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I can't speak to young attorneys not wanting to do real work, but I've definitely sensed a "grass is greener" mentality among several of them. It's usually that they're convinced that a particular line of work is boring and that there's something interesting and more glamorous out there. I've never done criminal defense, but I interviewed with the DA's office a number of years back and was told that the job was in the DUI division; I'd be doing nothing but drug DUIs, all day every day, and if I needed help I could ask the regular DUI guy for advice.
I think part of the problem stems from the fact that in law school you're constantly moving between different areas of the law, but when you get into practice you're mostly doing the same thing, and novel legal issues don't come up so much as novel factual issues. It's been at least a year since I've had to read any caselaw, but I spent last week going over hundreds of pages of contracting records from the 70s.
This is one of my "complaining about the kids these days" hobbyhorses: in criminal defense, there is a reason to be searching caselaw almost every day. Huge amounts of constitutional disputes revolve around tiny factual differences and finding caselaw with the most similar factual similarities and arguing by analogy why those should control instead of the cases favoring the State is the name of the game.
Being able to say to a prosecutor "here are 3 opinions with similar fact patterns and here's why I'm going to win a suppression hearing" is the best move towards a better plea offer (even if the argument is mostly bluster). Maybe the research leads to 0 and it's time for hard talk with the client that they have zero legal issues to stand on. Either way, that exact issue shouldn't need to be researched from scratch in the future and it should be incorporated as base-level knowledge for future cases.
There are plenty of areas of law where changes are slow and caselaw searches aren't crucial, like you say yours is. Criminal defense is not one, especially in more populous states where new decisions on criminal issues are a constant thing. And I cannot get newer attorneys to do caselaw searches. No matter how many times I hear, "I have a case with fact pattern Z, what do you think?" and respond with "I don't know, what caselaw have you found with something similar?," I keep getting blank stares like research never occurs to them. And research could not be easier now compared to the paper days of Shepard cites, or even the early 2000s electronic options.
This is not isolated to my office. I hear the same thing from other defense friends who have become supervisors or mentors. Plus it's merely one facet of the unwillingness to do work overall. Coupled with the overall dearth of candidates (something DA offices are contending with, too), it makes for frustrating times.
Is it really that you can't get them to do caselaw searches or that they just aren't experienced enough to know that they need to do them? I actually had to assign a newer kid some research into a motion in limine I was preparing a few weeks ago. He called me five minutes later with the disappointing news that I was wasting my time drafting it because he only got as far as the rules before seeing that it wasn't going to work, but he never complained about it or anything. But if they are pushing back on it it reminds me of a scene from The Wire where Herc calls the procedures "more bullshit" and Freamon says "This right here IS the job. When you came down here what did you expect?" Maybe it's because when I switched practice areas I harbored no delusions about what the job would entail, even though I didn't know what the job would entail. There's always an outside impression that's at least somewhat at odds with the workaday reality of any job. I'd honestly rather have younger attorneys who at least ask you what they should do. I've found it preferable to the ones who don't ask you anything and then turn in terrible work product, and then stay bad at their jobs long enough that they can't even ask some questions without eliciting "how long have you been working here?" as a response.
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