"The poor job market for new veterinarians is not the much-publicized fiasco that it is for new lawyers," The New York Times‘s David Segal wrote in a story published on February 24. Although the article’s focus on the travails of an outlying, foreign-located, for-profit veterinary school undercuts Segal’s comparison, its publication does provide a good opportunity to look at just how badly the "much-publicized fiasco" that is the market for legal services is doing.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) updated its GDP-by-industry accounts last November, and the picture the numbers paint for the private legal sector isn’t pretty. In fact, the first thing you might notice is that the 2.3 percent upward turn in the sector’s real value-added that I wrote about last year has been revised downward to -2.2 percent, and the new 2011 rate is in negative territory as well (-1.7 percent). The legal sector, it turns out, is not benefiting from the U.S. economy’s upward slog. In fact, the industry’s real value-added has now fallen below its 1988 level.
