American Lawyer:  Job Growth In Legal Services Lagged Behind National Rate In 2012:

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% 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%, 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.

The 2012 BLS jobs data, whose monthly figures
are revised for two months following their release and on an annual
basis for five years, serves as further evidence that employment in the
legal sector might never fully bounce back.

In a separate set of
data collected by the BLS, the legal services sector—93 percent of
which is made up of employees in law offices, and the remaining
percentage is comprised of nonlawyer legal practitioners like paralegals
and notaries—is projected to grow by 64,200 jobs—or nearly 6%—between 2010 and 2020, according to BLS's Occupational Statistics and Employment Projections office,
which generates its figures based on household surveys that includes
the self-employed. (The current employment statistics that the BLS
releases every month are based on a payroll survey of business and
government agencies and excludes the self-employed.)

For that
projection to hold true, however, the industry has quite a lot ground to
make up since it gained only 12,300 jobs in the first three years of
that time frame, leaving it about 6,300 jobs off of the projected 6% rate.

The total number of lawyers—who also fall into industry sectors other
than legal services—is expected to grow at a rate of 10% between
2010 and 2020, down from the 13% increase the BLS had projected
for the 2008–18 period.