Pretty much. It's kind of like tech, in which you can more or less break employers in to FAANG, non-FAANG, and small consulting shops. The big white-shoe firms

Pretty much. It's kind of like tech, in which you can more or less break employers in to FAANG, non-FAANG, and small consulting shops. The big white-shoe firms (the legal equivalent of FAANG) pay enormous salaries to even their junior associates (a first-year associate's salary is almost 200k at this point), but the gap between them and the equivalent of non-FAANG companies is way, way higher than it is for tech. Like in tech, independents have a pretty wide distribution, but the ceiling is a lot higher than it is in tech for a very small number of extremely elite lawyers in niche fields.