US legal jobs hit new high, labor data shows

By David Thomas

Jan 9 (Reuters) - There are more people than ever working in the U.S. legal sector, preliminary data released Friday by the U.S. Labor Department showed.

Legal sector employment totaled a record-breaking 1,208,100 jobs last month, according to preliminary seasonally adjusted data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The count includes a range of legal workers at companies, law firms, government agencies and nonprofits, including paralegals and assistants, but the majority are lawyers, according to BLS.

December's historic high follows several record-breaking months for U.S. legal sector employment, though the November and December figures are still subject to revision.

Overall U.S. employment growth slowed more than expected in December amid job losses in the construction, retail and manufacturing sectors, but a decline in the unemployment rate to 4.4% suggested the labor market was not rapidly deteriorating.

Large and midsized U.S. law firms enjoyed a highly profitable 2025 thanks to soaring client demand and ever-higher billing rates, though a contraction could be possible in 2026, according to a report released this week by the Thomson Reuters Institute and Georgetown Law’s Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession. The Thomson Reuters Institute and Reuters share the same parent company.

Both the Great Recession and the pandemic reversed years of gains in legal industry employment, an August 2025 Reuters review of 35 years of BLS data found. It took until 2022 for employment in the sector to rebound to an earlier peak of 1,179,500 jobs recorded in May 2007, when a period of propulsive growth had increased the number of legal jobs by 26.3% since 1990.