Want to see who's doing more hiring or less? We put together this chart based on new data from Chambers Associate, which surveyed dozens of law firms about their summer and first-year associates.

The ranks of summer associates were larger in 2012 than in 2011 at more than half the firms surveyed. But at the same time, firms were more likely than not to have smaller first-year classes in 2012 compared with 2011. The Chambers data on summer associates go back to 2008 and the data on first-year associates to 2009. We looked at...