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This question is about lawyer salaries.
What is the highest-paid lawyer?
The highest-paid lawyer is a patent attorney. Patent lawyers are among the highest-paid types of lawyers and earn one of the highest median salaries in the legal field at $265,392 a year. Families lawyers are the second highest paid layers making an annual median salary of $213,447 a year.
You may be wondering why patent attorneys make so much money. Most lawyers are reactive; they are there to take action after an event. A patent lawyer is there to prevent the event from happening in the first place. This makes their value something that isn't measured by the success of a single case.
Imagine this analogy. Let's say that you have a mansion filled with valuable things and irrational fear of locks. You also are away from your mansion a lot, so to keep your belongings protected, you hire the most ferocious attack dogs to guard the property. You advertise your dogs and what they are capable of on TV, TikTok, and in as many places as possible.
Every time you return from a long trip, your mansion is untouched. How you measure the worth of the guard dogs is analogous to how you measure the value of a patent attorney. They are there to scare away would-be patent robbers.
Other top-paying lawyers include:
Environmental Attorney: median annual salary of $125,000
Real Estate Attorney: median annual salary of $123,951
Divorce Attorney: median annual salary of $121,978
Tax Attorney: median annual salary of $120,910
Intellectual Property (IP) Lawyer: median annual salary of $115,820
Immigration Attorney: median annual salary of $115,840
Oil and Gas Attorneys: median annual salary of $111,701
Medical Lawyers: median annual salary of $107,848
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