A little ray of sunshine is peaking through the dark clouds of law school graduates’ employment opportunities!

Employment prospects for law-school graduates are less bleak than in past years, according to new data, but the job market is also showing few signs of improvement.

Law schools reported that 57% of class of 2013 graduates landed long-term, full-time jobs for which passage of the bar exam was a prerequisite, according to figures published by the American Bar Association on Wednesday.

That is a slight increase over 2012, when 56.2% of students in that year’s class were employed in those types of jobs.

Other indicators were less hopeful. The percentage of class of 2013 graduates reported as unemployed and seeking work grew to 11.2% from 10.6%. The class of 2011 percentage was 9%.

For the past several years, law-school graduates have entered a legal jobs market that has been relatively slow to recover from the financial crisis. Finding full-time work as a lawyer remains a challenge for new graduates, who are often saddled with hefty student loans. Adding to recent graduates’ employment problems: a bumper crop of young lawyers that entered the market ahead of them.

The association’s data covers graduates of ABA-approved law schools as of Feb. 15—about nine months after spring 2013 graduation.

The percentage of students taking jobs at law firms of any size nudged up a bit to 39.6% of total graduates from 39.3%. The number of students who took jobs at large law firms with 500 or more lawyers grew more substantially, increasing to 3,989 positions in 2013 from 3,643 in 2012, the ABA said.

The employment numbers held more or less steady despite a record number of law students entering the job market last year. At 46,776, the class of 2013 was about 400 students larger than the 2012 class.

And according to figures released in February by the National Association for Law Placement, a nonprofit group that tracks legal employment, the job-offer rate for those lucky enough to have landed a summer job at a law firm in 2013 is nearly as high as it was before the financial crisis.

The flow of graduates is expected to slow considerably in the next few years.