Holland & Knight, Layoffs

Nationwide Layoff Watch: Holland & Knight

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You know how a lot of buildings omit the “13th floor” out of superstition? I’ve noticed that really superstitious people think about the 14th floor as the danger zone, because counting is not a particularly hard thing to do.

I bring this up because tomorrow is Friday the 13th, and I’m just wondering if the invisible hand of market collapse decided that Thursday the 12th was a “better day” for everybody to get fired.

In any every, as many commenters have already noticed, there appear to be massive layoffs at Holland & Knight today. Some of our sources report that as many as 200 attorneys and staffers could be out of a job by the end of the day. Other sources place that number closer to 300.

Holland & Knight has declined to offer us a statement at this time.

Update: According to the WSJ Law Blog, the firm fired 70 lawyers and 173 staff. From a statement: “Today, we began restructuring our operations to better meet the needs of our clients and to take steps to fully respond to the adverse effects of the current economic downturn.”

After the jump, we have additional details from tipsters.


Holland & Knight is big in Florida. And we know Florida has been hit hard by the collapse in the housing market. But how many staffers can Holland really afford to cut back on? Last May, the firm axed 70 staffers. Once again, we’re not sure how many redundancies are left.

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But at least one tipster expected Holland & Knight to get around to layoffs sooner or later.

Work has been very, very slow since [in 2008]. At first it was for management reasons, then the economy. Under prior management, H&K unwisely bought up a bunch of diverse and relatively small practices for several years. This ended up being something of a hedge against the Wall Street mess, but they certainly have fat to trim.

We understand that first- and second-year attorneys have been let go in this round of layoffs.

Good luck to all of the people losing jobs today.

Earlier: Nationwide Layoff Watch: More South Florida Suffering

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Prior ATL coverage of law firm layoffs

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