Sometimes a perfect plan still ends poorly

It goes without saying that I'll spend the rest of my life hearing jokes about unscrupulous, greedy lawyers. That comes with the territory, and doesn't bother me much since I'm only becoming a lawyer for the money and prestige. What really bothers me is that, despite all my careful planning, I may still get screwed.

Law used to be kind of like the federal government. That is, if you could get your foot in the door, you were set for life barring an unfortunate bout of investigative journalism that publicized your yawning incompetence. Unfortunately, things are changing now.

The life cycle of a lawyer works (or worked) like this.

Stage 1: You're born and live the first 18-24 (depending on how slow you are relative to the general population) years of your life in kind of a fuzzy haze. During that time, you attend school but fail to realize that picking up marketable skills somewhere along the line might be a good idea for when your parents are tired of supporting you.

Stage 2: This cycle is typically triggered by the realization that you're broke and your parents think you should be inviting your dates to places that aren't your parents' house. Our nascent lawyer brainstorms. He digs deep and figures out that he isn't actually good at anything that people pay other people money to do. In the depths of despair, he googles "trade industry requiring no inherent talent". Within hours, he has begun studying for the LSAT.

Stage 3: Our budding lawyer is now in law school. Law school is a lot like college and high school except it's legal to drink the entire time. That is the only discernible difference. Actually, that trivializes things. If you go to a top school, you're probably pretty smart and don't experience an unprecedented jump in difficulty. With your future assured, you spend most of your time perfecting your solid handshake and learning to play golf. If you don't go to a top school, you're what people in the legal industry refer to as gg'ed.

Stage 4: Assuming that our neophyte esquire either A.) went to a really good law school or B.) was in the top of his class, he gets an offer to work at a firm that pays him a godlike sum to do fascinating research and interface with intellectual giants like himself.

Stage 5: Our successful lawyer dies surrounded by his wife, loving children, mountains of cocaine, and any hookers that he did not murder.

Unfortunately, the economy has left stage 4 in shambles, thereby directly compromising stage 5. Bear Stearns? Thelen? Gone. Firms and banks that had existed for decades and were considered too big to fail failed. As they collapsed, they took out much of the job infrastructure that supported the bright eyed MBA and JD graduates. Now, we face an uncertain future.