<p>To be fair, I think it should be emphasized that lawyers have great career flexibility, relative to most other Americans. </p>
<p>For example, as mentioned in passing by others, lawyers can start their own firms; in other words they have a skill that is highly amenable to entrepreneurship and small business. Now, to be sure, starting your own law practice is extremely difficult and risky - but probably no more risky than any other new business venture, as over 90% of all new business ventures fail in the first few years anyway. What that means is that if you can’t get the law job that you want, or you feel that your law firm employer isn’t paying you properly, you can decide to just sell your services to the market directly. The vast majority of Americans - including most college graduates - can’t do that, because they don’t have a skill that can be packaged and sold directly to the market. They have little choice but to work for an organization, and if that organization screws them over, then they either have to find another organization to work for, or simply have to suck it up. </p>
<p>The other aspect is that legal services are required practically everywhere in the country, something that just isn’t true of many other skills. For example, you just can’t work as, say, a chemical engineer, in wide swaths of the country because there just aren’t chemical or manufacturing facilities everywhere, which means that if you end up moving to one of those places, you basically have to find another career. While obviously legal work tends to be concentrated in certain places (i.e. NY, Washington DC), the geographic availability of law jobs is far more widespread.</p>