Just how crippled is the legal job market? Utterly. Here's the graph of total employment in legal services since 1990. It includes everyone from attorneys to paralegals to secretaries, but it gives you a sense of the industry's much deteriorated health. There are 50,000 fewer jobs today than five years ago. In meantime, schools have been graduating more than 40,000 students a year.

Many of them been eaten alive on the job market. Just 85 percent of the class of 2011 had a job 9 months after graduation, down about 6 percentage points, according to the National Association of Legal Placement. But fewer than two-thirds had a job that required bar passage,* and not even half were at law firms. At the largest law school in the country, Thomas M. Cooley, only 37 percent of new graduates are getting full-time jobs that require their JD.

With jobs few and far between, salaries have tumbled. Median pay for new grads in private practice has fallen 18 percent since since 2010 to $85,000. The only reason this particular combination of debt and falling pay isn't a bigger disaster is the federal government's income based repayment program, which caps student loan payments at 10 percent of discretionary income and forgives the balance after 20 years.**

The upshot of all this is that unless you're graduating from a truly top program -- and then, only if you graduate reasonably high in your class -- going to law school has turned into professional Russian Roulette. If it works out, you survive to pay off a truly enormous debt burden. If you don't make it on the job market, you've just spent three valuable years of your life sweating through deadening lectures and high-stakes finals for nothing, probably consigning yourself to a quarter-century loan payments the process.

And yet, the response from law schools has amounted to not much more than some extremely belated soul searching. In June, the Wall Street Journal found 10 schools that are considering cutting their enrollment -- a positive development, but only an incremental one. And still, some members of the professoriate don't to understand the problems they're facing. Take this gem from the Times story:

Some argue that the drop is an indictment of the legal training itself -- a failure to keep up with the profession's needs. " We have a significant mismatch between demand and supply," said Gillian K. Hadfield, professor of law and economics at the University of Southern California. "It's not a problem of producing too many lawyers. Actually, we have an exploding demand for both ordinary folk lawyers and big corporate ones."

In a word, no. Legal education could do a better job teaching students actual practice skills, and maybe that would help a few students find gainful employment. But the difference would be on the margins, and there's simply no sign of "exploding demand" anywhere in the market. As Citi Private Bank -- the pre-eminent lender for major law firms -- noted in a recent report, demand for high-end corporate legal services has fallen at a 0.4 percent annual rate since every year since 2008. Revenue at big firms has grown slower than inflation. And while firms have tried to raise their official rates to make up the difference, the reality is they're handing out discounts left and right, particularly to big clients.