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When large law firms crumble
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With the evaporation of Heller Ehrman and Thelen, lawyers and staff at other major law firms are getting worried.
This real life lawyer dilemma was dramatized in the final episodes of the show Boston Legal, where the firm, nearly broke, sold out the a Chinese buyer. As the owner of a small firm, I have often wondered how the big firm lawyers do it. They work more hours, have less autonomy, and even partners are not secure in their employment.
At any large institution there are always good players and not so good players. In a series of books on hiring and retaining good employees and weeding out bad ones, Bradford Smart discusses what it mean to be an "A" player, and now anything less is a drain.
The major problem for large firms during a severe recession is that they have so many balls in the air that they are trying to juggle, they have no time to really analyze who is dragging them down. Therefore, the entire institution becomes unstable and collapses from within.
According to lawjobs.com, the two major law firms mentioned above still have about 200 former lawyers who are currently unemployed. That is about 15 percent from one firm, and 30 percent from the other. These are staggering numbers which far exceed the national unemployment rate. These are also, presumably, top grade lawyers.
So this holiday season lawyers at large firms have every right to be worried.
The one solace that all lawyers have is that, legally speaking, even the cleanup of the cleanup needs legal cleaning up. These things are cyclical. It happened after the dot com bust. It's happening now.
This too shall pass.
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