Great news for lawyers (and their legions of fans)

Sick of your stagnating wages and the high cost of living? Here's a solution: go to law school. According to the New York Times, base pay for new lawyers is now experiencing an unusual inflation:

The recent round of pay increases began last year, when Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, a litigation firm based in California with offices in New York, decided to increase the base pay for first-year associates to $135,000, which at the time exceeded even the $125,000 starting salary common at many New York firms. A partner, A. William Urquhart, said his firm “hoped bigger firms wouldn’t follow so we could separate ourselves, but they did.”

A few months later, Sullivan & Cromwell, a large law firm with headquarters in New York, raised the base salary for new lawyers by $20,000, to $145,000.

Somehow this strikes me as a misallocation of resources. The article goes on to state that this income inflation will probably not result in increased lawyer fees and hourly rates (y'know, what you and I pay when we need a lawyer), so I guess we can rest assured that an inflationary price/wage spiral will not happen to the venerable Laffey Matrix.