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.
Click on the link below for more stats (and charts and graphs) from Law Shucks.
The Year in Law Firm Layoffs – 2009 [Law Shucks]
First?
In other news, the Dow is up.
Third on
Mission Accomplished!
How many lawyers work in “BigLaw” ? (ie, AmLaw 100) 4,633 sounds like a lot, but how does it compare to the BigLaw attorney population as a whole?
The ship be sinking…
Gee, this post is an hour old and there are less than 10 comments. I think we can take this as proof that the only people who read this crap blog (and possibly believe its endless bs) are law students bored in class. Maybe the editors, who themselves have little more legal experience than the average law student, should take heed and take another week off.
An excellent year for severance. I was happy to help so many firms achieve reductions in head count. Looking forward to more in 2010!
5,
There are approximately 130,000 lawyers in firms listed in the NLJ 250 (http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202425894490). This doesn’t compare directly to the vault rankings, but even a weighted comparison would put no more than maybe 75,000 lawyers in the vault 100.
According to the Lawshucks summary linked above, the vast majority of the layoffs they tracked came out of Vault 100 firms.
So, 4633 is actually quite a bit comparatively. If we considered it the whole NLJ it’s still about 1%, if we consider the much smaller vault number it’s more like 5%+ of the layers in vault 100 firms.
But again, That 130,000 in the NLJ 250 is just over 10% of all lawyers, so with these layoffs we’re talking about 5% of a group that is itself only about 10% of all total lawyers.
SHAFEEF
Great story. Way to start the new year off with a bang.
CHECK YOU OBESE WALRUS
The worst year of my life is finally over.
Has it occurred to anyone that 2010 could easily be worse than 2009?
2010 has the ring of Armageddon
Nice job, 9
-5
5,9-
I think it’s more accurate to assume that the average v100 firm has approximately 400-500 associates (we probably don’t want to look at partners and staff) as most have around 700 total lawyers. Some are much larger (Jones Day) and others are much smaller, but I think that’s a pretty fair mean number. That would give us a total number of 50,000 and put the layoff percentage right around 4.6% (not exact, but definitely fair).
It’s also important to consider the fact that most firms conducted 100% of their layoffs as performance reviews. For example, my firm (V20) laid off approximately 20% of its associates in this fashion.
Under these two assumptions, I think it would be more than fair to put the total number of layoffs well above ten percent for 2009.
Got to agree with 17 on this. Stealth layoffs were all over the place, not to mention deferred and revoked start dates, “sabbaticals”, etc.