A lot of people here are touching on related issues, but I want to give you my perspective as a young attorney.

The truth is, law school doesn't teach you how to be an attorney; it teaches you how to interpret and argue the law. The actual day-to-day work of being an attorney comes from working with more experienced attorneys: getting clients, timing, strategy, office management, and even the basic procedure of particular fields are not taught in text books.

Traditionally, law students would commit to a firm their second or third year in law school, and then spend their first couple of years being closely supervised by a more experienced attorney, with an already established office (complete with support staff!). Unfortunately, law offices are not hiring new attorneys any more. So even though there are a bunch of attorneys who know the law, they don"t really know how to practice the law. Considering how easy it is to get sued in this field, and how expensive overhead is, it is incredibly difficult to get started without guidance.

I was recently in just such a situation. I had interned at several offices during law school, and if a supervisor told me to write a brief on a subject, I could do an excellent job. But I had no idea how my supervisors got the information they gave me to work with on the brief, and I had only a very limited idea of what the paralegals did with the briefs I finished writing. I was amazing in court once I knew how to handle a particular type of hearing, but could only guess at hearings I had yet to experience. So once I lost my job, I couldn't just go into business on my own, and drive down prices by competing. The same is true for all the other unemployed attorneys.