This is not to say that things are all rosy. The National Association for Law Placement found that in 2013, only 86.4 percent of law school graduates were still in school or had a job, down from a 25-year high of 91.9 percent in 2010. The association also noted a shift in employment from big firm jobs to lower-paid jobs at small firms as well as to jobs that did not require a law degree.

A new study, however, provides a compelling reason to be optimistic about a career in law. Two professors, Frank McIntyre and Michael Simkovic, recently released a study of lawyer salaries from 1984 to 2013 with the goal of seeing whether students who graduated in a down economy suffered long-term negative effects.

The co-authors found that unemployment in a bad economy hit lawyers in the first four years of their career, lowering the amount of money they made relative to similarly educated people who did not go to law school. Yet law salaries can climb rapidly. In another paper, the two authors found that such acceleration in compensation results in a premium of $1 million for lawyers over their lifetime compared with those who did not go to law school. Based on this growth and the ability to eventually find lucrative employment, the two authors found that over a 30-year period, the hit from early unemployment and a bad economy fades as times get better and graduates gain experience. Indeed, the lawyers caught up so much that the two found that “timing” law school — starting law school in a bad or good economy — did not matter.

Another study released last fall by the American Bar Foundation supports the authors’ findings. The foundation’s After the JD project surveyed lawyers who passed the bar in 2000 to assess their career trajectory 10 years after graduation. The foundation found that as of 2012, lawyers had high levels of job satisfaction and employment as well as high salaries. Even graduates with low grades from low-ranked law schools had median incomes in the $85,000 to $95,000 range. This follows the fact that law firm salaries have risen by more than inflation since 1995, according to the National Association for Law Placement.

Even as signs point toward improvement, forecasts of doom for law schools continue to emerge. Dorothy A. Brown, an Emory law professor, recently wrote that “law schools are in a death spiral” and that “in three years, a top law school will close.”

Her solution is to turn away from legal scholarship and reduce professor research budgets to further lower tuition.

Never mind the fact that not a single law school has closed so far or that law schools have been racing to shed professors and staff as well as tuition. The University of Iowa, Roger Williams University, Brooklyn Law School, Pace University, Penn State and others have cut tuition, while faculty buyouts have become more frequent. Sticker price discounts on even reduced tuition are common.