Bar examined: the ever-diminishing advantages of a career in the law versus the undiminished enthusiasm of law schools to mint new attorneys.

• Author: Stevens, Elizabeth Lesly
• Position: The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis - Book review

The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis

By Steven J. Harper

Basic Books, 272 pp.

Steven J. Harper has been blessed with notably good timing.

Born smack in the middle of the Baby Boom, the Minneapolis native excelled in school, collected bachelor's and master's degrees in economics from Northwestern University, then headed straight to Harvard Law School, where he was a classmate of future U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

Neither of Harper's parents--a truck driver dad and a stay-at-home mom--got past high school. A working-class kid, Harper financed his future with student loans. By the time he graduated Harvard Law, magna cum laude, in 1979, the total debt he had incurred for his three degrees from Northwestern and Harvard came to about $16,000.

It paid off. Harper went straight from Harvard Law to Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago, where he had been a summer associate. His starting salary was $25,000. He flourished, and was mentored and trained as a litigator by sage elder partners who invested their time and energy in the new blood brought into the old-even-then firm. This was the start of the Reagan era, and the U.S. economy began to boom after a long malaise. The future for the bright young corporate litigator was sweet.

"I led what anyone would call a charmed life in the law," Harper writes in his new book, The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis. "Then, as now, most people assumed that the legal profession offered financial security and a way to climb out of the lower or middle class. Career satisfaction, upward mobility, social status, financial security--who could ask for more?"

Harper spent his entire career at Kirkland & Ellis, made equity partner by the time he was thirty-four, and did so well financially that he was able to retire from the practice of law in 2010, when he was fifty-three years old. He now writes books. His latest seeks to warn bright young sons and daughters of midwestern truck drivers that they best not try to climb that ladder that served him so well.

Some of the rungs are broken, others greased and impossible slippery, and that ladder doesn't stretch to any place you would want to be, really. The era of law being the safe and well-compensated "traditional default option for students with no idea what to do with their lives," Harper notes, is over, even if the tens of thousands who still flood into law school each year stubbornly believe that these macro forces will somehow not apply to them.

New...