This Week in Layoffs: Mid-Year Layoff Review

[Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks. Law Shucks has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.]

We’re not doing This Week in Layoffs this week, as it was a triple witching day – end of week, end of month and end of quarter (not to mention holiday weekend). Instead, we’ve put together an extensive mid-year review of law-firm layoffs so far.

All told, 125 major law firms have announced or had confirmed layoffs. The combined total is 10,723 people, 4,015 of which are attorneys and the balance, 6,708, are staff.

After the jump, we go into excruciating detail, complete with charts.

Layoffs ramped up in January, February, and March, then plummeted in the second quarter.

The pace slowed (relatively speaking) in April and May, with more than 1,000 people laid off in each month. In June, layoffs slowed even further, likely the result of the arrival of summer associates and the runup in the stock markets.

Sponsored

This year has been a tale of two quarters. The first quarter was marked by unprecedented layoffs seemingly on a weekly basis, then the second quarter was markedly lower.

February and March combined for almost 60% of the total layoffs this year, 73% with January.

So which firms were laying people off?

Based on 2009 numbers only, the top ten list looks pretty familiar.

The firms are geographically diverse (given the limited universe of BigLaw, which is dominated by US and UK firms).

Sponsored

There are four UK firms (A&O, DLA Piper, Clifford Chance, and Linklaters) and six US firms. Of the US firms, only one is based in New York (White & Case), two are from California (Orrick and Latham), and there is one each from Chicago (Baker & McKenzie), Philadelphia (Morgan Lewis), and Tampa (Holland & Knight).

One thing the firms do have in common, though is size.

Based on the American Lawyer’s Global 100, these are some of the largest law firms in the world by number of lawyers and revenue (data as of October 2008 – see below for analysis based on the more-current, but US-centric, AmLaw 100 and AmLaw 200). By number of lawyers, the firms range from Baker & McKenzie at #1 with 3,626 down to Orrick at #39 with 923 lawyers. Similarly, by total revenue, the firms range from Clifford Chance at #1 with $2,660,500,000 gross to Holland & Knight at #51, with $612,500,000.

Put another way, of the ten largest global law firms by revenue, six are also on the top ten list for number of people laid off. Of the ten largest by total number of lawyers, all but two are among the top ten list for layoffs (only Jones Day and Freshfields, neither of which has had any reported layoffs, don’t make the latter list). Further, six firms meet all three criteria: most revenue, most lawyers, most layoffs.

Sound complicated? The article continues on Law Shucks with lots more charts, plus a Venn diagram!