I'm so suprised that there wasn't a properly thought out redundancy selection process! How many of you were dismissed? It doesn't appear to me that there is very much employee protection at all when compared to the UK (based on the tiny amount I know of US labour laws). Us Brits do have something to thank the EU for it seems…

Best of luck with your job search – how long have you been looking now?

Ex-Latham (from CA) here. Everything you mention sounds about right, except that my office spared nearly all first years and instead annihilated the second years and any recent transfers (regardless of seniority). I wholeheartedly agree that a lot of talent was lost during the layoffs, and that Latham's disingenuous policy regarding pro bono was retarded. What a bunch of snakes.

So I have a summer offer from Latham. I'd be an idiot to even consider it, right?

It’s funny that you mention how they seemed to be pleased with themselves that they were the “market leader” as it relates to severance packages. My ex-boyfriend is a partner in one of Latham’s offices, and I remember speaking to him after the mass lay-offs. After expressing my shock and horror of reading about it on ATL (since he obviously didn’t tell me about it before-hand), the first thing he cited was how generous the severance packages were. They all drank the Kool-Aid on that one to make themselves feel better! A source of consolation for you though perhaps when you see terms coined like “Lathamed” that will dog them for years as well as their fall from grace in the Vault rankings. Shame on them.

Yes and no. These jobs are temp jobs. You will get [screwed] over at some point. Six months. Six years. It’s all the same thing.

Hi JL,
Your blog has been featured in a National Newspaper of South Korea ( http://news.donga.com/fbin/output?f=f_s&n=20091… ) and led me to this blog. Why don't you consider Korean, Japanese, Chinese law firms? I'm sure you will be happy there.

“what roll we played on them at the time when the layoff decisions were made”

roll? Like toilet roll?

Please don't take this the wrong way, but I honestly believe that getting laid off from Latham will be the best thing to ever happen to you in the long run. You will now be forced to think about how you really want to spend the rest of your working life.

Leaving my big law firm was by far the best move I've ever made. Life outside of big law can be very rewarding and fun. Don't buy into the big law myth. It's a worrible god-awful way to waste one's life.

I wish you the best of luck.

My condolences on you being “let go”. Maybe you can get unemployment benefits. I don’t think there’s enough legal work to justify the thousands of lawyers that graduated from school every year not to mention the ones that are already out there working.
The economy sucks and that’s the start of it. People see these law shows on television and automatically run out to try to become lawyers. It looks sexy on t.v. but when the student loan coupons become due and the work isn’t around it doesn’t look pretty.

Dont' forget that Latham did this to 68 people in 1991. Latham does this all the time.

The painful thing (that you may face, as I did) are the people in 2019 who will wonder what you did wrong to wind up at a bunch of undistinguished firms after Latham. (I wound up ten years after my layoff as one of the best credentialed partners at a very large, unprestigious insurance defense firm; I left that firm to go in-house, where I am now happy.)

“Dont' forget that Latham did this to 68 people in 1991. Latham does this all the time.”

Huh? Unless you count the 18 intervening years…

I was pretty unimpressed with Latham during my time there. I lateraled in a few years ago, and I was amazed at the amount of kool-aid that many people there drink.

I agree with the prior poster when I say that one day you may look back at the layoff and, while you may never feel happy about it, you may realize that this opened up a career and a life very different from what you imagined but far more fulfilling. I'm now a lawyer with the Federal Government, and I couldn't be happier. While I miss my Latham-sized paycheck, it could not buy me the things I get to enjoy now. Good luck with your search.

9+ months after the chopping block at Latham and still no job prospects. Guess this Top 5 $140,000 legal education isn't worth very much right now. Screw Latham. It was a bad time to transfer offices.

