According to the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the legal services industry in the United States shed some 7,000 jobs between December 2007 and December 2008.
The numbers include lawyers, paralegals, public relations specialists, secretaries and other positions; and reflect layoffs by firms nationwide over the last few months, and the dissolutions of Am Law 100 firms Heller Ehrman, Thelen, and Thacher Proffitt & Wood.
In all, 2.6 million US jobs were lost in 2008, the biggest fall in more than six decades.
But the number of legal services jobs actually increased in December by 1,300.