End-of-year figures showed legal employment returning to the numbers it saw at the start of 2019. While this means that 2019’s gains were essentially undone by pandemic losses, a 2.3% unemployment rate in this sector suggests the industry is doing well relative to the overall economy, which finished the year with unemployment at 6.7%. This data is not limited to attorneys; it includes all jobs within the legal services industry. This helps explain why, over the course of a year, women lost approximately 155,000 jobs (over 13%) to men’s 15,000 (1.65%). Although not discussed much at the time, when law firms reduced staff, women were disproportionately impacted.
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