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If you’re a lawyer or third-year law student, prospects for finding a new job in 2007 are good. If you’re a paralegal, legal secretary or other skilled support staff, your prospects are great.
That’s the consensus of observers as business transactions drive the demand for competitively priced legal services, both at private firms and in corporate departments.
“The prospects for 2007 hiring in the legal arena are high,” says Steven Levine, vice president of national permanent operations for staffing firm Hudson in New York. “There’s a great demand for candidates with experience in mergers and acquisitions and corporate litigation, for both law firms and corporate legal departments.”
Legal professionals are generally bullish on employment prospects in their industry, according to the Hudson Employment Index. Some 31.4 percent of respondents to the December 2006 survey said they expected their employers to be hiring in coming months; only 11.6 percent anticipated layoffs -- just more than 50 percent expected no change. Still, nearly 20 percent of respondents said they were worried about losing their jobs.
Attorneys in Demand
With corporate compliance requirements increasing and business transactions evolving with global markets, demand for skilled attorneys and the best and brightest law students is healthy.
“In the past, we could largely restrict our hiring to a couple of months in the fall of each year,” says Racquel Keller, manager of professional development and recruitment at Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox PLLC in Washington, DC. “Now our recruiting efforts have been driven to more of a year-round schedule.”
Although many large firms hire the upcoming class of law graduates almost a year ahead, many other legal employers are still recruiting for this year. “Small and medium-sized firms and government agencies and public-interest organizations hire when they need somebody,” says Randi Friedman, director of career services at Northeastern University’s School of Law in Boston.
Private firms are also hiring more experienced lawyers to quickly build practice areas as the business environment shifts. “Over the last couple years, there has been a large shift toward lateral hiring” of experienced attorneys from other employers, says Keller.
“The corporate law world is such that certain kinds of transactions become hot and others slow down,” says Scott Berson, a partner and chair of the recruitment committee at Chadbourne & Parke LLC in New York. “Right now, private equity and hedge funds are hot.”
Legal recruiters could almost take their orders by reading business news headlines. “Compliance and options backdating are hot areas,” Levine says. Still, “corporate legal departments are looking for people with rounded experience.”
Although certain attorney specialties will be in high demand for years, overall growth in attorney jobs will be constrained by thrift. “More and more employers realize that they can get some legal work done less expensively with paralegals than with attorneys,” says Rafia Aleem, a paralegal manager and member of the University of California Irvine Extension’s paralegal advisory committee.
Flush Times for Paralegals and Legal Secretaries
Indeed, skilled professionals who support lawyers are highly sought after, as both private firms and in-house departments respond to competitive pressures to keep legal fees contained. “There’s a tremendous need for paralegal and legal secretaries, much more of a demand on the corporate side than in the past,” says Levine.
Professionals without law degrees form a major employment sector in the legal industry. Paralegals and legal assistants held about 224,000 jobs in 2004, according to the 2006-07 edition of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Outlook Handbook. More importantly, growth of these jobs is projected to be much faster than overall employment growth through 2014.
Recent job openings include legal secretaries specializing in each of the following specialties: corporate, litigation, intellectual property and patent prosecution. Paralegal openings recently listed include specialists in litigation, real estate, trademark, bankruptcy and loan administration.
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