Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks, which has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.

This week, economists missed on the good side — initial jobless claims fell by more than expected. The 502,000 applicants are the fewest since January 3, and the four-month rolling average is at the lowest level since November 2008.

It’s tough to grasp half a million people filing for first-time benefits as good news, but these are troubled times, so we have to cheer where we can. Don’t get too excited, though. Even news that looks good at first glance probably isn’t. The 139,000 people who came off the continuing-claims roster more likely did so as a result of benefits running out or giving up the search than actually finding work.

But don’t be surprised if that number starts creeping back up. A bill was passed last week that will extend benefits by 14 weeks in all states, and six additional weeks in states where the unemployment rate is greater than 8.5%.

All in all, it was a relatively good week in BigLaw, with no layoffs reported. Nonetheless, firms continue to flail about trying to fix their economic models, and we document the efforts after the jump.

Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks, which has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.

It was pretty hard to miss this week’s big news: unemployment crashed through the 10% barrier, hitting 10.2% in October - the highest level since 1983 (and, of course, worse than predicted). Underemployment also hit record levels, with the number of self-reported disenfranchised and under-utilized people reaching 17.5%.

Republicans jumped on the numbers as a sign that Obama’s package has failed, and the White House countered that it has saved almost 700,000 jobs. But that claim doesn’t even come close to addressing the original estimates and is completely unmeasurable. Still, the administration is reconsidering ideas it had previously rejected, like a highway bill and a business tax credit for new hires, even as they ask for two versions of a budget: one with flat spending and another with a 5% cut.

Law firms got their place in the MSM sun this week, as Bloomberg used a former law-firm employee as an example of increased migration to areas perceived as having jobs:

Some people are pulling up stakes and moving to where they think the job prospects may be brighter. Beth Rubin, 41, lost her position as a receptionist at the law firm Goldstein Bershad & Fried, PC in Southfield, Michigan, in October. The resident of Ferndale, a Detroit suburb, is now selling her furniture and moving to Georgia. “I’m looking to get a job in Georgia, and I don’t know about the job market there, but I can tell you Michigan is horrible,” Rubin said in a telephone interview.

Of course, anything has to be better than Detroit.

More on the highs and lows in the legal sector, after the jump.

Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks, which has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.

Last week we wrote that jobless claims were higher than expected and that predicting anything with any degree of confidence seemed pointless. This week, the number of people receiving unemployment benefits was lower than expected, the lowest levels in seven months, and that was before announcement that benefits will be extended again. Still, the best that can be said is that the cuts are slowing:

Companies are cutting fewer jobs as they see more evidence of a recovery, helped by government stimulus efforts and less weakness in housing and manufacturing. While a separate report today showed the economy expanded for the first time in more than a year, a rebound in hiring may take longer to materialize

So while things bounced around unpredictably in the broader market, we had two notable announcements in law-firm innovations this week. We’ll cut right to them after the jump.

Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks, which has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.

We took the week off last week, but you didn’t miss much. In fact, we had another run of almost two weeks without a layoff, before WilmerHale laid off 57 staff. But we’ll get back to the layoffs after our regular sojourn through the broader American economy.

If you’re a regular reader of this column, this should sound familiar: initial jobless claims were worse than expected. 49 states and territories reported increased unemployment, with four seeing improvement. To the extent you believe this is a recovery (and even if you do, whether you believe this is sustainable is another question entirely), it appears to be jobless at best, and job-losing more likely.

Companies are salvaging net income numbers almost entirely on the expense side, and the stimulus has done nothing to create job and nothing demonstrable to save jobs. Just ask the Republicans, who point out that President Obama claimed his stimulus would create 3.5 million jobs, when the actual result has been a loss of 2.7 million - a 6.2 million-job deficit.

Part of the frustration, of course, is the long-running treatment of disillusioned jobseekers and people whose benefits have run out as not being counted as unemployed. When minor improvements in unemployment numbers were being hyped a few months ago, it now appears that was almost entirely the result of people falling off the rolls, not actually finding gainful employment. Maddeningly, that means 7,000 people a day are no longer counted as unemployed.

