The National Association for Legal Career Professionals (NALP) Thursday released its findings analyzing the state of part-time work among lawyers. While the number of working part-time lawyers has never been particularly large, in 2011, it went down (albeit ever so slightly) for the first time since the NALP started collecting this data in 1994.
Last year, 6.2 percent of lawyers worked part-time, compared to 6.4 percent in 2010. This is lower than the national average across the entire workforce. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported in 2010 that just less than 13.6 percent of all employed individuals usually worked part-time. The low number of part-time lawyers isn’t due to lack of flexibility on the part of law firms, though—98 percent of law firms allow part-time schedules.
What’s particularly interesting is that despite the small overall percentage of part-time lawyers, a whopping 70 percent of the lawyers that do work part-time are women. 13.4 percent of women lawyers overall work part-time, and just 2.7 percent of all male lawyers work part-time.
