By
Michael Simkovic is
an associate professor of law
at
Seton Hall Law School.
Although about the same number of people work in law
firms or in legal services today as a decade and a half ago, superficially
static job aggregatesmask substantial
changes in employment patterns.
According to the Census Bureau’s American Community
Survey, law firms employed about 90,000 more lawyers and about 80,000 more
paralegals in 2014 than at the start of the survey in 2001. At the same time,
law firms shed 180,000 to 190,000 legal secretaries, other legal support
workers and their supervisors.
The pattern is the same for other occupations at law
firms. Low-skilled jobs like bookkeepers, file clerks and in data entry are
shrinking, while high-skilled jobs like professional workers, skilled managers
and computer specialists are growing.
Lawyers account for less than half of the jobs in
legal services. Like most businesses, law firms employ a large number of
support personnel. Unfortunately, many commentators on the legal profession have overlooked the crucial distinctions between
legal services employment, lawyers and law school graduates.
As a result, they have mischaracterized a decline in
the fortunes for low-skilled support workers at a time of expanding
opportunities for highly educated workers as stagnation for all.
Law firms have sharply upgraded the education level of their work force, increasing the number of workers with graduate
degrees by 100,000 and those with bachelor’s degrees by 30,000. At the same
time, jobs for those with one year of college or less have shrunk by 125,000.
Those who say law firms are going through “structural
change” may be right. Changes in employment patterns appear to be giving those
who are highly educated an even bigger
competitive advantage than they
have had.
These trends are not unique to legal services. They
can be seen throughout the economy, where the share of jobs for highly educated
workers and in skilled professions is growing faster than that of jobs for the
less educated and less skilled.
Because hundreds of thousands of lawyers work outside
of law firms, the number of law firm jobs does not include some
jobs for lawyers. Similarly,
because hundreds of thousands of law graduates do not practice law, the number
of lawyers does not count some jobs for law graduates.
The best way to measure the benefits of education is
not by counting jobs, but rather by measuring the earnings premium, or differences in earnings caused by differences in education. This
measure also shows the advantages of education growing over time.
The reported change in the number of jobs at law firms
is much lower than hiring because of attrition from law firms to other
employers. The numbers reported are the change in the total number of jobs at
two points in time, not the total turnover.
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