Yeah, it's the perfect storm of automation and an industry that assumed growth would go like gangbusters forever. And by "industry" I mean law schools - law schools were (and maybe still are) big profit centers for universities, so they were expanded as quickly as possible.

The junior work is being deskilled. Paralegals are doing some of the work junior lawyers used to do, and search and recordkeeping systems are doing much of the work paralegals used to do. A friend of mine is an attorney at a big Silicon Valley law firm, and she says that most of the low-level work is now automated.