Greetings and Salutations Ladies and Gents.  

I am an attorney looking to transition and wondering if there are other former attorneys out there that did the same.  

My reasons for moving over are many fold, but here are a few:

1)  I worked as in house counsel for a company that went bankrupt.  I have been able to stay busy with consulting and some other gigs, but have not found a real opportunity that I believe has the same long term potential as financial advising.

2)  I have always loved the financial side of things, even in my law practice.  Even now in my consulting gig I find myself concentrating heavily on financial aspects (planning, risk management, fund raising) and less on actual legal matters.  

3)  After talking to many FAs in the area (some of which are wildly successful) I believe that the legal community and FA community are going in 2 different directions - that is, lawyers are getting younger and FAs are getting older.  Law Schools are upping class sizes all while the legal job market is completely shriveling to the point that people graduating in the top 20% of their class are being forced to take part time work for $25 an hour because there is NOTHING out there.  This is all happening while B/Ds are hiring heavily in the area and these successful FAs are telling me that "there is no one around to fill the void these 50-60 year old FAs are going to create in 5 years".

I intend to target a big wirehouse to start, and have interviews with a few coming up (WFA and ML).  I tend to like the set up of merrill more simply because of how the local offices operate.  Can anyone give me some honest advice on their hurdles and whether or not I should just shoot for their low bracket, ask to make 49.5K and try to meet those goals over getting in the 50-75K?

Would I be setting myself up for failure jumping in that middle bracket?  I would not be bringing substantial assets with me, though I do think I could raise 400m-1mm from family (and in laws) over the course of a year.  

And YES, I know this is a sales job.  Although lawyerin' is lawyerin' and not necessarily a cold calling sails job, I do have experience pitching on the angel circuit trying to raise capital for start ups.  That involved a hell of a lot of phone beating, azz kissing and cold pitching.  

I have read quite a bit on this forum about ideas to raise AUM, but I was wondering if there were any ex-lawyers out there that could help me focus a niche market targeting system for the legal community.  As a bit of background, I have significant networking ability within my city's legal force.  My wife is an attorney and we obviously have a ton of lawyer friends (both went to law school in this city).  

A few concepts I have seen on here involve going after divorce attorneys (which is very smart) and plaintiff's guys (also interesting).  I think I could do this as I have a relationship with quite a few good persons in both those categories.  Any other thoughts or words of wisdom?