Further to the discussion in the comments to Bernie Burk's post last week about numbers of jobs for lawyers in the United States, a reader sent along this list taken from the Occupational Outlook Handbook going back to 1996:
Year Jobs held
by lawyers
1996 622,000
1998 681,000
2000 681,000 (Same number as for 1998; confirmed in the two
OOH editions)
2002 695,000
2004 735,000
2006 761,000
2008 759,200
2010 728,200
I don't have links to the OOHs, so I'm going on the basis of the reader's representations that these are right.