Sen. Lamar Alexander will participate Friday in a Small Business Roundtable with the Bristol Chamber of Commerce. The topic of the chat will be, not surprisingly, jobs. The Republican Party elder statesman likely knows the eastern section of the state well, having once served as president of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

April was a turnaround month for the nation’s legal industry. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment grew by 1,500 jobs after two straight months of decline.

This good news for the legal sector comes after the industry lost 300 jobs in March and 2,000 in February, the website AmLaw Daily reports. Employment has increased by 1,500 positions compared to one year ago.

Still, with this month’s law school graduations under way, the broader employment outlook for these folks is bleak. See this article in The New Republic, wherein University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos said the jobs picture is far more dismal than most law schools let on to students.

"Nashville the place to go for health IT jobs." That's the headline of a story in Healthcare IT News that looks at the Nashville Technology Council's most recent report on local job openings in the technology field. Maybe the exposure will help attract some talent to the 925 openings.

Turns out it's young companies, not small businesses, that are the economy's greatest job creators. The Curious Capitalist has a brief post, at this link, that explains census data from 1992 to 2005 show that start-ups drive the job effect normally attributed to small companies.

The caveat:

Start-ups haven't been pulling their weight during the most recent economic recovery. The likely reason? This recession wasn't just about slack demand, but also about a massive credit crunch. That particularly hurt young companies, the sort often financed by credit card and home-equity loan. It may also be part of the reason jobs have been so slow to return.

Nashville ranks 11th in the nation when it comes to job creation, according to numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. NewsChannel 5 reports that the numbers — Nashville added 16,300 jobs from January 2010 to January 2011 — are the result of relocations and expansions from companies including Bridgestone, Shoals Technologies Group, Comdata, and the Internal Revenue Service.

But Thursday, Haslam named only two bills that he’s likely to support in any so-called jobs package — tort reform and changes in regulations to encourage insurance businesses to locate in this state. He also pointed out that he already has frozen new state regulations for 45 days while his administration reviews whether they are impeding economic growth. “We will have some legislation … but it will not be a huge, thick jobs packet because I don’t think that’s how jobs are created,” he said. “I think they can be created, though, by looking at the different rules and regulations that are put in place by government that sometimes make it difficult to do business and often times can encourage businesses to go somewhere else besides Tennessee.”