The preliminary jobs numbers for 2012 are in, and while last year’s herky-jerky hiring in the legal sector resulted in a net increase of 7,800 jobs for the year or 0.7 percent more than in 2011 the legal industry nonetheless grew at just half the rate of the broader economy, where the total number of jobs increased 1.4 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The mild uptick in legal hiring, combined with the even smaller gains of 400 jobs in 2011 and 4,800 in 2010, has done little to make up for the combined 60,100 jobs the sector lost from the beginning of 2008 through the end of 2009.
