Salary
Average Salary: $113,530
Expected Lifetime Earnings: $4,740,000
The money is terrific. Vastly better than doctor money and with many more opportunities to have "a killer year" (you don't want one of those in DoctorLand).
The average for lawyers out of an Ivy League school, in their first year alone, is something like $120,000-$130,000 a year. A partner in a decent firm should make $300,000-$500,000 a year. And a big, fat, ambulance-chasing lawyer who just nails the insurance company for the client's left turn onto a one-way street can make a few million bucks or more just in one payday lawsuit (source).
You'll make more if you're handling the interests for a large company, and much less if you're employed by local government or by a seven-year-old girl who's paying you four cents an hour to prosecute the bully who knocked over her lemonade stand. (It's an open and shut case. There were witnesses.)
Show your ID at the counter.
But lawyers have huge ranges in pay—the low end are do-gooder public service jobs like working for the ACLU or the government; at the high end are people who went to law school and then did something else business-y with their lives, like package real estate deals or set up a hedge fund. Or, like Robert Shapiro, famous defender of O.J. Simpson, started an Internet company—LegalZoom—which is probably worth over a billion dollars today. Hey—if the glove fits, wear it.