Bloomberg wants tools[1], not people who expect to work 40 hours a week and then go have a life. If you're willing to put in that kind of time and can get into a T14 law school[2], then doing biglaw for a few years in a contract or patent practice would open a lot of doors in a lot of places, plus make it very difficult to lose your job to offshoring.
The federal government has an annoying habit of preferring contractors for technical work, both because it's easier than directly paying people what they're worth and because it allows them to claim that the government is smaller than it actually is. Nonetheless, there are pockets of good technical jobs: CIA DS&T; NSA (RF, signals analysis, cryptanalysis); DHS (CISA). You won't be laid off, and there's lots of interesting and useful work; but even if you don't want to go contractor you're likely to run away from the HR departments that seem to view their job as preventing everyone else from doing theirs or the lack of external training opportunities, and at least in the intelligence community agencies are as headquarters-centric as Google and Facebook were ten years ago.
The risk of contracting can vary wildly. Some contracts have a new prime every five years; some go fifty years or more without a changeover. There are definitely contractors and contracts that are low risk, but in general the same rules apply as in SV: stability is being able to find another job, not a guarantee of continuing the same one.
[1]: In the MIT sense.
[2]: Spoiler: if you have a high enough GPA to convince Bloomberg that you'd be a good tool, you can get into a T14 law school.