You've got a bit of a jumble in the description so not quite sure what you're looking for, but when I was a new biglaw associate making a similar salary (except after clerking, so my base salary was a bit higher + got a clerkship bonus), this is what I did:
- Maxed out my 401(k) every year and usually frontloaded it. (I picked a traditional 401(k), because my taxes at the big firm were likely as high as they were going to get in my lifetime.) If you are asking whether you should "max a Roth [IRA]" before you file, versus a Roth 401(k), make sure you are within income limits. I was way over the income limits the entire time I've worked as an attorney.
- After maxing the 401(k), drove 90% of my savings into a taxable brokerage account with VTSAX. Since I started my biglaw job in 2016 [left in 2019 to take a sabbatical then go to a boutique firm], my brokerage account ballooned to $460k as of this month.
- The remaining money I could save I generally kept in a high-interest online saving account. I tried to keep it under $30k or so, because otherwise it's too much cash to not be invested.
- I saved a LOT. I didn't have student loan payments, but I also lived in a much higher cost living area than Texas, so my guess is that more or less evened out. I set up my rent, cars, etc. to only need a fraction of my paychecks every month and saved aggressively. Annual bonuses in biglaw are substantial, and I never used those to make a big purchase -- they all went into my VTSAX account.
- I graduated from law school in 2013, clerked for awhile, then worked in biglaw from 2015-2019, and now work at a boutique firm still making good money but not Cravath-scale money. (The work/life balance has been worth it.)
- I just this week liquidated $200k of my brokerage acct for a down payment on a house I just bought in my HCOL area. I definitely benefitted from needing the cash out of it during a high point in the market. I bought an expensive house in an expensive city, but I can comfortably cash flow the mortgage from my paychecks and still have a quarter of a million left in my investment account, and another quarter million in retirement accounts (401(k)s, a Roth IRA from before I was a lawyer under the income limits, and an HSA account from biglaw). Now that my work/life balance is comfortable, with lots of flexibility for long vacations and working from home, I find satisfaction in my job and don't feel the need to retire super early (just regular early, like 50), so am ok with having a pricey house for at least the medium term.
Overall, pretty happy with how I played it from a money perspective (other than a divorce in the middle of it that took a chunk of cash -- unrelated to my job).