To be fair, more than half of those part-timers are at least technically working as lawyers. But many are likely "contract lawyers," who are hired to sit in front of a computer and review vast document caches for as low as $25 an hour. These luckless young folks are supposed to spend less than a minute staring at each PDF before marking it "relevant" or "not relevant," and there's now software available that can do the work better than most humans. It's a pretty soul-sucking gig, and often a career dead end.

So what, precisely, killed the J.D. job market? When the financial industry melted down in 2008, it burned a hole straight through the finances of America's big corporate law firms. They in turn cut back on hiring, and that destabilized the rest of the market, as graduates who would have landed a plumb firm job opted for lower-paying positions in government, small firms, and public interest that in past years would have gone to the alums of less prestigious institutions. As shown in the graph below, also from NALP data, about 80 of the hiring cutbacks were at firms -- and, if you dig a little deeper, most of those were concentrated specifically at firms with 100 or more lawyers. Outside of private practice, actually hiring edged up.

But here's the key thing: while the number of law grads without work more than doubled, the number that did land jobs stayed relatively even -- 37,123 in 2007 vs. 35,653 in 2011. So why did unemployment grow so much? Because more people were graduating law school in 2011 than four years earlier. And that brings us to why there might be a little ray of hope for this year's law school applicants.

It involves a tiny bit of high school math and a tiny bit of optimism. As the National Law Journal reported, law schools are on pace to receive about 54,000 applications, which would lead to about 40,000 students on campus come Fall. Looking over past years admissions and graduation statistics, I think it's fair to ballpark the national law school attrition rate for the last couple years somewhere between 10 and 15 percent. Applying the conservative 10 percent figure, that might mean just 36,000 law students will graduate in 2016, down from a full 44,495 in 2011.** In short, the number of new JDs would roughly match the number of jobs that were available to even the unluckiest law school class in recent history. They wouldn't all necessarily be very good jobs (again, consider the contract lawyer), but they'd be jobs nonetheless.

That's the math. Now about the need for optimism. Big law firms seem to have stabilized themselves, but the calm might only be temporary. Their business model is still in a fair amount of danger, under siege by innovative, lower-cost companies that market basic corporate legal services on the cheap as well as technology that threatens to undercut the need for associates, and along with them an important source of profits. As firms struggle their way towards sustainable growth, some may well cut down their hiring even further. And if they do, the effects will be felt all over the legal job market, just as they have been for the past couple years. Call it trickle down unemployment.