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If the economy is better, the legal field will be better as well. However, a lot of legal jobs are going away and never coming back: everything from predictive coding to LegalZoom are automating legal jobs.</p>
<p>BigLaw is undergoing a few radical changes as well: entering job classes are smaller, and they are hiring a lot of people on non-associate tracks (if that makes sense): outsourced document review, associates who live in a cheap, rural area and do a lot of the grunt work; and more lateral hiring. Clients don’t want to pay for brand-new associates, and the law firms are finding cheaper ways of doing a lot of that work. Also, many clients are getting price-conscious and are moving towards mid-sized law firms to do their work.</p>
<p>You also may find an entry level job market with an entirely different focus than it has now. I would not be surprised to see the end of the era of the generalist law student, ie one who has gone into law school with no particular skill set or focus. Clients may want lawyers who understand their business, have a particular knowledge base, or are otherwise equipped to understand the business implications of what they are doing. (For example, employment law might be full of people who used to be in HR; health care law could have a lot of people who did compliance in hospitals; or corporate law might have former i-bankers.)</p>