Legal salaries are bi-modal. You either work at a big firm paying the market big-firm rate ($160k+ bonus in NYC, Chicago, etc) or you work at a small firm making $45-70k.
There are some weird market dynamics in the legal field. Law firms create an artificial shortage of lawyers, and thus a corresponding explosion in associate salaries, because they refuse to hire substantial amounts outside the top 15 schools or so. They'll hire anyone at Stanford and most people at Duke, but only the very top of the class at say U Washington.
Exactly, I know a Columbia law grad who works in NYC. His firm hires nothing but Harvard, Columbia, and Yale grads.
He said that it's not because a Berkeley or Texas grad isn't just as good it's because they have a certain culture and in case one of the new hires messes up a case no one wants to be the partner who gave that "public school kid" a chance and lost the firm a lot of money and prestige.
Law is also a pretty insular and regionalistic field. E.g. at one of the most selective firms in the country (Susman Godfrey in Texas), a UT Austin grad has a much better chance than a Columbia grad. They think UT = Harvard down there.
It's all very strange. In most fields such blatant regionalistic favoritism isn't so encouraged.
In most fields the rules do not vary so much by state and to a lesser extent a small collection of states. But in law your state law matters, and even on federal law the precedents can vary according to which circuit you are in.
Law school graduate salary distributions are really an interesting thing. I suggest a quick gander at this chart of the distribution from 2006-2011: http://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib .
There are some weird market dynamics in the legal field. Law firms create an artificial shortage of lawyers, and thus a corresponding explosion in associate salaries, because they refuse to hire substantial amounts outside the top 15 schools or so. They'll hire anyone at Stanford and most people at Duke, but only the very top of the class at say U Washington.