The median salary for graduates of the law school class of 2011 was $60,000, which was 17 percent lower than it had been just two years earlier, according to a new report from the Association for Legal Career Professionals (NALP).

But if you know anything about the bizarre market that is legal hiring, you know that the median salary tells you zilch.

Few newly minted lawyers actually earn salaries close to the median (or mean) — their pay tends to fall much higher or lower. In other words, the salaries for have for years been “bimodal,” meaning they’ve generally sorted into two levels: the $160,000 earned by first-year associates at big, white-shoe law firms, and the $40,000-to-$65,000 range earned by lawyers at smaller law firms, government jobs and so on.

NALP

Across the board, big law firms have been offering starting salaries of exactly $160,000 since 2007.

Talk to just about any partner at any major law firm, though, and they’ll tell you that first-year associates know basically nothing when they start out. Plus, a tiny fraction of the new grads they hire and train intensively actually stick around to become partners seven or so years later. And during the financial crisis, clients balked at paying the hourly rates that firms had to charge in order to cover those $160,000 salaries. There’s also a huge surplus of new lawyers right now, even from the top schools.

With all those factors put together, you might expect salaries to fall, at least a little, at some of the big firms.

Instead law firms have been reluctant to lower their starting pay for these first-year associate slots, partly because they worry they’ll miss out on the best talent (even though that seems to be abundant) and partly because they are afraid of losing face. Not paying the standard top-tier salary is a tacit admission that you’re no longer top-tier.

Lawyers are by training (and nature, one might argue, given the choice to go to law school) risk-averse. Because no one wants to be the first mover in lowering that entry-level salary, firms have kept the salary and just hired fewer new lawyers.

It’s the perfect example of a “sticky wage” depressing employment, even though the “sticky wage” concept usually applies to jobs that people already have, not jobs they’re applying for.

You can see the shrinking pool of $160,000-salary first-year-associates pretty clearly in the NALP data. Here is the salary distribution for 2009:

NALP

And for 2010:

NALP

Compare those to the graph for 2011 posted earlier.

The spike on the right-hand side is in the exact same spot in all three charts, at $160,000. But the height of the spike — which represents the percentage of lawyers who got that starting salary — has fallen. In 2009, 25 percent of new lawyers reported receiving starting salaries of $160,000. In 2010, that share fell to 18 percent, and then in 2011, to 14 percent.

(The trends are probably even worse that those numbers suggest, by the way, since those percentages refer only to share of new lawyers who got full-time jobs. And plenty didn’t.)

You’ll also notice that the other cluster of salaries, the one on the left side, has gotten a little larger. In 2009, salaries in the $40,000-to-$65,000 range collectively accounted for 42 percent of reported salaries; in 2010, 48 percent; and in 2011, 52 percent.

The growth in that left-side hump reflects not only fewer $160,000 jobs, but also the creation of new second-tier, nonpartner-track jobs.

Orrick, for example, hired a bunch of lawyers for new nonpartner-track jobs at its hub in West Virginia at salaries around $60,000. These lawyers perform a lot of the same kind of work that their $160,000 counterparts used to, but at lower cost to the firm (and to clients).

On the other hand, these career associates also have much more manageable and flexible work schedules than the traditional partner-track, first-year associates do. Rather than working 80 to 100 hours a week, these career associates can expect closer to 40 hours. Other firms have created or expanded similar positions, with fewer hours at lower hourly pay.

If you want to put a positive spin on these trends, you could argue that these new types of jobs are a potential benefit of the implosion in the legal hiring market: law firms, risk-averse as they are, realized that the one-size-fits-all, standard partner-track system was broken, and they have been getting more creative about establishing alternate work arrangements. The work-life balance benefits of these new jobs are certainly what the firms themselves emphasize, anyway. New and heavily indebted lawyers may not get the six-figure salaries they expected, but at least more choice in career path may be available to them later on.

For more information on the evolution of legal salaries, I recommend this paper by Judith N. Collins, NALP’s director of research. It shows that the bimodal salary distribution really began in 2000, when a few big firms started offering $125,000 to new hires.

Above the Law, a legal-news Web site, also has extensive coverage of developments in lawyer salary structures.