Corporate, Securities Law Are Hottest Practice Areas, U.S. Survey Shows

An article by Charles Toutant in this week’s New Jersey Law Journal reports the findings of a national poll that the pressure of regulatory compliance on corporations is leading to corporate and securities law offering the most job opportunities for lawyers in the coming decade. Litigation is a close second in the survey which was released on July 29 and conducted by staffing agency Robert Half Legal. The survey posed this question to practicing lawyers “Which one of the following legal practice areas, in your opinion, will offer the greatest number of job opportunities over the next 10 years?” Their responses were:

Corporate and securities 24%
Litigation 21%
Intellectual property 16%
International law 16%
Environmental 12%
Commercial real estate 5%

The article cites the increasingly global nature of capital markets as creating more business opportunities here, and therefore more work for U.S. lawyers. Quoting Dina Cappuccio of Advocate Legal Search and Consulting in Newark, several law firms have put in requests for corporate and securities lawyers. “’In terms of keeping corporate law hot, I think one of the reasons is there’s a lot of foreign money coming in.”