Sometimes these artificial gates are good things. They can protect consumers from low-quality products whose quality is very hard to evaluate. The market you use to "buy" a lawyer is not efficient: lawyers are no commoditized and you don't buy them frequently enough to have a good skill at evaluating them. An artificial gate like a professional association can help ensure consumers get access to a quality product, and that shitty products are prevented from entering the market and driving down the reputation of all producers.
If you're competent you have offers left and right and can command a very good salary. If you're out of a diploma mill with just the curriculum under your belt you're basically useless.
And a law degree is probably more comparable to a masters in CS than a bootcamp like flatiron.
I feel like this is only true because there's such huge demand recently if you have a pulse and can code fizz buzz you can get hired - but I know 3 guys of the top of my head who went to school with me, finished 5 years (local uni, I dropped out but kept in touch) and then went in to IT or sales because they weren't good enough to get hired as devs - this was 10 years ago.
If someone used a law degree to sell law software, or malpractice insurance I would count that was well.
It's often stated - and worried about, but whenever a thread comes up about devs over 50, we mainly see counterexamples.
Law schools are making lots of lawyers, but the 'failed' ones just drop out. That is why there is no downward pressure on the fees from increased supply.
Lots of young lawyers have no interest in biglaw either, and only some of them are naive about their future prospects.
I've seen research that the average lawyer (which is definitely not NYC biglaw firm) successfully collects on about 1/8 of their nominally billable hours.
If that is true, and you also factor in that they are effectively running a small business with all that implies for non-billable work, your $250/hr lawyer working on their own is making about $50k/year. So even if we are off by nearly a factor of two, they are hardly raking it in.
By comparison if you are in larger firms, more of the hourly rate is captured but it is also paying for multiple people.
Don't get me wrong, there are lawyers out there making great money (e.g. partners in those same NYC biglaw firms). But thinking that is the experience of the average lawyers is a bit like looking at levels.fyi and deciding that all over the country most software engineers are making 250k+.
That's insane.
I think time estimation is pretty hard in a lot of legal work also, you may be prepped for 60 hours work over then next two weeks and then a client phone call derails it entirely. It's not always easy to replace that time.
But it's still hard to find a lawyer that charges less than 250/hr.
My hypothesis is that law school is not preparing lawyers well enough to be useful right after school. So many can't find a job to get the experience to compete with senior attorneys who charge 250/hr.