If you turn on your local news channel, you will likely hear a great deal of talk about the automotive industry and the thousands of jobs that have been lost as a result of our current economic troubles. What you don’t hear about is the impact our current economy has had on the legal profession. While those who are employed as paralegals are still enjoying a relative amount of job stability, those who are employed as lawyers in major firms around the country have been seeing their jobs disappear at a very rapid pace. In fact, according to the Layoff Tracker on lawshucks.com, more than 10,000 lawyers from major firms have lost their jobs in this year alone. But, why are lawyers experiencing such a massive reduction in force? The reality is that a number of different factors have come into play to lead to this troubling situation.

The major cause of the troubled legal industry is the credit crisis. With a lack of credit flow, businesses and individuals do not need a lawyer to help with things such as mergers and acquisitions, structured finance and private-equity transactions. In short, with deals at a standstill on Wall Street, there is no need for Wall Street lawyers to help the deals go through. As a result, major law firms have found their revenue to drop significantly. In fact, 20 of the top-grossing law firms saw the average profit per partner as well as the revenue per lawyer drop during the first quarter in 2009.

Of course, before the economy got to this point, many legal firms had got caught up in their own growth and failed to look forward to the future. According to Peter Zeughauser, who is a legal strategist in California, many of the top law firms continued to expand as business boomed, causing them to hire numerous young associates making six figures per year doing not much of anything. As layoffs became unavoidable, many of these young associates were the first to go.

Young associates aren’t the only ones losing their jobs within top legal firms, however, as many top-level associates are also suddenly finding themselves without a job. Fortunately, paralegals are not experiencing the same level of struggle. In fact, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that jobs within the field will grow faster than the average occupation as firms look to find more affordable ways to take care of their legal needs. Visit the Top Colleges home page to learn more about paralegal programs as well as other programs that will help you start moving on a new and rewarding career path.