Amid a flurry of surveys that paint a bleak picture of the legal industry’s financial health in 2012, the one bright spot in an otherwise low-demand market is labor and employment work.

According to a recent Hildebrandt peer monitor index report issued this summer, demand for labor and employment work rose 4.7 percent in the second quarter and is one of the only practice areas that has been consistently positive in terms of demand for the last year-and-a-half.