Law Shucks, Layoffs

Last Week in Layoffs: 09.21.09

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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.

A piece in Wednesday’s WSJ brought into stark relief the futility of using unemployment data for any sort of analysis, as we futilely do every week. Even the states and the federal government can’t agree on how the numbers should be calculated. Not surprisingly, the assumptions being made are largely influenced by the message the economist wants (or is nudged) to give.

The most visible figures available to evaluate the job market are unemployment rates, which don’t speak well for the stimulus package. The national rate of joblessness last month was 9.7%, up from 8.5% in March, the month after the stimulus act was passed. A week after that number was released, the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers reported that the stimulus had increased employment to a level by “slightly more than 1 million jobs higher than it otherwise would have been.”

That awkward wording says a lot: It reflects the tough job facing any economist who tries to estimate job creation. In every method used, economists are forced to imagine an alternate reality — one built on assumptions that are easily challenged. …

The White House method assumes that things were getting worse and that the stimulus is the sole factor responsible for stopping the bleeding. So economists imagined an alternative reality whereby the present would have been much worse — to the tune of one million more lost jobs.

So with that in mind, unemployment was up again, even as Obama and Bernanke are announcing that the recession, "from a technical perspective," may be over.

Perhaps the slowdown in law-firm layoffs is a leading indicator? The activity in our little corner of the economy, after the jump.

As happened a few times in August, there was a single law firm ruining the party for everyone. This time, it was UK IP firm Marks & Clerk, which had been quiet about redundancies resulting from consolidating some of its offices. Thanks to some Law Shucks tipsters, they fessed up to laying off nine fee-earners and 51 staff.

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Other than that, this really was a relatively quiet week.

Firms are apparently being on their best behavior as they go through the charade of OCI.

Still, the more passive-aggressive expense management goes on. Summer offers are still a disaster, which makes one wonder how firms like Alston & Bird can be doing OCI if they don’t even know what to do with the summers who just finished up.

The Class of 2009 isn’t rolling over to Class of 2010 for the legacy of "most-screwed-over class in recent memory." The deferral-extension train keeps running. So even though the 2009ers got to do "full" summer programs last year, they don’t know when, if ever, they’ll get to start.

Perhaps there’s some comfort that the misery is widespread – or at least schadenfreude – to be found in the Texas Lawyer’s discovery of pay cuts on the state’s top GCs.

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Even with so few layoffs this week, there have already been twice as many firms in September laying people off as in all of August, and almost three times as many individuals have been affected (and the September chart has "gone live" on the Law Shucks Layoff Tracker).

One last piece of advice for those who have been laid off: please don’t turn to prostitution.

The final numbers for the week and month on Law Shucks.

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