Legal Week Magazine is reporting that UK Magic Circle firm may need to shed jobs soon.
Jeremy Hodges wrote for Legal Week yesterday
Lovells to Cut up to 94 Jobs
Lovells has launched a redundancy consultation that could see up to 94 London staff lose their jobs.
The monthlong consultation, which kicked off Monday, includes 18 fee earners and six professional support lawyers.
The remaining cuts come from the firm’s support staff, with 43 business support and 27 secretaries facing the ax.
The layoffs cover the majority of the firm’s practice areas, although no fee earners will lose their jobs in the dispute resolution, business restructuring and insolvency, intellectual property, media and technology or pensions practices. Trainees will not be affected.
Managing partner David Harris said: "Whilst overall performance levels across the firm have so far been reasonably good considering the economic environment, the continued uncertainty means that we need to take additional measures to manage our capacity levels and overall cost base."
http://www.law.com/jsp/law/international/LawArticleIntl.jsp?id=1202428117621
As pointed out by Law 21 last week – the majority of jobs going will be fielded by support staff rather than the lawyers.
We are trying to imagine how some of these bigger firms will operate with smaller IT, Business Development & Knowledge staff. Lawyers are already expected to bill 25 hours a day.. we presume they’ll be expected to be billing 28 hours a day to make up for lost revenue. What happens when IT issues don’t get fixed immediately, information enquiries take longer and general administration tasks come back to them as there aren’t enough secretaries to manage them all.
And as for new business & client development issues
It’s going to get increasingly complicated
