re: Would the highest paid lawyer in Baton Rouge be a corporate lawyer or billboard lawyer?

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If you can get in, corporate law or insurance defense is just much safer career path.

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Perhaps a bit "safer", but with little upside potential. From a litigation standpoint, commercial litigation is more lucrative than insurance defense simply because commercial clients will pay higher billable rates. Of course, the competition to get those commercial clients can be tough. Pure insurance defense (think Allstate, State Farm, USAA, etc) can provide good volume, but the billable rates are low with the insurance companies ALWAYS looking to cut each invoice by 10% - 30%. Frankly, the insurance companies don't care all that much about they quality of the attorney. They just want to close claims and spend a little as possible doing so. Some might say they hate paying their lawyers almost as much as they hate paying plaintiffs.

Plaintiff's PI work can be very lucrative...if you can routinely get good cases. The problem is that competition is fierce and many of the "TV lawyers" are taking all of the cases. It can be very difficult for a small, even solo, PI attorney to consistently bring in business unless he/she has a very good referral base. The general public in inundated with PI attorney ads. So unless they already have a personal relationship with a lawyer, they will generally just go with one of the "TV guys" simply from name recognition. That's why you are seeing a colossal influx of TV ads. Even from small PI firms that, frankly, would prefer to not advertise that aggressively. If they don't, they feel their clients will completely dry up.