As the Fed steps in to save the financial world with a bridge to nowhere AIG, we pause to reflect on the results from Monday's ATL / Lateral Link survey, which asked whether the woes of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch would hurt your career.

We received 830 responses, and quite a few of them looked like this one:

It's the end of the world.

Overall, 42% of practicing attorneys said the demise of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch would hurt their careers, which is way up from the 27% who said the same about Bear Stearns back in March. Law students are even more concerned, with 50% of 3Ls, 68% of 2Ls, and 63% of 1Ls feeling fearful.

While a third of New Yorkers were afraid about the impact of Bear Stearns back in March, the more recent collapses have frightened 55% of the Big Apple's Big Law respondents. In fact, fear has risen dramatically in every market:

Responses by market: Are you afraid that the recent collapse will hurt your career?

Additional discussion, including selected comments from survey respondents, after the jump.

Lawyer layoffs: they're not just an American phenomenon. Last month, for example, DLA Piper laid off lawyers in London. Here's more layoff news from that fair city, from TheLawyer.com:

More than half of the UK lawyers at US investment bank Bear Stearns have been axed since the ­collapsed bank was taken over by JPMorgan.

Out of 23 lawyers in ­London's legal department, only 10 were offered new positions by JPMorgan, with nine accepting.

Fortunately, Bear Stearns refugees are landing new jobs without too much apparent difficulty. The Lawyer reports that ex-Bear Stearns attorneys have landed at Bingham McCutchen and Brown Rudnick, in New York and London, respectively.

JPMorgan cuts Bear's headcount [The Lawyer]

That's what our colleagues over at Dealbreaker are reporting. But we just checked in with them, and they don't know whether it was an in-house lawyer at JP Morgan Chase or someone at Wachtell Lipton, JPMorgan's outside counsel on the deal. If you have more details, please email us.

P.S. If you're not familiar with what's going on here, read this earlier ATL post and this earlier Dealbreaker post, which supply the necessary background.

Update: A source at our former firm reports that "everyone at WLRK who worked on JPM/BS is still very much 'with the firm.'" This is consistent with the chatter in the comments, to the effect that the lawyer in question works in-house at JPMorgan Chase.

People Moves: Anyone Need A Lawyer? [Dealbreaker]

Earlier: Wachtell Lipton: Fallible After All?

Okay, not literally; they're almost-but-not-quite anagrams. But it's certainly the case that economic woes are leading employers to retract job offers, left and right.

So rescission is no longer just an equitable remedy; it's a hot new trend in the world of employment. Over the weekend, this report appeared in the New York Times:

Thousands of people are losing their jobs on Wall Street — some before their first day of work.

They polished résumés; they sweated interviews; they landed dream jobs. But now a small group of college and business school students are discovering that their careers at Bear Stearns ended before they began. JPMorgan Chase, which bought the beleaguered investment bank last month, rescinded many of their job offers.

Yashoda Khandkar, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, is among 250 Bear hires who now find themselves unemployed in one of the worst financial job markets in years.

“The worst part about the entire situation is that it’s a really hard market for us to look for other jobs,” Ms. Khandkar said. “We probably can’t get as good of jobs as we would have had.”

Compared to the rescinded offers on Wall Street, what we're seeing in law firm land looks like small potatoes. This makes sense. If finance offers richer rewards than Biglaw during good times, Biglaw should offer reduced risk during bad.

But could it be the case that we don't know the full extent of rescinded job offers in the legal world? From a tipster:

Why aren’t you doing anything about law firms rescinding offers to 2L summer associates?

[Firm X] apparently rescinded 15-20 offers in Chicago. [Firm Y] rescinded 15 offers in their DC office. Apparently Charlotte is getting hammered...

Please look into this, and if it's true, hammer these firms and protect the rest of us!

We are following up with the firms mentioned by our tipster, and if we can confirm the rumors, we will report them in these pages. In the meantime, if you have definite knowledge of a firm rescinding offers of summer or full-time employment -- e.g., your own offer was rescinded -- please email us (subject line: "Rescinded Job Offer"). We will investigate and report back. Thanks.

