Yeah, I was more curious as to what type of law they practice that pays that much, but in retrospect I realize that almost every field of law pays in that range if you're good and have the years worth of XP. I know there's some famous Highland Park divorce lawyer with a license plate "Sir Ike" that charges in that range easy..
By the richest individual lawyers are successful personal injury guys. Those large billboard firms you see around town the owners of the firm can rake in several million per year easily. But these guys are more running a business than practicing law, not really my cup of tea.
The big firms like the one I'm talking to have 800-2000+ lawyers, 10-20 offices, and typically work on what you'd call "bet the firm" type litigation. Whether thats commercial litigation (breach of contract, they violated the agreement we had type of stuff), whether its antitrust, white collar securities defense, shareholder securities suits, etc - this is the bread & butter of these firms. There is a whole other side of the firms that do "corporate" work, where they do M&A, derivative actions, board of directors stuff. I don't really do anything with that.
These companies can and will pay this amount for the best service because we're talking 100's of millions of dollars at stake. If the bill ends up being $10M, well, it was worth it because we didn't want to lose $500M. Of course sometimes they do anyway.
My current firm is more of a boutique with lower overhead but still the same kinds of cases; I tried to bring in a $1M case on my own and got it turned down for potential conflicts, they said the amount we could get wasn't worth taking on a potential down the road conflict.
