Lawyer Up
Order in the court! Houston ranks as the second best city in the nation for lawyers
If you're a lawyer living in Houston, you've found an excellent city to call home, according to a new report.
Austin-based blog Sparefoot recently released a list of the 10 best U.S. cities for lawyers and Houston came in at No. 2. The only other Texas city featured on the list was Dallas, coming in at No. 7.
To assess which cities were the best, the site teamed up with Indeed, the world's largest job site by users, to find the 10 metro areas with the most job listings for lawyers, as well as the average salaries for those positions in each city. Sparefoot also aggregated the median rent and home prices based on 2013 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. The site ranked each metro area by combining the rankings — they gave twice as much weight to job availability — to determine overall rankings.
Although the average annual salary for lawyers in Houston is the fourth lowest on the list at $90,000, the list cited the city's affordability as a significant reason for its high overall ranking. Houston's median home price ($141,300) is the second lowest on the list besides Dallas, which has a median home price of $131,800.
In terms of salary as a percentage of home price, Houston ranks No. 3 with 63.7 percent, and for rent as a percentage of income, the city comes in at No. 2 with 18.8 percent.
The list noted Houston's largest law firms by personnel as Vinson & Elkins, Norton Rose Fulbright and Andrews Kurth, respectively. In Dallas, Haynes and Boone, Thompson & Knight, and Locke Lord are the largest firms.
Although affordability was quite similar, Dallas fared worse than Houston due to a lower average annual salary ($81,000) and a lower percentage share of jobs out of the cities ranked in the top 10.
Atlanta managed to score the No. 1 spot on the list, with an average annual salary of $99,000 and a median home price of $179,000. Other top cities include Chicago (No. 3), Boston (No. 4), Washington D.C. (No. 5), New York City (No. 6), San Francisco (No. 8), Seattle (No. 9) and Los Angeles (No. 10).