In March, the legal services sector in the United States cut 1,300 jobs, according to the Labor Department. In overall numbers there were 120,000 jobs in March added to payrolls across the country, which helped decrease the unemployment rate in the country to 8.2 percent. There were very modest gains in the legal services sector for the month of February, which were erased by the significant dip in the month of March. The Labor Department recorded 1,117,700 legal jobs in the country in February of 2012. The legal services sector has lost 1,100 jobs since the month of January. Just when the legal industry seems to be picking up some steam, it suffers through a month of job cuts that hurts its outlook for prospective law school students and upcoming law school graduates.
Since 2009, the conditions at law firms have been stabilizing. In 2009, there were 41,900 jobs in the legal services sector cut per data released by the Labor Department. There were roughly 2,700 jobs eliminated in 2011, which makes for moderate numbers compared to 2009. According to the Labor Department, there were 13,800 jobs added in the month of March in the professional and technical services group. This group includes the industries of accounting and bookkeeping, legal, computer systems design, architecture and engineering and management and technical consulting.