Those 5800 jobs lost in the legal sector in October [Source: BLS], are not coming back. Even if some kind of Golden Age returns to the profession and business of law post-bubble burst, it will take place in a downsized industry. The manpower demand, at least at the associate level, will never match that of the boom years.
So, that leaves jobless lawyers and those who have yet to laid off with the necessity of moving toward What Next. Fortunately, there are plenty of precedents. Generations of doctoral candidates sidelined from college teaching, dotcom entrepreneurs whose enterprises tanked, middle managers made redundant by technology, and journalists who couldn't afford to hang out around the ink showed the way of career change.
The first step is both a mindset and behavioral one: Burn bridges. What got us into those now-obsolete sandboxes and what gave us a shot at success are unlikely to help us making a living doing something else. Those bridges include our mindsets or values, persona, decorum, and contacts. Those will only hold us back as we struggle to penetrate new territory. See, as W.B. Yeats put it, you can't separate the dancer from the dance. The professional in X becomes X. To make the leap into Y, X must be left behind.
For example, I could have had a smoother transition from academia to business had I burned bridges - just cut off all ties, be they emotional or human, to my former world. It's tough enough to adjust - and expect it to be tough - without the baggage, in our heads, hearts and contacts, from the past. The past won't earn a living in the present.
Here is an ebook on some of that Download SavingSoulsJaneGenova. It's had more than a million downloads.