After spending a lot of time and money in law school, you want to make sure you’re in a great place for your career, which is where the best states for lawyers comes in handy.
Law is one of the most profitable fields, and lawyers are often considered some of the richest people in the community. The lawyers on Law & Order or most recently The People vs. OJ Simpson (they were real people, too, but you get my point) show that they’re competent, smart, and quick-witted. Not everyone can become a lawyer since it takes both college and law school and then on top of that the BAR exam in whatever state you want to practice. It costs a lot of money and nerve. It is, however, one of the most well-paying and respectable professions. In reality, there aren’t very many lawyers in the US. According to the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are only 609,930 lawyers. If we look at how the US has a population of about 300 million, you’ll see that there’s only about one lawyer per 500 people.
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Since there are many types of law, there are a variety of types of lawyers. They’re generally split into two basic fields: criminal and civil. There are many specialized fields as well like family, corporate, financial, contract, constitutional, human rights, international, environmental, administrative law, and more. Probably the most challenging field is criminal law, which is most profitable in most countries. No matter the field, though, lawyers are paid well across the board. In the US, the mean hourly pay is $65.51 and the mean annual salary is $136,260, which is more than the average pay for all professions.
The main conditions for a lawyer’s work environment are that they earn enough money and they are not restricted by the state, which means the state has a developed legal system. To check out more about lawyer demands and the best cities for the lawyers, check out our list of 11 Cities with the Highest Demand for Lawyers. Since the US is a huge country with a lot of states, some cities are good and some are bad depending on salary and cost of living. In this article, however, we’re going to choose the best states for lawyers. To create this list, we’ve chosen the states where the salary is highest and the cost of living is lowest. We took the average pay and cost of living index from MERIC, the Missouri Department of Economic Development. We combined the two factors to get the average and rankings for our list. Here are the results:
