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Many lawyers may enjoy less prestige, less interesting work and only modestly robust pay scales in the future. Trends in specialization, prepaid group legal plans, storefront legal clinics and advertising may well make for greater competition, lower fees and more of a supermarket approach to the law. The days of the independent, prosperous general practitioner are numbered. For some time to come, however, the top half of the classes graduating from the best law schools (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, Michigan and Berkeley) are likely to do very well indeed. These are the young lawyers who will be asked to join major corporate legal firms as associates in New York City, Washington, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and other large cities. At these firms, the competition is brutal, and perhaps one in four survive to become partners six years later. The rest spin off to smaller firms, corporate jobs, Government work or other fields. The range of possible career paths is staggering. With the law explosion, a new member of the bar can elect to try a judicial clerkship, criminal law, tax practice, public interest work, corporate law, legal aid or work in public defenders' offices, a prosecutorial job at the state or federal level, Government practice in, say, a regulatory agency, or any number of others.

Many lawyers also devote time to clients who cannot pay. This is admirable, but not entirely altruistic; they are supposed to do so under the Code of Professional Responsibility. In the late 1960s, idealistic young lawyers persuaded blue chip firms to let them do pro bono publico work, representing indigents on the firms' time at their regular salaries. Moreover, small-town lawyers have long been known to dispense free legal advice or tear up the bill for a strapped client. And school and hospital boards are often populated with lawyers who in addition to getting known around town perform valuable public services.

But such good deeds often go unnoticed. What works against lawyers generally is that they are at once indispensable and intimidating—a combination guaranteed to breed bitter resentment. "Lawyers have become secular priests," says Fred Button, a White House aide in the Kennedy Administration and now a successful Washington, D.C., attorney. They are, agrees Berkeley Law Dean Sanford Kadish, masters of "a mysterious art form to which the layman is not privy, with mumbo jumbo going on." The heart of the art, of course, is the impenetrable language that lawyers use, sometimes at great length (a direct outgrowth of the English practice of paying lawyers by the word for their briefs, which were, as a result, rarely brief).