It’s September & It Looks As Though It’s Time To Fire People Again

As we guessed the job losses in the UK & US legal industries haven’t gone away, they just took a break in August along with everybody else.

Writing for The American Lawyer? egal Sector Loses 100 Jobs in August Ross Todd notes that while the U.S. economy shed another 216,000 jobs in August, the legal sector lost only 100 jobs during the month, according to statistics released last Friday by the the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He? writes. The numbers are seasonally adjusted. When not seasonally adjusted, the legal sector lost 11,000 jobs — presumably because of the flow of summer associates back to law schools across the country. (See The Employment Situation: August 2009.)

See full story at http://www.law.com/newswire/cache/1202433632546.html

So that’s the sort of good news .. because this week it appears to be kicking off again. In the US the big story has been the fact that even though they’ve had previous rounds of layoffs Kirkland & Ellis are having to layoff individuals from offices around the country.

Above The Law are reporting. Since the firm won?t say, we?ve been trying to cobble together the full extent of Kirkland?s layoffs. We?ve already reported on layoffs in New York, D.C., and San Francisco.

But just before Labor Day weekend, Kirkland got around to making layoffs at its main office in Chicago. We are still gathering numbers, but as of now we know that at least 12 people were let go. Other tipsters suggest that the number is higher.

And in the UK we’ve seen hints on the web that more jobs at Eversheds might be on the line

Here’s the latest from Law Shucks Layoff tracker in the USA

As of September 7, 2009, over 13,353 people have been laid off by major law firms (5,248 lawyers / 8,105 staff) since January 1, 2008. Read about the road to 10,000 in this piece from April 13, when we crossed the milestone.

90 (all lawyers) have been laid off in September.

http://lawshucks.com/layoff-tracker/

The figure to note, we suppose, is 90 lawyers laid off in the first week of September compared to August’s total of 100.