Crowell & Moring Asks Staff To Voluntarily Lay Themselves Off

It’s been a while since a firm asked people to voluntarily fire themselves. Maybe with the economy getting better it’s time to dust that strategy off?
Apparently, that is what Crowell & Moring is hoping for. The firm just asked its staff to voluntarily help them get down to a 4 to 1 attorney to staff ratio:

Our goal remains to handle this necessary reduction in a humane and generous way. Accordingly, effective today, we are offering a voluntary opportunity for our support services employees to elect to resign from the firm in exchange for payment of six months of each employee’s annual salary. We are hopeful that this opportunity may be of interest to a number of our secretaries and will bring the firm closer to achieving its goal of an average lawyer to support services ratio of 4 to 1 across our offices. This voluntary package will be available through October 23. At the end of that period, we will reassess our staffing levels and determine whether involuntary reductions are necessary.

Six months severance is a nice package, especially for staff who don’t typically receive as much severance pay as attorneys. If you assume that the firm will not be offering six months to people that are “involuntarily” laid off after October 23rd, the package could be a pretty powerful motivator.
Of course, if there are still no jobs in six months, then does it really matter? If you are a rock star secretary maybe you should just roll the dice and try to hang on.
Tough decisions abound during a recession. Good luck, Crowell & Moring staff.
Read the full internal memo after the jump.


CROWELL & MORING — MEMO — VOLUNTARY STAFF LAYOFFS
Good Morning.
As you know, the Firm has taken many steps over the course of the year to meet the challenges of a very difficult economy. The downturn has created significant hardships for our clients, who in turn have raised their already high expectations of us to serve them not only in a high quality and efficient way, but in an even more cost-effective manner. We have responded in a number of important ways, ranging from reducing attorney compensation where there has been a slow down due to the recession, cutting internal expenses, deferring capital investment and re-negotiating supply contracts. These efforts are on-going.
In addition to cost reduction, we have focused on the more fundamental issue of how we serve clients and how we need to position the firm to offer competitive services in the future. We took into account the evolving skill set of our staff and attorneys, as well as substantial investments in technology and other resources that have helped us improve our client service. We have learned that we lag significantly behind our peer firms in the relative size of our support service staff, i.e., the ratio of our secretaries to lawyers.
As you saw last year and early this year, other law firms have dealt with this through large-scale layoffs of staff. We resisted that approach, and instead tried hard to look at our whole firm, and take as focused and modest approach as we could. We also have resisted any effort to apply these ratios in a mechanical or rigid way to our team. But, after long and thoughtful consideration, we have determined that we need to reduce the number of our support services staff to a level that is, at least on average, closer to the levels of our peer firms.
Our goal remains to handle this necessary reduction in a humane and generous way. Accordingly, effective today, we are offering a voluntary opportunity for our support services employees to elect to resign from the firm in exchange for payment of six months of each employee’s annual salary. We are hopeful that this opportunity may be of interest to a number of our secretaries and will bring the firm closer to achieving its goal of an average lawyer to support services ratio of 4 to 1 across our offices. This voluntary package will be available through October 23. At the end of that period, we will reassess our staffing levels and determine whether involuntary reductions are necessary. We are hopeful that we will not need to move to involuntary reductions, but we may well need to if too few employees elect to participate in the voluntary program.
[Redacted] and other members of our Human Resources team, will be in touch soon to provide you additional details about this voluntary program. She will also host a series of town hall meetings in our offices in Washington, California and New York for our entire support services team to answer questions, explain options, and talk further about how we will move forward t ogether. I ask for your patience as we move through what promises to be a very difficult time. We will do our best to communicate with you as clearly and openly as we can.
Thank you.
Kent
Kent A. Gardiner, Esq.
Crowell & Moring LLP
Earlier: Pillsbury: Let’s Try This Whole ‘Voluntary Departure’ Thing One More Time

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