Biglaw

Get Ready For THOUSANDS Of Biglaw Layoffs Due To COVID-19

Things are probably going to get pretty bad...

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While salary cuts shore up firms financially, they don’t address the fundamental problem: more lawyers than can be kept busy enough to grow professionally at the required pace. Thus, we should expect layoffs as people return to their offices. We should also anticipate churning of the equity partner ranks and another round of widening of equity partner comp ranges. …

[A]s an order of magnitude, if we repeated the same net 2008-10 contraction percent, and allowed for two new associate classes at smaller numbers than 2008-09, we’d be looking at a total of 20,000 departures—17,000 and 3,000 from the Am Law 100 and second hundred, respectively.

— Hugh A. Simons, formerly a senior partner and executive committee member at The Boston Consulting Group and chief operating officer and policy committee member at Ropes & Gray, offering a sobering analysis of the layoffs to come due to the coronavirus pandemic that’s wreaked havoc upon the legal professional and Biglaw firms in particular.

Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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