A report earlier this year by Research Economist Joseph Von Nessen for the Moore School of Business showed that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects employment for lawyers to increase 1.1% over the next decade. Meanwhile, total employment from paralegals will rise almost 2% annually for the next ten years. Von Nessen’s report, which focused mainly on South Carolina, shows that from 2010 to 2012 U.S. employment overall had also been ticking up at a similar pace.

The role that lawyers will play in the recovery remains to be seen, but the average rate of pay for a lawyer is significantly higher than the average worker. According to information from the Social Security Administration, the average U.S. worker hauled in $42,498.21 a year in 2012. Meanwhile, BLS data shows lawyers made an average of $130,880.

Further, taking into account the 1,023,020 Americans that work in the legal profession in some capacity, including some lower paying positions, average wages are still $98,570, double the average worker. This includes; lawyers, judicial law clerks, administrative law judges, adjudicators and hearing officers, legal support workers and others.

Each of these jobs has a “direct impact,” “indirect impact,” and “induced effect,” Von Nessen’s report reads. The direct impact includes wages, benefits, the construction and remodeling of office space, computer equipment, and other overhead and administrative costs. The indirect impacts focus on “inter-industry linkages.”

For example, a law firm in the process of expanding a may need to purchase new computer parts in order to support their growing infrastructure.

“In this situation, local computer hardware suppliers would see an increase in demand, which would require them to purchase additional supplies from their vendors and to potentially hire additional employees if the increase in demand were large enough,” the report states. “The vendors of the computer hardware suppliers would then see an increase in demand and have to purchase additional inputs as well, and so on.”

Lastly, there are induced effects, which would include an increase in wages for computer hardware vendors, who have an increased demand as a result of, for example, expanding law offices.

“Part of this income will then be spent locally on, for example, food, entertainment, or housing,” the report states. “These industries will then also see an increase in demand for their goods and services, which will lead to higher income levels of some of their employees, part of which will also be spent locally.”

In South Carolina alone, there is a $2.7 billion economic impact from the legal profession, accounting for direct, indirect and induced effects. “It is difficult to infer multi-state impacts from our study simply because the economic multipliers are very different among different states,” he said, although he said it is possible to replicate his study on a national scale.

Dan Sabbatino is an award winning journalist whose accolades include a New York Press Association award for a series of articles he wrote dealing with a small upstate town’s battle over the implications of letting a “big-box” retailer locate within its borders. He has worked as a reporter and editor since 2007 primarily covering state and local politics for a number of Capital Region publications, including The Legislative Gazette.