Count On The Lawyers…

As has been discussed here many times before, the reason you don’t see more news about the Big 4 and next tier layoffs is because no one except me wants to talk about it.

Duh, fm, you say.

But the contention I have made that in many cases the firms lay off or terminate under the guise of “poor performance” when that claim is often trumped up, papered over, and completely self-serving to the firms who have the inarguable upper hand, seems to be also true of law firms.

They shame you into not wanting to talk about it.

Well, they’re sadly mistaken in that assumption, in some cases.

😉

I should not be surprised and neither should you be.

Partnerships are like that.

Fraternal, secretive, opaque, arrogant, self-serving, short-term oriented, etc.

She should sue. A woman, a pregnancy, a minority… Sounds like a triple whammy.

Fired Paul Hastings Associate Talks to Law Blog

The BigLaw story of the week has without a doubt been about a mass email sent by an associate at Paul Hastings in San Francisco who was fired on April 30 — six days after having a miscarriage — allegedly for poor work performance. (See earlier LB post here, the ATL post that started it all here.)

We caught up with the former associate, Shinyung Oh (University of Chicago ’93, Georgetown Law ’98), a commercial litigation lawyer, who says she sent the now-infamous email because she didn’t want other associates who may be laid off because of downsizing by the firm – but told it is because of their performance – to doubt their own abilities.

“I want them to feel like they’re not completely alone and not to worry about their own performance when it’s the firm doing something for economic reasons” and because of a “desire to increase partner profits,” she said.

Oh said two other associates who were widely believed to have been fired recently from her office had “left the firm with their tails under their legs,” and that she didn’t “want to walk out under the guise that I’d done something wrong.”