Mr. Erwin, the adviser, said he tried to offer doctors a financial plan that dealt with their desire for rewards. At the same time, he lets his clients know about the risks inherent in not saving and in trying to fit in time for investing when they have an all-consuming job.

“They’re very methodical thinkers, but they’re also extremely busy,” Mr. Erwin said.

He said he spent time coaching his doctor clients not to get swayed by a friend who thinks they should invest in something they know nothing about or has an opinion about timing the market.

But doctors generally get two important things right. Doctors, particularly those with a unique specialty, buy disability insurance because they know that if they can’t work as a hand surgeon, for example, their income will plummet, even if they can still work as a doctor in a different capacity.

Given their high incomes, they can eventually be persuaded to defer a large portion of their income into retirement plans to lower their current tax bill. Mr. Altfest said he had clients contributing as much as $150,000 a year often in a defined benefit plan, but in many cases it took showing them how dire retirement could be if they didn’t save. Yet those who have the bulk of their savings in retirement plans can end up with a different problem, Mr. Erwin said. Since the doctors never paid income tax on that money, it is taxed as ordinary income when they withdraw it. People who save in brokerage accounts, by contrast, pay the lower capital gains rate when they sell those securities. And most other professionals have nontax savings to balance the tax bill from their retirement account distributions.

OBJECTIONS OVERRULED Lawyers can certainly be as busy as doctors, but they also chart their days in billable hours: giving up time to talk to financial advisers or to think about their financial situation can literally cost top litigators $1,000 an hour.

“They want a strategy that they sign off on but that they’re not going to have to micromanage,” said Ross Gerber, chief executive of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management, who said a third of his clients were litigators in the Los Angeles area. “Trust is huge. I don’t think they’re looking at their statements at all.”

That is not a practice any adviser would recommend, but it’s just another area of their lives where lawyers delegate as much as they can, advisers said. And the difference between lawyers and everyone else, of course, is that they make so much money that advisers are willing to do the work for them.