Lawyers leaving US government drive workforce shift

By David Thomas

Jan 29 (Reuters) - (Billable Hours is Reuters' weekly report on lawyers and money. Please send tips or suggestions to D.Thomas@thomsonreuters.com.)

An exodus of lawyers from the U.S. government supercharged the hiring pool for law firms during President Donald Trump's first year back in office, according to federal statistics and new data from private analytics firms.

Figures from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management show that 8,599 licensed attorneys left the federal government between Trump's inauguration and November, for a net decline of 6,524 accounting for new hires. The drop follows annual increases nearly every year over decades — the second-largest net decrease since 2005 was 389 lawyers in 2022.

Trump's administration took aggressive steps to shrink the overall federal workforce last year. The U.S. Department of Justice experienced both firings and resignations, including in protest over administration actions.

Departures from the DOJ and dozens of other agencies skewed the legal hiring market for large law firms — the segment for which the most up-to-date data is available. The 200 highest-grossing U.S. law firms hired 1,129 attorneys in 2025 who left federal service the same year, according to numbers gathered by Firm Prospects, which analyzes hiring in the U.S. legal industry. They accounted for 8.54% of attorney hires by those firms, roughly double the percentage in the most recent years and a full quarter more than in the first year of Trump's first term.

Data from SurePoint Legal Insights, which also tracks law firm hiring, showed a similar surge in the hiring of ex-government lawyers by large firms. Phil Flora, a SurePoint vice president, said that federal and state government lawyers made up 7% of the lateral hiring pool in 2025, compared to 4-5% in years past.

"This is unlike anything that’s ever been seen," said Firm Prospects president Adam Oliver.

About one-third of the exiting attorneys worked for the DOJ, the largest federal employer of lawyers, according to OPM figures. The DOJ's Civil Rights Division and Federal Programs Branch have seen significant departures, while its Tax Division has closed, and officials have scaled back white-collar prosecutions.

An unusually high number of rank-and-file attorneys in the federal government began reaching out to recruiters in the private sector after the election but before Trump's inauguration. The volume surged further after the inauguration, said Washington headhunters Dan Binstock and Amy Savage.

"The DC market was able to absorb many of those attorneys, but not all," Savage said. "Supply exceeded demand on that front."

High-ranking prosecutors and agency officials are perennially attractive hires, but lower-level lawyers and those who lack a specialized or high-demand skill set face stiffer odds, said Rachel Nonaka, a former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission attorney-turned-recruiter in Washington.

Including lawyers and other workers, the Justice Department has lost a net 8,900 employees since Trump took office, according to OPM, which is set to release December's data next month. The DOJ figures include 2,526 lawyers who retired or quit, 261 who left via force reductions, transfers or "other separations," and 503 lawyers who were hired. The overall federal workforce has fallen to its lowest level in at least a decade.

The number of lawyers employed by the federal government has gradually risen under both Democratic and Republican administrations in the past. More than 38,000 lawyers were serving in November, according to OPM, roughly even with the number employed in 2017.

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"If there’s someone out there who bills at a higher rate than Bill and me on hourly cases, please let us know so we may raise our rate," Manne told Reuters.

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The brief celebrity appearance came on the eighth day of the trial in Greenbelt, Maryland, against Goldstein, who pleaded not guilty last year to charges that he failed to report millions of dollars he won in poker games, lied on loan documents, and made improper payments through his law firm Goldstein & Russell.

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