Nationwide Layoff Watch: World's Largest Law Firm Culls Its Herd

This megafirm is trimming its headcount. How bad is the damage?

onOctober 19, 2015 at 1:00 PMOctober 19, 2015 at 7:33 PM

October hasn’t been a very good month for lawyers, in that law firm layoffs have been running rampant. Things like this tend to happen during the fourth quarter because cutting and slashing human expenses is sure to make your firm look a lot more profitable when all is said and done.

Today’s layoff news comes to us from Dentons, the largest law firm in the world. While the firm was amassing a horde of lawyers and gobbling up competitor firms, it apparently forgot about its bottom line. Heads are now rolling at the firm, but how many?

According to tipsters, the megafirm recently announced that it would be laying off a number of positions across several offices among its administrative, secretarial, records, and facilities staff. Here’s a statement we received from Dentons regarding the layoffs:

Sponsored

Navigating Financial Success by Avoiding Common Pitfalls and Maximizing Firm Performance

In this CLE-eligible webinar, we’ll explore the most common accounting pitfalls and how to avoid them for your firm.

From Pilot and Above The Law

Following our July US merger, we comprehensively explored how to better deploy our combined talent as efficiently as possible. This included the creation of new roles to meet our now enhanced size and profile in the US. After careful review, however, we concluded that there remained a very small number of administrative positions that will not carry forward. We confidentially notified the few impacted individuals and each have been provided with a severance package along with a range of outplacement services. Each person deserves our thanks and respect during this difficult time.

According to a confidential memo (available on the next page), Dentons claims that these layoffs “comprise a very small fraction of [its] total US workforce.” For a firm that employs approximately 6,500 lawyers across the globe, with several thousand of those lawyers employed in America, that “small fraction” could amount to an untold number of staff.

Do you have any additional details on what’s going on at Dentons? Please drop us a line. We wish all of the legal professionals who may be affected at Dentons the best of luck while they seek new job opportunities in the legal industry and beyond.

If your firm or organization is reducing the ranks of its lawyers or staff, whether through open layoffs, stealth layoffs, or voluntary buyouts, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Our vast network of tipsters is part of what makes Above the Law thrive — we’ll never ignore you. You can email us or text us (646-820-8477). Thank you very much!