I'll explain in more detail what I actually meant, which isn't what Andrew assumed, next Wednesday. For the moment, let me just restate it, which may help: Your generation, unlike all previous generations of lawyers in New York City, will be competing for daily bread against well-trained lawyers in New Delhi and Bombay. The savagery of leverage will soon make corporate finance practice and large litigation support--in general, in fact, the back office practice on which large firms currently thrive--a practice you can't afford to be in. The legal industry is going to look in future more like the garment industry, and more so at its top than it will at its bottom. The jobs that have been considered elite for two generations, and for which your institution is best equipped to train you, are about to globalize elsewhere, leaving a steeper pyramid with much less room at the top for people like you.

-- EbenMoglen - 19 Jan 2008