The Above The Law Blog.. suggests we read the following article published on the Texas Lawyer website on 6 May…….
The article is entitled…
Calculus of the Damned: How Are Associates Marked for Extinction? By writers David Bario and Drew Combs who start their article by saying….
The associate layoff memo has developed certain conventions. First, there’s the blanket assurance that the firm is fundamentally healthy. Then comes the announcement itself, regretfully noting the need to "realign capacity." Finally, most firms emphasize that the departures were not performance-based; in fact, the lawyers that just got canned were "valued colleagues."
But associates rarely forget that they are merely cogs in a larger profit machine, or that the product of their daily grind is continually reviewed–both for quantity and quality–by the owners of the machine. More than 3,000 lawyers have been laid off from large firms so far in 2009, according to legal blogs tracking the carnage, and even the greenest greenhorn knows that someone in HR isn’t pull ing names randomly out of a hat.
So how are associates marked for extinction? Who lives, who dies, and why?
Read the full article here http://www.law.com/jsp/tx/PubArticleTX.jsp?id=1202430500622&slreturn=1