As usual, law firms continue to muddle through. Their efforts, after the jump.

Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks, which has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.

Many people fear that this will be a "jobless recovery" and those people keep getting more justification for their concerns. Unfilled positions fell to the lowest level since the Department of Labor began tracking the statistic in 2000, falling to 2.39 million, which is less than half of the number of spots available at the peak just back in July 2007.

That’s the heart of the increasing schism between the fantastic run on the major US equity indices since March (when law-firm layoffs peaked) and increasing unemployment. Earnings have been improving due to cost reduction, not "real" growth, and that’s likely to continue.

The U.S. economy may grow at an average 2.8 percent pace annual pace in the second half of the year, according to the median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News this month. Consumer spending, after rebounding last quarter as auto sales jumped because of the government’s “cash-for-clunkers” plan, will probably decelerate in the last three months of the year as the jobless rate reaches 10 percent, the survey showed.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke last week said economic growth next year probably won’t be strong enough to “substantially” bring down unemployment. The jobless rate will “still probably be above 9 percent by the end of 2010,” Bernanke said.

Sadly, the factor that has done the most to keep the unemployment rate down seems to be the massive number of people whose benefits are expiring or have simply given up looking, and thus no longer count.

It wasn’t a particularly good news in the legal corner either. For the first time in a few months, four of the AmLaw Global 100 have had reported layoffs in the same week. (Law Shucks did a comprehensive analysis, complete with charts, of all the layoffs in the Global 100 last week.)

Details of those layoffs, plus other cost-cutting measures, after the jump.

On the one hand, according to Law Shucks, September was almost three times worse for layoffs than August. On the other hand, that’s still a lot better than May.

While we’ve been focused on the U.S. market, Law Shucks reports that the biggest September layoffs happened in the U.K.

Of the seven firms that laid people off, the biggest by far was Eversheds, which laid off 117 people (22 lawyers, 95 staff) - the largest layoff in over two months. The second-largest was UK IP firm Marks & Clerk, which laid off 60 people as it consolidated offices and scaled back due to the downturn (in a story broken by us, thanks to tipsters).

Still, as regular readers know, September was far from quiet on the home front.

Click the link below to see all of the numbers in easy-to-understand graphical form.

The Month in Layoffs - September 09 [Law Shucks]

Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks. Law Shucks has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.

For a while there it would look like the first consecutive weeks without layoffs since this time last year (by our reckoning, you have to go back to the weeks ending October 9 and October 2, 2008). Alas, one firm did come through with staff layoffs, about which more after the jump.

As usual, we begin with the US macroeconomic picture, and as usual, it ain’t pretty. For the week, the S&P 500 was down about 2%. That was the second straight week of losses, and the DJIA had its biggest weekly decline in three months. 263,000 net jobs were lost in September and the unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent, despite perhaps the technical end of the recession. As with the stock market, bad results are one thing, but results worse than expectations are another, and that was the case here. Consensus estimates were net losses of 175,000, so the actual results were way short. August’s revised numbers were slightly better than original reports, though.

The poor results are creating pessimism around when things will start to turn around:

[T]he report also buttressed fears that economic expansion would be weak and hesitant, with scarce paychecks and economic anxiety remaining prominent features of American life well into next year.

“This is a weak report,” said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. “The rate of job loss has tapered off, but we still haven’t reached the point where businesses are willing to hire.”

Could this create political difficulties for the president?

Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks. Law Shucks has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.

We draft this column by starting with the relevant articles from the past week in the legal sector, then tying in the broader economic data. We were quite happy to see that the law-firm layoff numbers this week were good - perfect, in fact - a week without layoffs for just the second time this year (the other was the week ending August 14).

And we weren’t the only ones pleasantly surprised. For the third straight week, initial jobless claims declined, down to 530,000 against an anticipated 550,000. Continuing claims also declined, but as we’ve said repeatedly, that seems to be more the result of benefits running out and people giving up (which means they no longer count as unemployed, in a bizarre example of government logic), than actual job creation.

After the jump, we turn to the legal sector.

Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks. Law Shucks has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.

A piece in Wednesday’s WSJ brought into stark relief the futility of using unemployment data for any sort of analysis, as we futilely do every week. Even the states and the federal government can’t agree on how the numbers should be calculated. Not surprisingly, the assumptions being made are largely influenced by the message the economist wants (or is nudged) to give.

The most visible figures available to evaluate the job market are unemployment rates, which don’t speak well for the stimulus package. The national rate of joblessness last month was 9.7%, up from 8.5% in March, the month after the stimulus act was passed. A week after that number was released, the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers reported that the stimulus had increased employment to a level by “slightly more than 1 million jobs higher than it otherwise would have been.”

That awkward wording says a lot: It reflects the tough job facing any economist who tries to estimate job creation. In every method used, economists are forced to imagine an alternate reality — one built on assumptions that are easily challenged. …

The White House method assumes that things were getting worse and that the stimulus is the sole factor responsible for stopping the bleeding. So economists imagined an alternative reality whereby the present would have been much worse — to the tune of one million more lost jobs.

So with that in mind, unemployment was up again, even as Obama and Bernanke are announcing that the recession, "from a technical perspective," may be over.

Perhaps the slowdown in law-firm layoffs is a leading indicator? The activity in our little corner of the economy, after the jump.

Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks. Law Shucks has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.

We’ll actually be hitting a week and a half in this roundup, going back to August 1. As we’ve been saying for a while, September is not likely to be as tranquil as August was (3 layoffs, 126 people in total), and the layoffs have already started. Eleven days in, and twice as many firms have laid off almost twice as many people.

Let’s step back and start with the big picture.

The really bad news came just before the Labor Day weekend, as unemployment hit 9.7%, a 26-year high. If you really want to find a silver lining, the net job loss for August was less horrible than expected, coming in at 216,000 jobs lost for the month. The decrease in total unemployment in July is now just a blip on a 16 out of 17 month streak of worsening employment numbers. It’s not even like the improvement in July was a result of actual new jobs, either — it came from people becoming so disaffected that they stop looking for jobs entirely, which takes them off the rolls of the unemployed. Hurray for government math!

Coincidentally, BLS reported 100 jobs lost in the legal sector for the month, which is right in line with the tracker (although they’re measuring two entirely different things).

Overall, 6.9 million jobs have been lost since the beginning of 2008 — which, coincidentally, is also the beginning of the Law Shucks layoff tracker (we count from Cadwalader’s first round). Major firms account for just over 13,000 of those.

So what has been going on so far this month? After the jump, we analyze the looming surge.

It already looks like September will be a month rife with layoffs. But before we bunker down for a bumpy fall, let’s take one last look at the end of a peaceful summer. Law Shucks has done his monthly round-up of an August that was mild on the layoff front:

The month set records (in a good way) in every major category: fewest total layoffs, layoffs of lawyers, layoff of legal staff, firms laying people off, etc.

Most notably, for the first time since December 2008, there was a week without a layoff.

Is it just the eye of the storm, or are big layoffs in Biglaw a thing of the past? Click the link below for all of the charts and trend lines.

The Month in Layoffs - August 09 [Law Shucks]

[Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks. Law Shucks has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.]

It seems so good, doesn’t it? According to the lead of a recent AP story, "The unemployment rate fell in 17 states and the District of Columbia last month, a positive sign even as the pain of joblessness remains widespread."

Don’t believe the hype. Even lawyers can subtract when it’s only double-digit numbers. Are we not supposed to notice that that must mean the unemployment rate increased, or at best was flat, in more than 30 states? In fact, it was up in 36 states and territories, more than twice as many as it was down in, but the AP is just drunk on White House Kool-Aid apparently, how else to explain that spin?

Other outlets aren’t so optimistic (or bedazzled, depending on your level of cynicism). Initial jobless claims were actually higher than expected for the week, at 576,000, and the overall unemployment rate was flat at about 9.4% (we touched briefly last week on why that number is particularly misleading right now). That rate is still expected to hit the psychologically-dreadful 10% level by early next year. Still, the S&P 500 had a nice little run for the week, finishing up about 40 points.

Law-firm news wasn’t terrible this week, although the "week without a layoff" streak ended at one. Details after the jump.

Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks. Law Shucks has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.

Hallelujah!

We’ve come so close recently, but we can finally call it.

For the first time this year, we have gone an entire week without a layoff reported at any major law firm.

By popular demand, we’ll first address the broader US economy, where the news isn’t quite as good. Initial jobless claims rose unexpectedly, to 558,000, last week. Curiously, what seems like good news might not be: the total number of unemployed dropped to the lowest level since April. Once again, that’s more likely the result of people no longer qualifying as "unemployed" under the BLS definition. In the worst case, people whose right to receive benefits has expired (i.e., they’ve been unemployed for more than 12-18 months) don’t count. There is also a substantial contingent of disaffected workers, those who have simply given up searching, who also don’t count.

Perhaps the better indicator of BigLaw’s clients’ health is the S&P 500, which was relatively flat for the week and held at the psychologically important 1,000 level.

After the jump, a celebration of the week without layoffs.

On Monday, we tossed out a blind item about future layoffs at a Manhattan law firm, mentioned in the Washington Post as a client of the Five O’Clock Club, an outplacement firm. On Tuesday, with the help of Law Shucks, we narrowed down the list of suspects.

We’re happy to report that we can advance the ball on this. Three firms should be cleared of suspicion:

1. Dewey & LeBoeuf: A spokesperson from D&L stated that it is not the firm in question and has no layoff plans.

2. Schulte Roth & Zabel: A spokesperson from SRZ stated that it is not the firm in question and has not hired a layoff consultant or outplacement consultant.

3. White & Case: A reader pointed out to us that White & Case is listed as a Five O’Clock Club client (PDF). [Update: Looks like the client list has been removed, but we downloaded it; check it out here.]

This caused us to wonder if White & Case might be the firm at issue. But White & Case denies it.

Yesterday, we wrote about a Washington Post article profiling a layoff consultant who advises companies on conducting mass firings. The article caught our attention because one of those who called Kim Hall of the Five O’Clock Club during the course of the article was a “law firm in Manhattan,” planning a third round of layoffs in August with more to come in the fall.

We invited you to speculate as to the identity of the firm. Law Shucks (the layoff tracking blog with whom we frequently “team up”) compared the information in the article with data from the Layoff Tracker:

Here’s the list of law firms in Manhattan that have had two layoffs (we’re assuming layoffs of lawyers) reported this year:

* Dewey & LeBoeuf
* Fish & Richardson
* Loeb & Loeb
* Mayer Brown
* Morgan Lewis & Bockius
* Schulte Roth & Zabel
* White & Case

Further speculation and narrowing of the list over at Law Shucks.

Handicapping the Next Layoff [Law Shucks]

Earlier: Blind Item: Layoffs To Come At ‘A Law Firm in Manhattan’

[Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks. Law Shucks has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.]

Come on, now! Last week, we made it all the way until Thursday afternoon before word came out that Alabama’s Bradley Arant was keeping the "weeks with a layoff" streak alive.

This week, it’s even more poignant because the end of the run was so close. This time it was yet another southeast regional firm raining on everyone’s parade. Florida’s Akerman Senterfitt has just confirmed that it laid off five of its 150 associates. At 2:30 on a Friday afternoon. Surely it can’t get any closer than that.

We soldier on.

Broader economic data are particularly interesting this week, as there are completely mixed messages coming out. There will be reports that unemployment has declined, and President Obama is excited, saying that the "worst may be behind us."

To the surprise of many, the unemployment rate dropped to 9.4% when most were expecting a small increase. Basically, there was still a net loss of jobs in July, albeit smaller than predicted and smaller than June, so how did the unemployment rate drop?

We address that burning question, plus the week’s events in law-firm layoffs and other activities, after the jump.

[Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks. Law Shucks has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.]

This is getting ridiculous.

Every week we come closer and closer to the promised land: a week without layoffs. But still no dice.

This time, it’s a regional Alabama firm, Bradley Arant (#178 on the AmLaw 200), that went and ruined things for everyone. The streak of 31 straight weeks with a layoff by a law firm continues (it would be longer than that if not for the Christmas holiday).

At least the legal sector is no worse than the rest of the economy. This downturn is now officially the worst since the Great Depression.

Every significant firm, other than the above-mentioned party pooper, had the decency to avoid layoffs during the last week of most summer programs and bar-exam week. There were a few close calls and the other cost-cutting measures did continue, though. We detail them, after the jump.

[Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks. Law Shucks has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.]

We may not have seen the worst yet, the last few weeks’ progress in the American economy has turned slightly for the worse this week.

Applications rose by 30,000 to 554,000 in the week ended July 18, in line with forecasts, figures from the Labor Department showed today in Washington. Claims had fallen by 93,000 over the previous two weeks. The number of people collecting unemployment insurance decreased to the lowest level in three months, also reflecting seasonal issues surrounding closures at carmakers.

To add insult to injury, first-time filers’ checks are being held up by an overburdened system, and the coffers are running dry.

Could be worse - Spain’s unemployment rate is just shy of 18%.

The constant layoffs without any expectation of hiring have had a continuing negative effect on consumer confidence. If we’re getting out of this recession, it won’t be consumer-spending driven. And it looks like there’s still some pain to come.

The economy has lost 6.5 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007 [the Law Shucks Law Firm Layoff Tracker counts lawyer layoffs from January 2008]. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg predict the unemployment rate may reach 10 percent by year-end from 9.5 percent in June, the highest level since 1983.

Slower layoff rate, more yet to come? Sounds just like the law-firm industry.

[Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks. Law Shucks has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.]

Fortunately, this week’s law-firm layoffs didn’t follow last week’s surprise return to March form. In fact, there were fewer layoffs this week than any other this year.

While this is a nice reprieve, unemployment continues to rise, despite some indicators of stabilization in housing and manufacturing. Non-farm payroll fell by 467,000 last month, which was worse than estimates, and unemployment hit 9.5% - the worst in 26 years but still not at the peak levels Obama predicts (10%+).

Closer to home (geographically, for most of us, and metaphorically for those of us whose fortunes rise and fall with the financial services industry), the financial sector "continues to bleed jobs." Unemployment in NYC reached 9.5% in June, the highest level since 1997.

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, Mort Zuckerman wrote an op-ed in the WSJ, saying it’s even worse than we realize:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics preliminary estimate for job losses for June is 467,000, which means 7.2 million people have lost their jobs since the start of the recession. The cumulative job losses over the last six months have been greater than for any other half year period since World War II, including the military demobilization after the war. The job losses are also now equal to the net job gains over the previous nine years, making this the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all job growth from the previous expansion.

After the jump, we sift through this week’s activity in our little slice of heaven.

[Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks. Law Shucks has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.]

Where did that come from? The big news for the week is obviously DLA Piper blasting us back to mid-March form, with the biggest layoff since, actually, completion of its own UK redundancy consultation in May.

More on that later. But first, we’ll take our traditional quick look at the broader economic activity.

The numbers were actually surprisingly good this week, with initial jobless claims down to the lowest levels since January. In fact, the numbers are probably significantly worse than that indicates; early plant closing masks some serious seasonal adjustments that are skewing the numbers. And, of course, overall unemployment was up again, to 1983 levels, as new jobs just aren’t being created yet.

In fact, overall unemployment is getting to record levels. According to Calculated Risk, “the current recession is now the 2nd worst recession since WWII in percentage terms - and also in terms of the unemployment rate (only early ’80s recession was worse).”

As we learned from DLA Piper, layoffs at law firms are still on the table. Details after the jump.