Stephen Lamb joins Paul Weiss at the firm’s new office in Wilmington, Delaware as a partner in both the corporate and litigation departments. He was a judge with the Delaware Court of Chancery for 12 years. Lamb earned his JD in 1975 from the Georgetown University Law Center.

Patricia Shiu joins the US Department of Labor as director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. She previously spent 25 years with San Francisco’s Legal Aid Society-Employment Law Center, where she was vice president for programs. She was also an associate at Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro. Her JD is from the University of San Francisco School of Law.

R. Hewitt Pate joins Chevron as general counsel, from Hunton & Williams where he was head of the global competition group. He was formerly head of the US Department of Justice’s antitrust division. His JD is from the University of Virginia School of Law. Pate clerked for US Supreme Court Justices Lewis F. Powell Jr. and Anthony M. Kennedy.

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The numbers include lawyers, paralegals, public relations specialists, secretaries and other positions; and reflect layoffs by firms nationwide over the last few months, and the dissolutions of Am Law 100 firms Heller Ehrman, Thelen, and Thacher Proffitt & Wood.

In all, 2.6 million US jobs were lost in 2008, the biggest fall in more than six decades.

But the number of legal services jobs actually increased in December by 1,300.

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The Labor Department reported that initial filings for state jobless benefits fell to 554,000 for the week ending December 13th. That was a decline of 21,000 from the 26-year high of 575,000 claims a week earlier.

Economists were expecting jobless claims slip to 558,000. But the reduction in filers “really was not enough to offset the significant gain we saw after the Thanksgiving holiday,” said economist Andrew Gledhill.

The number of people continuing to collect unemployment declined to 4.38 million in the week ending December 6th, the most recent data available. This was a decrease of 47,000 from the preceding week.

The rash of unemployment claims shows no sign of slackening, according to Gledhill, and may hit the retail sector particularly hard as consumers reign in spending.

The number of new jobless claims rose the most in Tennessee, rising by 12,170 due to layoffs in the manufacturing industry, the Labor Department said.

Wisconsin saw jobless claims fall the most, by 8,593, due to fewer layoffs in the construction, manufacturing and service industries.

Via CNN Money via BizChuck.

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