AbovetheLaw reports that the issues this year for legal jobs is not so much unemployment as UNDERemployment.
To quote ATL: “The year isn’t off to a good start, but it’s the same bad news it’s been for a while. Focus is increasingly turning to the underemployment rate, rather than the unemployment rate. 
It’s the same old denominator problem. Unemployment looks not bad (relatively speaking) at first glance – it was flat at 10.2%. But 661,000 people left the US labor force last month and a similar number of jobs were lost. Had the denominator remained constant, unemployment would have been 10.4%. Overall, 1.7 million Americans left the workforce in the second half of 2009, which was a 1.1% decline, and the workforce as a percentage of total population hit the lowest point since 1985.”
With the instability of the job market still a factor, associates need to take some steps to maintain their current positions while they consider a move to another firm.