Only Ireland has suffered more job losses within its legal profession than the UK, the director general of the Law Society of Ireland said last week.

Ken Murphy told delegates at a Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) meeting in Brussels that lawyers in both the UK and Ireland had been hit hardest by problems in the property market.

Murphy said that Ireland’s legal profession has been ‘decimated’. He added: ‘Ten per cent of our 8,200 solicitors are out of work. And that doesn’t include the 2009 intake of law graduates, some of whom are never going to find work as lawyers.’

After Ireland, practising solicitors in England and Wales have been worst hit by job losses, he acknowledged, with several thousand understood to have been made redundant.

Murphy said both jurisdictions had been exposed to the ‘biggest bubble in history’, the property market, which has now burst.

‘Bars and law societies in continental Europe, less reliant on property, have been largely untouched by the recession,’ he added.

Murphy said lawyers’ representative bodies in continental Europe do not see their role as helping members survive any downturn. ‘It is seen as a commercial problem for the individual firms affected,’ Murphy said.

The Law Society of Ireland has now appointed a full-time careers adviser to help lawyers find new jobs, including directing solicitors towards opportunities in Australia and Canada where law firms are still recruiting. The Law Society of England and Wales has published a redundancy note on its website advising lawyers on employment rights and job-seeking strategies.

Meanwhile, the late Stanislav Markelov, a Russian lawyer assassinated in January, has been posthumously given the CCBE Human Rights Award 2009. At the time of his death, he was seeking justice for Elza Koungayeva, an 18-year-old Chechen woman kidnapped, raped and strangled by Russian army colonel Yuri Budanov. Budanov obtained early release from prison on 15 January 2009. Four days later, upon leaving a press conference denouncing the release, Markelov was shot in the head and later died.