Legal Sector Losing Jobs in Down Economy Nationally and in Mississippi
According to Law.com the legal sector lost 5,800 jobs in October with more layoffs at large firms than at any time in the last 30 years. The blogs Above the Law and Law Shucks also track the carnage on a weekly basis. Law Shucks states:
The National Law Journal has put out its 2009 survey of the largest firms in the US, and the numbers are just about as awful as would be expected. Headcount is down pretty much across the board, with the total number of lawyers employed by the 250 largest firms back at 2005 levels, wiping out three years’ growth.
In our view, the data support what we’ve been saying all along: firms are grossly underreporting layoffs and stealth layoffs are running rampant.
In the Jackson area Currie Johnson recently laid off five associates and McGlinchey laid off two in its Jackson office. These numbers may not sound like a lot until you compute the percentage of lawyers in these offices who were let go.
The down economy for law firms in Mississippi started around 2004 with the Mississippi Supreme Court's opinion in Janssen v. Armond, which eliminated joinder of large numbers of plaintiffs in mass tort cases. This caused a huge hit to many defense firms who had a large presence in mass tort litigation. Mississippi firms slowly began to lose attorneys as natural attrition and stealth layoffs led to a reduction of the associate ranks.
Today many Mississippi firms look top heavy, with a lot more partners than associates. That's how firms looked in the early 1990's. The litigation boom of the late 1990's and early 2000's allowed firms to become leveraged by adding associates, of-counsel and paralegals. That meant more jobs for associates and more income for partners.
Ironically, associates in Mississippi who were forced to find new jobs several years ago turned out to be lucky. The economy was fine and it was usually not that hard to find another job. While finding another job often required leaving the state, some would say that is a positive. Today, it is much harder to find a job.
I do not expect the job market to significantly recover with the economy. Corporations and insurance companies are in a trend of bringing more legal work in-house. This is resulting in more lawyers going in-house from private practice. But since most of those types of jobs are outside Mississippi, the trend is a negative for Mississippi attorneys.
I'm not sure what will happen to the legal industry over the next 100 years. I hope a hundred years from now there are more lawyers who are practicing because they want to help resolve disputes and less who are practicing because they thought that it would be a path to making a lot of money.
There are too many well paid but unhappy lawyers who don't like the practice but are dependent on the income. I would like to see a leaner profession where most lawyers like the practice and do not attribute income with happiness. It may take fewer lawyers and less money to make this dream a reality.
