I was going to make the point that graph is (that it's basically binary -- you have a few at very high salaries, and then a lot more at much lower salaries). So thanks for posting that!
Here's the thing with BigLaw: their business model counts on your kid not making partner. It is very much a quid pro quo kind of thing: the kids give up their lives for 2-5 years so they can get their law school loans paid off (often in the hundreds of thousands) and have a fancy name on their resume; the firms pay them a metric shit-ton, bill the clients for a metric shit-ton more, and then let the vast majority of associates go by the time they're in ther 4th or 5th year. The firms manage those huge salaries by operating with a pyramid, where you have a ton of younger, salaried people supporting one equity partner at the top of the heap. So if you go into it with your eyes open and are willing to bust your butt for 3 years in law school to even get one of those jobs, then bust your butt even more for that first couple years to get a clean slate on your debt, by all means go for it.
OTOH, if you don't want those kinds of hours, then you need to have some plan to pay for school/pay off the debt before jumping. Otherwise, you become a slave to that debt. I had a friend back in the '90s with $100K in law school loans (he got in to Harvard Law, and who says no to Harvard?). Decided very quickly that he really wanted to be an FBI agent instead. But had to work for 5-8 years to get the loans paid off before he could afford to quit and do what he really wanted to do.
Government jobs pay ok -- feds better than state -- but they are very much in demand, and they don't hire right out of law school. In my area, law firm for a couple of years, then a jump to DOJ, is a pretty common path. Public interest jobs tend to pay the least. Another common track is work for a firm for a few years, then jump ship to a client or another company. Those jobs can pay really well -- not big-law equity-partner level, but you can get things like stock options and bonuses and such (I had a friend who was a few years behind me in law school who was making over $500K, and not even at a super-high level within the legal department). But the downside is that many of those companies work their lawyers just as hard as BigLaw firms do. There is a big span of jobs at the corporate level, just as there are within law firms.
One thing to ask your kid is what kind of law? Things like mergers and acquisitions tend to be largely run by big firms; litigation is often by the big firms on one side and solo practitioners/smaller plaintiffs' attorneys shops on the other. There are a number of specialty areas that can be a nice niche if it suits your skills and interests; patent lawyers can very much make bank, but you have to be really fucking smart to do that. There are a whole bunch of regulatory areas that have become complex enough to be a real specialty; I'm in one of those, and it suits me, because it's like putting together a puzzle (and arguing -- and I like both puzzles and writing, so I'm good). If he's entrepreneurial, he could do very well on the plaintiffs' side; most of those firms are much more "you eat what you kill," so I wouldn't go that route unless he's willing to hustle (and good at it) and is savvy as much as/more than "book smart."
tl;dr: "want to go to law school" can mean a huge variety of things. Unfortunately, with how much school costs nowadays, you can't really just take a flier on it and see what happens. I'd ask "why" and "what" and "how" beforehand, so that you know there is a well-thought-through plan that suits your kid. Generally speaking, people who choose law school because they see the awesome salaries tend to be the least happy with their career choices.
