Wall Street Journal Law Blog, Were the ‘Good Old Days’ of BigLaw Better?, by Ashby Jones:

If anyone out there had any question that now — right now — is just the worst time in history to be graduating from law school, take a look at this article written by Mayer Brown lawyer Robert Helman in Chicago Magazine.

Now, you already knew that graduating from law school now was bad for this reason: it’s harder than ever to get jobs. But it’s also bad for this reason: even if you get a job, your life is bad, at least as compared to what it would have been had you started practice 45 years ago.

Helman’s been practicing law for a long, long time — he served as Mayer Brown’s chairman for 15 years — and his reflections on how things used to be are interesting.