Update: A commenter points out this helpful article on the NALP website, Rescinded Offers: Mitigating the Effects of Rescinded Offers ("adapted from an article published in the August 2001 NALP Bulletin").

Bear Stearns’s New Hires Become Job Seekers [New York Times]
Law Firms Curtail Associate Programs As Economy Slows [Wall Street Journal]

With JPMorgan quintupling its offer for Bear Stearns earlier this morning, it seems like an appropriate time to discuss last week's ATL / Lateral Link survey, which asked you whether you were afraid the recent Bear Stearns collapse would hurt your career.

Twenty-seven percent of you said yes. New Yorkers were the most concerned, with roughly one third of respondents opining that the Bear Stearns collapse would hurt their careers. A quarter of respondents in Los Angeles and Atlanta and a fifth of respondents in Washington, DC said the same. In Boston and Philadelphia, seventeen percent of respondents were afraid the Bear Stearns event would hurt their careers, while in the Bay Area, the number fell to an unlucky thirteen percent. Respondents in Chicago, Dallas, and Houston were generally unafraid.

Concern was most pronounced among the newest lawyers and those closest to partnership. Twenty-eight percent of respondents in the Class of 2007, and thirty percent of respondents in the Classes of 2000 and 2001 were afraid that the Bear Stearns collapse would hurt their careers. A whopping fifty percent of respondents who graduated before 2000 shared this concern. Law students are also more likely to be frightened, with 43% of law students responding that they were afraid that the Bear Stearns event will hurt their careers.

Additional discussion, including selected comments from survey respondents, after the jump.

As we can see from the comments, you're already all over this NYT story. We linked to it in Morning Docket, but here's a little more. Andrew Ross Sorkin writes:

JPMorgan and Bear were prompted to renegotiate after shareholders began threatening to block the deal and it emerged that several “mistakes” were included in the original, hastily written contract, according to people involved in the talks.

One sentence was “inadvertently included,” according to a person briefed on the talks, which requires JPMorgan to guarantee Bear’s trades even if shareholders voted down the deal. That provision could allow Bear’s shareholders to seek a higher bid while still forcing JPMorgan to honor its guarantee, these people said.

When the error was discovered, James Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, who was described by one participant as “apoplectic,” began calling his lawyers at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to seek a way to have the sentence modified, these people said. Finger pointing over the mistakes in the contracts began as bankers blamed the lawyers and vice versa.

We don't have much to add to Ted Frank's excellent observations. Here's an open thread for anti-Wachtell schadenfreude.

(They're big boys -- and they send their clients big bills. So the WLRK folks can take a little snark and ribbing from the ATL commentariat.)

Update (11:40 AM): Actually, did Wachtell make a mistake? If so, what exactly was their error? Over at Dealbreaker, our colleague John Carney wonders: "How do you 'inadvertently include' a provision everyone is talking about?" (Gavel bang: commenter.)

How Do You Inadvertently Include A Provision Everyone Is Talking About? [Dealbreaker]
The dangers of doing an M&A agreement over a weekend [Overlawyered]
Did Mistakes in the JPM-Bear Contract Help Lead to Renegotiation? [WSJ Law Blog]
JPMorgan in Negotiations to Raise Bear Stearns Bid [New York Times]

* "Are we headed for another Great Depression?" [McClatchy]

* Quelle surprise: Bear Stearns shareholder lawsuit (filed in S.D.N.Y. by Coughlin Stoia). [Bloomberg; WSJ Law Blog (PDF of complaint)]

* Speaking of Bear Stearns, here are some law firms losing out on BSC business. [WSJ Law Blog]

* Tenth Circuit reverses convictions of former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio. [AP]

* Harvard Law School will pay the 3L tuition of future students who agree to work for nonprofit organizations or government for five years following graduation. [New York Times via Tax Prof Blog; Harvard Law School (news release)]

* Settlement in Paul McCartney-Heather Mills divorce (more on this later). [Legal Week]

* SCOTUS to hear Second Amendment / D.C. gun control case today (more on this later too). [New York Times; Reuters]