Law salaries are very bimodal. Effectively you either make $40k or $160k. The average career of the lower salary person is pretty long and can be soul crushing,

Law salaries are very bimodal. Effectively you either make $40k or $160k. The average career of the lower salary person is pretty long and can be soul crushing, making $60-75k after a decade or two of public defender or prosecutorial work. The average career of the $160k person is to work for 3-6 years ratcheting up pay to $220k and then getting pushed out into non legal work. Long tail for the former is to jump to private practice as an of counsel or partner and make $200-400k in a smaller to mid sized firm, and similar in the case of the latter, moving over to of counsel and keep relatively the higher level of pay or move up to partner and make significantly more. It's not like engineer salaries where there's some normal distribution. And of it were, you're comparing people who have the fancy titles at large companies (Principal Eng at Google I think?) to the long tail of law grads. For reference, the low end of salaries tends to be public defender, local/state prosecutors, insurance defense / document review, the higher end is almost all large law firms, and the middle that makes up only a small percentage of grads are well-for-the-region paying small to medium firms and federal government. Arguably for longevity for law for salary and potential the best option is federal government law where someone makes $75k to start and ratchets up to $165k over 20 years.