Funny – I was sharing your blog with, well some other law firm partners. I am not in big-Law so to speak, but of big-law ($800 an hour.) You guys are not yet “legal talent” – you may have the potential to become a legal talent, though probably not in a firm like this. Indeed we discussed with bemusement the central staffing system, something that treats junior associate time essentially as a fungible commodity, with no distinction to be made between one lawyer and another. In the legal “real world” lawyers are well paid for broad skill sets gained by experience. (My skill set is a mixture of high tech knowledge, international law, intellectual property law and antitrust – admittedly I'm an “odd fish.”) Those skill sets have a lot to do with what they were before they were lawyers – hence the retention of the IP associates and the former investment bankers. However, a lot of graduates of top Ivy League undergraduate schools and law schools were pre-law before they were law; their undergraduate degrees are things like political science, English, etc. all things that do not add special skill sets that make them distinctive as junior lawyers.

This for many big-law associates their best bet is to try over 3-9 years to pick up a set of skills that makes them non-fungible, or a book of business. The trouble is that the way in which most big law associates, especially corporate associates, are managed militates against getting such experience. First they are staffed without any real regard to experience, as simple “billing fodder” on huge matters. One famous lawyer I know described due diligence as “sending your most junior lawyers and accountants into a company, with instructions not to 'piss people off,' where they supposedly will find things that the company management has cunningly concealed for years – some hope,” to which he added “and anyway they are all effectively hired by banks really, not their clients, and no-one in the banks would ever recommend a law-firm again that found something in due diligence that derailed a deal.”

If the big-law firms do teach associates anything – in corporate law they seem to focus on developing micro-competence. This is best described as expertise in one small area of legal practice, that can justify a high billing rate, while effectively de-skilling the associate outside that area. Thus I remember interviewing in an earlier legal recession an 8th year associate who had been counseled out at a very very prestigious firm. It turned out for the last 6 years he had done nothing but Hart-Scott-Rodino Second Requests – he was the “Second Request King.” The trouble is, only one or two firms in the world would deal with so many second requests that they could justify paying someone that pay-level for just that skill.

Frankly, I think you may be lucky. The leverage model followed by big-law is irreparably broken. I have been a GC as well as a partner, and speaking to GC friends it is apparent that corporate clients are no longer willing to pay for the training of junior associates and are incensed at the “piling on” of timekeepers on legal matters that do not justify so much billing, so many pointless legal research assignments, 3-6 lawyers attending routine conference calls, etc. The trend is much more towards demanding more skill and experience – and the big-law model of discarding associates before they can gain it is becoming a serious weakness.

If you want to be a lawyer (and a lot of Ivy League graduates drifted into law) see how you can make yourself special, how you can gain a skill set that means that you will be in demand. In a way the first step has been forced on you – you have been pushed out of what seems like a caricature of a big law firm. I still cannot get over the work allocation system.

Thanks for your willingness to share your insights about your experience in the law firm and the the difficulties in making a transition from BigLaw. I have been a witness to this for the last 25 years when, as the Public Interest Adviser at Harvard Law School, I watched that school and many other “selective” law schools around the country funnel as high as 95% of their graduates to positions in BigLaw – brutally contrary to what many hoped for when they entered law school. For over two decades now I have worked with dissatisfied lawyers in BigLaw many of whom believed they were trapped and had no options. What has been missing in legal education has been preparing students to practice in, and making them aware of the existence and the benefits of being in, law firms of 5 or less lawyers (where two-thirds of all practicing lawyers in this country practice.) While this runs the risk of being self-promoting, I would like to make you aware of a program I presented for the New York State Bar Association's Committee on Lawyers in Transition entitled “Think Small: Learning About and Finding Positions in Small Law Firms”. You can find a summary of this program and a link to the webcast by going to http://www.lawyersatisfactionblog.com and scrolling down to the post entitled “Now Accessible Online..” It is in this world of small law firm practice that many have found positions consistent with their professional goals and personal values.

I write this as an Ivy League graduate in Biglaw who once saw himself as confident yet humble when in fact I had an overabundance of the former and too little of the latter. Speaking from experience, there are few influences more effective at providing character balance than life slapping you around a bit.

This experience, so long as you do not go the other direction and allow it to decimate your confidence, may prove to be one of the best things to happen to you as a person…and interview subject.

