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Taylor's second point -- that law school reform advocates "tend to focus on the youngest law graduates, who have only had a few years to find a respectable job ... [and] it takes time to build a legal career and to assemble a track record of solid work and experience at top firms" -- is specious if not laughable. Most reform advocates fully understand that finding a suitable job as a practicing lawyer takes time -- but more than that, it requires a start, which in turn usually requires a healthy dose of luck or family connections. The truth is that if one fails to find a good law job before or within a short time following graduation, the chance of ever finding such a position diminishes precipitously. If not hired within one year of graduating, the chance of ever finding any job practicing law falls close to zero: a brand-new graduating class, with twice as many new graduates as there are jobs, will enter the hiring process without the stigma of unemployed staleness. Why buy last year's model?
Of course looking at attorneys ten or twenty years out will reveal a rosy professional picture. Those are the ones, the few, who succeeded, not the average law graduate. Today, fifty percent will never practice law even in the short term, let alone as a career. Law is a profession as brutal as nature itself; for every successful long-term lawyer, there are dozens who fell by the wayside. Exactly how does Taylor see these unemployed graduates jumping from the early years of near-sweatshop "document review," unemployment, and underemployment into lucrative careers? Where are they acquiring the necessary grounding, the raw legal experience? Where are they networking and building (or inheriting) their books of business -- an absolute requirement for success as a lawyer in private practice, and perhaps the single most important factor in succeeding in the legal profession? The first few years of a legal career are exactly where our focus should lie, because that is where careers are made, or not.
This is an important point that I don't often see discussed. For most people who have entered the legal profession recently or are in law school now, choosing NOT to practice law is probably the most rational choice to make once you figure this out. You can cut your losses and enter into another profession, minimizing the amount of time wasted and financial waste, or you can bounce around between document review, low paying legal jobs that usually still require long hours, or spells of unemployment. If you choose the latter, there's a good chance you're never going to end up practicing law anyway and you'll eventually have to use your skills somewhere else to make money, only difference is that you've invested a few more years into something that was a lost cause.