CAREER COUNSELOR'S CORNER
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Are You About to Be Laid Off? [Jamie Barnes] Layoffs are often sudden, sometimes unexpected, and always unpleasant -- noticing the signs that you may be on the chopping block at your firm can help ensure that you are prepared for the worst.
You need to keep the unpleasant possibility
Association. Next came the scrutiny of law
challenge to such prevailing Protestant-domi-
of lay-offs in the back of your mind, for it has
firms by M.B.A. consultants in the early 1980s,
nated orthodoxy. Attorneys advertising in the
become a very relevant possibility whether
followed by the multiple crashes of dot.com
Yellow Pages destroyed whatever façade the
you are a partner or an associate. In fact, the
firms in the late 1990s and early 21st Century.
law had built over the previous centuries as
larger your firm and the more practice areas
a discrete, almost priestly profession that
it offers, the greater the lay-off danger, espe-
Thus, in the final three decades of the 20th
distained mass solicitations. In turn came a
cially if each practice specialty is considered
Century, the law profession saw itself trans-
change in the public’s perception. Lawyers’
its own profit center. We’ll tell you how to spot
formed from an inbred, sleepy, self-regulating
emergence in the Yellow Pages helped create
the signs of pending lay-offs in a moment, but
subculture into an intensely competitive ser-
the impression of law as a service industry
first, a little legal cultural history is in order,
vice business vying both for the highest paying
like any other.
as it will place the specter of law firm lay-offs
clients and for the best cognitive resources
in context for you.
(Law Review and Federal Clerkship graduates
Cultural Change Number Two: The Withering
of the top law schools). These competitive
Scrutiny of M.B.A.’s
Law as a Gentleman’s Club Still in the memories of lawyers now in their
pressures have driven up associate salaries and opened up competition for clients, even at
The use of consultants by law firms can be
discrete white-shoe firms.
partly linked to the effect that the Yellow Pages had democratizing the law and chang-
sixties lives a magical era when big law firms did not lay off attorneys. Instead, their
Cultural Change Number One: ‘Decultured’
ing its public perception. Once you accept
bonuses might be discretely cut, their clients
by the Yellow Pages
that running a law firm is not analogous to
shared or gently expropriated (while accom-
managing a men’s club and is not demonstra-
panied by some seemingly plausible explana-
Yellow Pages advertising, other than listings,
bly different than running any other business,
tion), and their salaries secretly frozen. These
was (and still is) generally avoided by major
hiring business consultants becomes the
middle-aged and older lawyers would be
American national and international law firms.
logical next step.
silently acknowledged as dead wood ‘carried’
However, such advertising has become a boon
by other more productive partners and as-
for small law firms who use the Yellow Pages,
Business professors and consultants quickly
sociates until eventually made ‘of counsel’ or
television and radio to attract small clients in
introduced into imbedded law firm cultures a
given a dinner and gracefully retired. Unless
volume, which had previously been next to im-
revolutionary new form of disciplined econom-
there was moral turpitude involved, a lawyer,
possible due to the legal subculture’s unwrit-
ic and structural analysis. They compared law
with few exceptions, was almost guaranteed
ten prohibitions. Big law firms seldom if ever
firms’ existing organizational structures and
lifetime employment.
solicited business off the street but preferred
financial management practices with modern
and still prefer stable relationships with
business structures and practices. Most law
large, deep-pocketed clients who are wooed
firms were found to be inefficient and operat-
not in a mass retail environment but through
ing economically in counter-intuitive ways.
Sleepy Giants Transformed Changes to this gentlemanly environment
discrete professional associations, referrals
came in the 1970s and have intensified since.
and private clubs. Part of this abhorrence of
In the July/August 1984 issue of the American
The first shock to what once approximated a
advertising can be traced to the influence of
Lawyer, David Maister, then of the Harvard
19th-century-men’s club-atmosphere began
the Protestant Ethic, especially in big, old-line
Business School, produced a landmark article
with the start of Yellow Pages legal services
firms. In this Ethic, calling attention to one’s
on law firms. He created terms such as:
advertising in the 1970s, a move fought vigor-
self in any way was frowned on. The use of
ously but unsuccessfully by the American Bar
the Yellow Pages by lawyers acted as an open
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NIPP (Average partner income) L (Ratio of
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