Some people immediately get good jobs after law school. Some do internships or fellowships, often with low stipends. It can be hard to break into a specific sub-field or a firm. But, if you need money now (this affects me, as I am LGBT and lost financial support from family when I was 22), there's always document review for major litigation.
This is, in the main, reviewing materials for huge cases. It's the one part of lawyering a computer will eventually be able to do. One uses special software to categorize the several thousand to millions of pieces of paperwork so as to find the smoking gun, as it were. Once one understands the case and what's key, and learns software, a literal child could do it. But, they need lawyers.
In any case, this work attracts lawyers who are down on their luck, struggling with starting their own firms or consulting, have obligations that keep them from working crazy hours, or, like me, are young and don't have a financial backstop.
I'm pretty sure my current agency (today is my last day, thank god for a permanent position coming), is stealing from us. See, any time the software goes down, we are temporarily out of items to review, or otherwise suffer ANY IT issue AT ALL for longer than 15 minutes, we don't get paid. If it's not something we can fix on our end, we can log off and go do something else, but otherwise…no pay, as you WORK to sort any issue. The “lost” time is never more than an hour a day, average about 1-2 hours a week, but this all adds up!
This is ostensibly because the law firm paying the agency will only pay billable hours, i.e. time actually working on the case, and the agency doesn't want to pay out directly. Work is currently in one of those times where there is nothing new to review and stuff is being loaded in the software. So if you're not reviewing a group of documents now, out you go, no pay! And to add insult to injury, we need to use our personal laptops with a virtual desktop while working remotely.
(That's actually how I write this post while on the clock remotely- I have a perverse incentive to look through stuff more slowly so that I get paid for the full time I am available to work).
Sure, we're lawyers, but the corporate lawyers are just better. They know people like us are paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford the money or time to argue out contract terms with them. In fact, I think there are now mandatory arbitration clauses in hiring paperwork. It's just ironic, Kafkaesque, and straight up evil that people who may have studied to *fight* exploitation are subject to it. We know what's legal and what's not. But we can't argue.