Key Stats
- 3,300 legal sector jobs added in July
- The legal industry is now 22,000 jobs below its pre-pandemic employment numbers.
- WFH continues to decline despite delta variant concerns.
68,200 legal jobs were lost between March and April of 2020. The August 6th Bureau of Labor Statistics reports show nearly 66% of those jobs have been recovered to law offices and in-house legal departments across the US.
July has become one of the best months in overall job growth since the start of the pandemic. The legal industry claimed a small portion of those jobs - 3,300 over the past 30 days. Across all industries, total employment rose by almost one million jobs, and unemployment rates fell by 0.5% - 5.4% (with pre-pandemic unemployment rates hovering around 3.5%).
Across the economy generally, work-from-home-based positions are continuing to fall in Q3. In May 2020, more than 33% of US workers were working from home compared to 13% now.
There were 1,138,400 total legal jobs in July indicating both an increase over corrected June and May numbers as well as an overestimation by previous BLS figures. The bureau reported 1,138,500 legal jobs in May, when the agency released a report in early June, but corrected May figures from the latest report show 7,000 fewer jobs for that month.