I agree with you that graduates of top Ivy League undergraduate schools and law schools were pre-law before they were law. In my experience of 7 years as a lawyer, they were so useless once things begin to get complicated for real. One thing I don't understand is those pre-law and then real law associates are so proud of not being able to understand computer coding or calculus that they won't bother to learn that. However, all these never justify the unacceptable behavior of ELF(Is it Latham?).

Don't forget this classic article about “life” at Latham when times were good. It was terrible then, too.

http://wpwy.org/blog/?p=580

Go to that rancid shithole ONLY if it is your only offer.

I worked at your firm and was let go, though i was a little more senior. I can tell you the staffing politics doesn't end once you're in a department. In mine, the staffing attorney clearly had favorites whom he/she inappropriately hung out with outside of the office. Despite the fact that my reviews were generally top notch, i was suddenly told I had performance issues (though after the fact, at least 2 partners have told me in so many words my work was fine).

Latham is rancid

I'm very sorry you got Lathamed man.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=…

You all should sue this TTT. Bunch of reckless pricks stomping out careers just to make a buck. VERY few firms pulled a Latham yet all are dealing with the same economy.

Why didn’t Latham defer half your class and cancel one summer class? Seems like they didn’t even try to avoid mass first year layoffs even though they must know how devastating they are to a career.

profits per partner is what, $2M a year at Latham? how much money do these assholes really need that they couldn't refrain from destroying a bunch of careers?

I bet I can tell you why they cared about being market leaders in severance but not about the careers of the hundreds of people they Lathamed.

The severance would be in the news immediately and they thought by paying a couple extra months they'd soften the blow. They figured no one would bother to follow up with the Lathamed associates five to ten years later to document the damage to their careers. Why bother trying to minimize the damage that no one would know about? They don't seem to actually care. I think Latham failed to understand the power of the internet to get this information out there.

They cared about the severance and not the damage to the careers of the associates because they figured the severance would make the news and the futures of those Lathamed would not.

I went biglaw to small law and I hate it. Sh*ttier cases, less intelligent supervisors, and none of the biglaw perks.

Please, let's not glamorize small law. IMHO it's just a poorly paying cr*ppier version of biglaw.

I, too, went from Biglaw to small law. Yes, the cases were worse, the supervisors were much dumber, and there were few perks. But I learned how to be a lawyer at small law. I took hundreds of depositions and argued motions. At Biglaw, I photocopied, document reviewed, and wrote memos — things that paralegals do. Biglaw is just a scam to screw rich clients. Biglaw wastes so much time on useless busy work that you can spend seven years there without taking a single deposition or arguing a single motion.

You learn how to think and write briefs well by writing memos and briefs for biglaw because you're dealing with complex issues and being supervised by bright people. You're also seeing very bright lawyers in action at hearings and trials. This is why most people go bigaw 3-4 years to midlaw. You get the best training that way. If you get Lathamed 4 months in like Jobless Lawyer you're completely screwed. Small law will mold you into a horrible lawyer because you're working with dumber people constantly. The good boutiques most likely will not be an option because they don't take new associates because they don't want to train.

I see you drank the Kool-Aid. Biglaw makes simple things complex, and the supervisors are not overly bright — they are just especially anal. There is no good training at Biglaw. You call typing and retyping interrogatories good training? Biglaw lawyers don't argue brilliantly at hearings and trials — they just pound the table and waste as much time as possible. Biglaw is a fat, pompous joke — an overweight diabetic with narcisstic personality disorder. All the best quality law in the country is practiced in midlaw, where you cannot assign 12 associates to a single case. Note the rush of Biglaw attorneys all forming new midlaw firms.

So many mentions of all of you being so “bright” and “smart” and “intelligent”. Actually, all you bumbling idiots running the markets with the bankers drove this Country into the ground. Maybe we start allowing Gardeners and “regular” folk to start making more decisions – as it appears “common sense” escapes most of you. Don't get me started on your social ineptitude either..you're really just glorified “memorizers”