Earning a high salary as a lawyer requires hard work. Students who excel during their 1L year and secure prestigious clerkships or law review positions stand a greater chance of becoming top earners in legal practice.
Real estate lawyers specialize in complex transactions involving substantial sums of money and local zoning laws, justifying higher salaries.
Public Defender
Public defenders are appointed by states to represent criminal defendants unable to afford private legal representation. Their high caseloads often limit how much time can be dedicated to each client and many do not have access to resources like private investigators or expert witnesses whereas private attorneys usually provide more individualized attention, extensive resources, and specialist expertise.
Some lawyers enter this field out of a sense of civic duty to those left behind by society, while others find the challenge of court battles alluring. Whatever the motivation may be, before entering this profession it’s essential that you’re truly passionate about defending indigent criminal defendants through hard work and trial experience – ultimately you must show this dedication through hard work and trials, managing emotional highs and lows associated with this job and ultimately coming out unscathed at trial.
Big Law
Law students aspiring to a legal career often dream of joining Big Law firms. Large firms attract top law school talent with lucrative salaries and bonuses compared with smaller or mid-sized firms.
Big Law firms have long paid associates on a Cravath scale — an adopted system of lockstep associate compensation originally used at New York firm Cravath that has since been implemented by other major firms nationwide. First year salaries at top firms may reach $215,000 with annual bonuses often exceeding this figure.
Big Law can be dauntingly demanding; firms often demand associates meet strict billable hour quotas – often working 60+ hours each week! Plus, the journey towards partnership takes at least eight years in most large firms.
Corporate Lawyer
Suits portrays corporate lawyers as having exciting lives filled with high drama and fast paced drama, yet reality shows otherwise: hours spent networking and combing through lengthy and detailed documents can take up most of one’s day if not longer.
These types of attorneys typically serve as leaders on legal teams and need to produce significant amounts of work – hence their high income potential.
Lawyers specialize in various legal areas, from employment matters and mergers and acquisitions, intellectual law and litigation to company structure advice, trade law compliance and new associate supervision. General counsel serve corporations by overseeing other attorneys and new associates – in other words they’re essential in making businesses run. Partners or equity partners at large law firms typically enjoy the highest starting salaries that typically range between hundreds of thousands to millions!
Intellectual Property Lawyer
Intellectual property law is an expansive field that encompasses patents (for technical inventions), trademarks (brands and logos), copyrights (music, art, literature), designs (products or artwork) and more. Lawyers specializing in IP may focus either on non-contentious work such as checking and registering clients’ rights or litigate contentious cases.
Who: Those with strong communication and commercial acumen should consider careers as IP lawyers. In this field, you could get up-close-and-personal with cutting-edge developments in nanotechnology, self-driving cars, biotechnology, space exploration and other fields with groundbreaking potential.
Non-contentious work includes drafting and filing patent applications, conducting searches to ensure proposed trademarks are not already being used, and negotiating licensing agreements for the commercial use of our client’s IP. Litigation often entails defending clients against accusations of intellectual property infringement by sending cease-and-desist letters and filing lawsuits in court; this area of practice requires exceptional focus.