Job Searches, Layoffs, Sonnenschein, Summer Associates, Weirdness

Update: What's Going on at Sonnenschein - CLT?(And a discussion of the Charlotte market in general.)

By  
on

Here’s a bit of follow-up on last week’s post about Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal. We heard from a number of tipsters, and their reports are consistent with the rumors previously reported:
1. Sonnenschein is rescinding offers of summer employment to incoming summer associates in the Charlotte office.
2. Sonnenschein is rescinding offers to full-time associates who were set to start work in the Charlotte office in the fall.
We have not heard from the firm since our initial inquiries last week — despite repeated efforts, including some made yesterday. We are inclined to agree with this commenter:

Their lack of response must mean it’s true. Rescinding offers is about the worst thing a firm can do for its rep. There’s no way they’re going to confirm it if it is true, and they would’ve immediately disputed it if it is false.

Read what our tipsters had to say, after the jump.


From a student at Wake Forest law school:

Both rumors are true. The summers’ and the full-time associates’ offers were rescinded. They were all classmates of mine at Wake Forest.

From another law student in North Carolina:

I can tell you, to a 100% certainty, that the rumors are true: the summer associates and the first year associates both had their offers rescinded. One of my classmates here at the law school whom I speak to almost every day pulled me aside the other day and told me that the firm had rescinded [its offers].

I understand why they had to do it, given the sluggish economy, but their timing is awful — [the rescission victims] lost essentially an entire year of job searching — given that graduation is right around the corner.

Sponsored

From another friend of someone scheduled to start at Sonneschein – Charlotte in the fall:

[My friend] had already bought a house in Charlotte. Sonnenschein did rescind the offer…. The associates that came to Sonnenschein from Kilpatrick Stockton came with guaranteed three year contracts, so I doubt that they are going anywhere.

And the cuts may have gone deeper than incoming summer and first-year associates:

I have good friends who work at the firm and it is definitely struggling. They laid off three associates in the fall, but didn’t do it as transparently as Cadwalader. They just laid off another associate though you’ll still find [that person] on the letterhead, and YES, they rescinded offers to the summer associates they interviewed for this summer. And they rescinded the offers to the two summer associates they gave offers to from last summer.

Talk about class, they did it one month before their graduation! I don’t blame the partners in that office, they are a great collection of attorneys. But Sonnenschein Corporate – aka Chicago – needs to handle this with a little more thought. They didn’t even offer the summers who had full-time offers the option to go to another office…. [T]o me this indicates the firm is having problems across the board.

Could Sonnenschein be guilty of a little duplicity? Writes a tipster:

Sponsored

I saw one of the recently unemployed students in the student lounge looking at this article that came out out only days before the Charlotte layoffs. Sonnenschein reported to Law.com that they would not let anyone go from their Charlotte office because it was “entirely inconsistent” with the firm’s culture…. It seemed quite two-faced to me after the glowing statements that [firm chairman Elliott] Portnoy made about the Firm’s culture. You should definitely check into this!

In that article, by Leigh Jones of the National Law Journal, there’s a nice overview of the troubled Charlotte market:

Commercial mortgage-backed securities work has slowed “considerably,” for Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, said Elliott Portnoy, chairman of the 644-attorney law firm. In April, it opened a Charlotte location with 16 capital markets attorneys. The group came from Atlanta-based Kilpatrick Stockton.

Sonnenschein has “integrated” those attorneys into other practice areas, he said, which includes more traditional real estate work and litigation. Laying off people would be “entirely inconsistent” with the firm’s culture, Portnoy said.

But earlier this year, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft did just that. It let go of 10 capital markets and global finance attorneys from its Charlotte office, which now has 82 attorneys. The New York-based law firm opened its North Carolina office in 1996.

Another firm, Dechert, earlier this month offered reassignments to 13 of its finance and real estate associates, three of them in Charlotte. Dechert opened its Charlotte office in 2004.

Given these grim realities, this account from a job searcher in CLT didn’t surprise us:

Weird things are happening in Charlotte. I’m a recently discharged JAG looking for a litigation job in Charlotte. Of course everyone says “oh, you’ll have no problem finding a job!”, but of course no one wants to put their money where their mouth is. During the course of this job search, I learned from a partner-level contact at a regional firm that his firm has received several letters from students who have had their offers rescinded by large firms. Apparently this is happening only to transactional associates-to-be, and the market is flooded with students.

Law Firms Lured by Charlotte’s Banking Culture Find It’s Cooled Down [National Law Journal]
Earlier: What’s Going On At Sonnenschein?

Topics