Anyone who is smart won't become a lawyer. The whole industry is a fucking mess and the job security sucks. I have first hand experience with this and have since moved on from practicing.

For the average person, your ideal path into law is:

• graduate top 10 undergrad, get 170+ on LSAT, go straight into a top 3 law school
• get onto some sort of non-shit journal and write a few shitty articles, get a good clerkship, summer at a good firm, get an offer from a good firm
• since the big firms are all still up-or-out and there hasn't been a path to partner since probably the 80s, your best case scenario is to stay in long enough to pay off your debts before you get booted and have to work as a public defender in bummfuck, idaho.

More likely path into law is:

• be too old, not diverse enough, not hot enough, etc
• don't go to an elite enough school
• don't get good enough grades/good enough law review/etc (law school grading is a crap shoot)
• don't get a good enough offer (outside of biglaw which is like 200k associate salaries it drops down to mid-low 5 figures for the rest of the profession, assuming you aren't in an eat-what-you-catch scenario, which is very likely)
• end up doing criminal defense, family law, probate, PI, etc (ie, shitlaw) instead of biglaw
• never pay off your debts

Realistically if you aren't related to a fortune 500 CEO, a big name politician or a biglaw partner, your chances of enjoying practicing and paying off your student loans are not that great.

edit- btw, I paid off all my debts a while back, I'm just telling it like it be edit2- also, there will be success stories from every graduating class in every school no matter how shitty- the problem is that you aren't going to be that success story any more than the average guy playing basketball is going to get into the NBA let alone become the starting lineup of the 90s Chicago Bulls.