Law (which OP focuses on) is a bizarre profession, because it used to be driven by an arms race dynamic. Most of what lawyers do, at the top of the profession, isn't intellectually difficult. The game is about being able to generate work for the other team faster than they can adapt to it. When litigation happens between large corporations, it's about playing the process, not arguing or interpreting the law itself. It devolves into brute-force process playing. It's not what you see in the movies, since cases so rarely go to trial.

So, even though the work itself isn't challenging, large law firms have traditionally sought very qualified people, not because of the work, but because there's a complex, ever-evolving game in this war of attrition. The winning team is the one that generates work faster than the other can keep up, and you need to be smart, driven, and brutal enough to work the angles. This also explains the 70-hour weeks that became the norm in biglaw. The game is about beating the other side to death with excess work, so the best hires are people who can do huge amounts of boring, procedural work and not get completely exhausted.

What changed is that there's now less work to go around, due to cost-cutting and "demand destruction" among these firms' Wall Street clientele. There's no longer 70 hours of work per associate. Now the firms are overstaffed relative to the actual workload. Well, the partners want to keep their lifestyles, so associates get axed. What's most disgusting about it is the recent trend of "stealthing", which is disguising a layoff as a performance-based firing.

There's also a bimodal income distribution. There's "biglaw" which has a hard salary floor of $165k per year, and "everything else" where the average might be $50k. Law is one profession where it's not at all uncommon to be making less at 35 (after not making partner, and being lucky if you crack 120k) than at 26.

White-shoe law is melting down. So is investment banking, on which it relies, but banking's degradation is more graceful. Banking is just hiring fewer people and reducing bonuses, while law has this problem of large numbers of marginally qualified people who've spent large amounts of money on JD degrees.

What have we learned from the Law Crash? (Yes, there was a Law Bubble, and boy has it crashed.) I think the lesson is about how of an influence respectability has over peoples' work lives. The attraction of the legal profession wasn't just the money, but also the prestige. You're not some plumber or computer programmer-- occupations whose average members now seem to be doing better than average attorneys-- you're a lawyer. Even now, with law imploded, I think that impulse is strong. What we're out of touch with is that most upper-middle-class Americans would see it as weird and risky for a young person to go off to Silicon Valley, and upper-class would only approve it if you were a VC, not an entrepreneur.

People are desperate for the credibility and respectability of being a "professional", but the professions are under attack. Doctors are being pillaged by health-insurance barbarians, the law bubble is collapsing, and academia's a non-concern by this point. Which means that the best (and, for many, only) ways for most people to make a decent living are in formerly "unrefined" lines of work. For a lot of people, it's a shock.

Millennials, for their part, often feel cheated out of this. They should. They were put through a 16+ year game to lead them to believe they'd have a certain kind of elite life, and then most were dumped into a featureless landfill of confusion and mediocrity. They've been pumped and dumped.