New York, NY —

These are the people who did everything right. They hustled for good grades in college, crammed for the LSAT, sweated through three years of law school – all to be shuttled into a cushy job that could help them pay off massive debts.

But for 27-year-old Mike Kremen, a law degree landed him a job as an assistant manager at Radio Shack.

Kremen graduated from Pace Law School about two years ago – right when the recession was picking up and the legal industry started to hemorrhage jobs. He’s still waiting for his first full-time legal job offer. He says he might be the only employee in the history of this White Plains Radio Shack who’s passed both the New York and Connecticut bar exams.

“I’ve had people ask me, ‘Why are you still at Radio Shack?’ And the answer is, ‘Because I have a job,’” Kremen says. “I have a lot of friends that don’t have jobs, and I tell them, if you want a job, you could probably find a job.”

Deciding to become a lawyer is supposed to be the safe choice. But the recession turned that assumption on its head, leading to lay-offs, rescinded job offers, and bankruptcies. Law firms are just beginning to heal, but thousands of lawyers still remain unemployed. They now represent some of the most highly educated, highly skilled, and highly indebted workers still without jobs in New York.

Kremen puts in about 11 hours a day, six days a week at radio Shack -– the kind of hours you see associates pulling at some of New York’s top law firms. But instead of a starting salary of $160,000, Kremen started here at $7.65 an hour.

Kremen still wants that New York law firm job. He’s straining under about $200,000 of law school and credit card debt.

He says the only mileage he gets out of being a lawyer these days is getting to tell customers he’s a lawyer. He says you can see the expression in their eyes change, and they suddenly take him more seriously. He tells them it wasn’t supposed to end up like this, but he wasn't going to sit around at home feeling sorry for himself.

“I had to find another outlet for my mind to wander through. There’s so much to know here at Radio Shack. I still have trainings that I need to do on parts and all this other stuff,” Kremen says of in-house training programs. “So I can still put the fact that I have a brain worth having gone to law school to work.”

Career coach and therapist Elena Kaspi, who specializes in lawyers, says many of her clients are asking, How could this have happened to me when I was doing “right”? She says a lot of her overachieving, laid-off clients are stunned that life didn’t go as planned. According to the National Law Journal, more than 5,000 lawyers in the top 250 firms lost their jobs last year alone.

Kaspi says it’s a real challenge getting these laid-off lawyers to make bold moves to jump-start careers in crisis. The problem is, these are people who have been trained to be risk-averse.

“The very strength that makes for fantastic lawyering can really be an enormous obstacle psychologically in making a career transition or trying something new,” Kaspi says.

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But Kaspi says the great thing about the recession is that it’s been a kick in the pants for a lot of lawyers who didn’t want to be lawyers in the first place. Some of her laid-off clients have started bakeries, gone back to medical school, become private investigators and psychotherapists.

One who has made a transition is Darlene Campbell, who is now starting her own clothing line for large-busted women. She’s designing dress shirts that will fit over a very specific range of chest sizes: "Double-D, which is the same as an E, a Triple-D, which is the same as an F," she says--and all the way up to H.

Campbell was laid off from a large law firm a year and a half ago – after eight years of practicing corporate law. She did IPOs, debt offerings, and mergers. She says all of that seems a world away now.

Today, she’s in a department store fitting room with two topless women who are modeling one of Campbell’s shirts before its release so she can adjust some of the measurements. Campbell doesn’t have her own studio, so she’s been sneaking into department store fitting rooms for months with her models. One of them, Amy Farabee, says Campbell’s reaching an untapped market: large-chested women who are sick of “busting” out of their shirts.

Darlene Campbell takes measurements on a fit model. Campbell practiced law for eight years before she was laid off by a firm. She decided to start a clothing line for large-busted women. (Photo by Ailsa Chang)

“I’ve snapped buttons before. They’ve just come undone, or they come undone and I don’t notice it and then I look down, and it’s like “’Hello, boobs,’” says Farabee.

So Farabee’s grateful for Campbell’s new enterprise, but Campbell says it wasn’t easy getting here. For months after the lay-off, she battled depression and beat back thoughts that maybe she lost her job because she wasn’t a good lawyer. She halfheartedly searched for another law job. And then she realized this was her chance to nurture a business idea she has had for years.

“That was my new purpose. I wasn’t saying to people, ‘I’m unemployed.’ I was saying to people, ‘I’m starting a new business,’” Campbell says. “If I had gone to a networking event as an unemployed lawyer looking for work as a lawyer, I would have been shot as far as self-confidence.”

Now she thinks getting laid-off from a law firm is the best thing that can happen to a lawyer looking for a jolt of creativity.

“One thing about law practice that can be soul-sapping is being around other risk-averse people who can’t see the possibilities, who are afraid to let go," Campbell says. "Other entrepreneurs are just so fun. They see the possibilities… and you talk about problems and how to solve them.”

These new peers give her confidence. Campbell calls her product line Red Violet. She says it’s the opposite of “shrinking violet” since so many full-busted women – like herself – want to hide themselves. Campbell expects to launch Red Violet this year. She’s calculated the financials, got her logo, picked her fabric, and hired her sewing contractors. And the best thing about it is she’s not trapped in a glass conference room all day.

“When I’m on the subway,” she says, “I see people who look like they’re coming from or going to a firm, and they just look like they’re going to jail.”

But the statistics show people still really want to go to law school. The recession has done nothing to scare off would-be lawyers. In fact, the Law School Admission Council says more people took the LSAT this past year than in any year in the test’s history.