Maybe I'll get a job making little skinny curly fries

Shortly after reading this in this weekend's New York Times, I received a call from another lawyer in town, someone whom I have known for a number of years. Our practice areas are similar and we have moved in many of the same professional circles. Though not in the same grades, our children all went to the local JCC. I wouldn't say we were close friends, but close enough that that we've occasionally sent small matters to each other, and we would sit together at conferences and Chamber events and the like.

Well, after a number of years of depending on himself, maintaining a practice focused on growth companies and running a legal/executive office suite business, his income has dried up. There has been no significant legal work in his practice area in the region in a couple of years. Nobody needs a finance lawyer right now. Nobody is looking to, or can afford to, rent law office space.

So now, as his debt load builds, he called me for advice on breaking back into a large firm.

And this, unfortunately, is the other side of the coin from the Times article.

[A] generation of J.D.’s face the grimmest job market in decades. Since 2008, some 15,000 attorney and legal-staff jobs at large firms have vanished, according to a Northwestern Law study. Associates have been laid off, partners nudged out the door and recruitment programs have been scaled back or eliminated.

And this:

This gets to what might be the ultimate ugly truth about law school: plenty of those who borrow, study and glad-hand their way into the gated community of Big Law are miserable soon after they move in. The billable-hour business model pins them to their desks and devours their free time.

Hence the cliché: law school is a pie-eating contest where the first prize is more pie.

One of the troubles with the profession, aside from the fact that it eats away at your soul, isn't simply that new graduates struggle under mountains of debt and anemic job prospects which are unfulfilling at best. The not-so-hidden story is that, even if you are one of those proud, lucky ones, one of those top-tier students from high-ranked law schools who lands one of those high-wage, elite, mega-firm spots -- which this friend, like I, did -- none of that provides any guarantee these days that fifteen or twenty years later, you will not wind up back in the same spot as those middle or lower tier law-school graduates who cannot get out from under the weight of their law-school debt. However, this time there's a mortgage to pay, a family to support, with fewer options and even less flexibility.

And even where you don't suddenly find yourself in a hole, it's not necessarily any better, because you're sometimes instead in a prison, with no chance of escape, because even if you can cross the moat and swim across the shark-infested bay, there's still nothing waiting for you on the other side, except those same conditions that you spent your entire career trying to avoid, telling yourself that the life of a lawyer was, if not the prize, the path to the prize.

Well, good luck with that.