Legal News

April, May Particularly Cruel Months for Legal Workers

By Dan Slater

On Friday — the same day that oil surged to record prices and the dollar weakened further — the Labor Department came through with some tough news of its own: In May, non-farm jobs declined by 49,000, sending the unemployment rate to 5.5%, its highest since 2004.

Lawyers were particularly hard hit, according to the AmLaw Daily blog. The legal service sector — defined as lawyers, paralegals, legal librarians and secretaries — lost 1,100 jobs in May, the same percentage decrease, 1.4%, as the month of April, when the sector trimmed 1,900 jobs.

Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal was responsible for a good chunk of the carnage, firing 124 employees, including 24 lawyers, late last month. Earlier in May, Holland & Knight pink-slipped 70 legal secretaries, due to “redundancies and inefficiencies,” according to a firm spokeswoman, while Bingham McCutchen laid off some 17 staff members in its Bay Area offices. (“We don’t send and receive nearly as many faxes as we did five years ago,” explained managing partner Geoffrey Howard.)

In total, reports AmLaw Daily, 1.17 million people, or less than 1 percent of the overall U.S. job market, call themselves legal service employees. Overall, the sector has lost 9,700 jobs since a year ago, and 4,200 in the last six months, according to the Labor Department.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 09, 2008 (boomark / email).