On the other hand . . .

The same agency that listed the project I thought was pretty good that they were having trouble staffing is listing a project that sounds like they think there are still plenty of contract attorneys desperate for work, especially newbies:

[An agency I have worked] is looking for law school graduates (J.D.'s) and paralegals with a minimum of 3 years of legal experience to start a project next week.
Need all Word version resume submissions by 9:00am Tuesday 6/24/2014, the latest.
The ideal candidate will be a Juris Doctor graduate or a paralegal with 3 years of legal experience. Legal experience may include legal internships, document review, student clinic, law clerkships, law firm, temporary, full-time, etc., type work.
Experience reviewing contracts/agreements is a plus.
Pay rate is $18/hr. 40 hours a week. Duration: 5-7 weeks. Location: Downtown D.C. (next to Metro Center metro stop.). On-site work only.
This group will be starting Wednesday 6/25 or Thursday 6/26//2014. This is an add-on to an existing project. MUST have good computer skills and good Microsoft Excel skills to do this work.
If interested, qualified, and available, please reply to the link below with a Word version resume (no phone calls at this time, please):

Just for starters, most paralegals with three years of experience have actual jobs. The ones who don't, suck. This is the time of year JD-only people come to D.C., hoping to make the big time but having no job, and they wind up doing temp work. They haven't even taken their state bar exam yet, much less passed it, and so they can't become members of the DC Bar, either. They have to eat, so they take shit like this. Some of those people with JDs will take the paralegal jobs, just to have a job. It sucks, and in a market that seems busy, it really sucks. But most gigs these days require DC Bar membership, and this project is aimed at people who can't possibly have DC Bar membership. On the other hand, projects like this tend to depress rates, even in a tight market, as agencies and firms find ways to hire people who don't have DC Bar membership so they can pay them less -- and, in this instance, much less -- than the going rate.