Last Year in Layoffs

While I was off sampling eggnog from all across the land, Law Shucks was busy crunching numbers.
To no one’s surprise, it turns out that 2009 was a very difficult year for those trying to hang onto Biglaw jobs:

2009 will go down as the worst year ever for law-firm layoffs. More people were laid off by more firms than had been reported for all previous years combined.

So much for Biglaw being the safe, fallback option.
Numbers after the jump.


When you put it all together, the layoff numbers for 2009 are staggering:

Cutting right to the chase: we tracked 12,196 people laid off by major firms in 2009, of which 4,633 were lawyers and 7,563 were staff. Make sure to check the tracker for the methodology — and we’re aware that layoffs are severely underreported, a trend that increased as the year went on.

Seriously, that’s 12,000 reported layoffs. Who knows how many more souls were thrown to the recessionary wolves because of “performance.”
The numbers also show that staff took a much harder hit than associates and other attorneys. I wonder to what extent firms were just more willing to announce staff cuts than attorney layoffs, but it’s clear that staff drew the short end of a straw full of suck.
There is reason to be hopeful that 2010 will be much better than 2009. First of all, one would think that most of the people that can be let go, have been let go. But most importantly, the pace of layoffs slowed significantly in the latter half of 2009:

This year’s story was largely written by the end of March, when 73% of the year’s total layoffs had happened, as we noted in our mid-year review. The pace has slowed even further since. Eighty-eight percent had been done by mid-year, leaving “just” 1,473 layoffs for the last six months of the year — four fewer than in a single week in March.

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Click on the link below for more stats (and charts and graphs) from Law Shucks.
The Year in Law Firm Layoffs – 2009 [Law Shucks]

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