student at SMU. And she's in serious demand. She has a stellar academic pedigree, including an undergraduate degree in economics from Stanford. She's excelled at SMU and is this year's editor of the law review. She has already had a career in banking, and she will be 40 by the time she graduates next spring. That sets Mitchell apart and surprisingly, at a time when 40 is the benchmark for age discrimination claims, makes her even more desirable to Dallas' top firms. Simply put, she stands to make a lot of money in a red-hot legal market.

Mitchell has experienced this kind of roaring economy before. In the 1980s, she was a banker in Houston when the Texas economy tanked. She had dreamed of settling in with a stable financial institution rooted in the community. There she would help people finance their dreams. But before she knew it, the whole thing turned into a nightmare of red ink. Suddenly, she was dealing with the underside of banking--loan workouts. That meant lots of contact with troubled businesspeople, government regulators--and lawyers.

Much to her surprise, she liked it. There was something energizing about plotting strategies and solutions with the bank's attorneys. As her bank metamorphosed into a local arm of still another huge out-of-state lender, she moved to Dallas and joined a small company as a financial officer. But as the company thrived, she found herself growing bored. Again, the best part of the job for her was the most troubling for the business--working with its lawyers on the various legal wrangles that surfaced.

This banking experience makes Mitchell especially attractive to law firms, who frequently hear from their corporate clients that they like lawyers who understand the business side of their legal work. Local firms need lawyers who can one day bring in new business--lawyers who are partnership material.

Mitchell certainly looks like the type. She is mature, poised, and focused. She did not decide to give up a successful business career and take on $70,000 in debt on a whim. Indeed, by the time she'd finished her first year, she already had a strong sense of what she wanted. She knew she would stay in Dallas; she did not want to work at the local office of an out-of-town firm, and she wanted to practice commercial litigation. That's what had jazzed her in the business world, and she wanted a career that jazzed her every day.

But her decision to change careers wasn't just about excitement: It was about money. With the raging economy, the competition for top law students has grown increasingly fierce. As a result, the salaries offered to standout law students have skyrocketed. In July, Houston-based Vinson & Elkins, a firm with nearly 100 lawyers in Dallas, raised associate salaries an unheard of 20 percent across the board, pushing starting compensation past $90,000. That means that Mitchell, at the top of the top, is in a position to make a bundle.

After her first year of law school, she split her summer between two very different Dallas firms: Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, one of the biggest firms in the country, and Figari & Davenport, a small, elite--and purely local-litigation shop. This past summer, she again clerked with Figari & Davenport, and also with Carrington, Coleman, Sloman & Blumenthal, which at 75 lawyers is three times the size of Figari but hardly a gargantuan like so many of the firms pursuing her. The result of these clerkships? Mitchell now has two offers on the table: one from Carrington, Coleman, the other from Figari & Davenport. The firms guarantee her a job, but haven't yet released starting salary figures. With Vinson & Elkins latest aggressive move, though, the offers are sure to be lucrative.