Alright, we’ve broken them down by quartile, now let’s round them all up together: it’s all the REPORTED layoffs in the 2009 Vault 100 prestige rankings.
Required reading:
For those who see the need to comment on it, and as we’ve said repeatedly before, we can only track layoffs that have been reliably reported. We know there have been many other layoffs both by the firms that have had layoffs reported and those who otherwise appear to have clean hands. But if there’s nothing for us to rely on, there’s nothing for us to put in the tracker.
After the jump, we compare the quartiles to each other and the entire V100 to all the layoffs we track. (Sorry, no Venn diagrams made sense, but we do have a pie chart today!)
Rolling the numbers up, the Vault 100 accounts for 10,098 of the 13,232 total layoffs we track. That’s a combination of two factors: pretty much all of the largest firms (by PPP and lawyers) comprise the list; and we focus on “major” law firms, so there’s some self-selection there.
Attorneys constitute 41.28% of the total layoffs (4,169 of 10,098), which is pretty much right in line with the overall ratio of lawyers to staff (not surprising, considering the V100 constitutes 76.31% of the total layoffs we’ve tracked).
Of the more than 10,000 layoffs at the Vault 100, by far the worst of it was in the V26-50 firms. Those 25 accounted for more than 41% of the total layoffs.
As we’ve reported previously, most of the quartiles held pretty closely to a 40:60 attorney:staff layoff ratio, with the exception of the bottom quartile, where attorneys were closer to 50%.
In our estimation, it’s pretty clear that layoffs have affected reputations, and will hit even harder in next year’s tally (most of the surveying was done before the layoffs really started to hit). The top firms also seem to have tried harder not to lay people off and to keep the layoffs out of the presses.
Of the top 10 firms by layoffs, six have already dropped and two stayed the same. Only two, Allen & Overy and Baker & McKenzie, improved their rankings.
In fact, they all clustered pretty closely together in a band of sort of upper-middle-class mediocrity.
It’s really the massive firms that seem to have reputations based on their ubiquity that embraced layoffs – did they grow too big too fast? The second quartile (plus White & Case and Latham from the top) are replete with massive firms that shed hordes of people this year. Above and below that, the firms tended to be more manageable in terms of size, so were probably closer to being right-sized already.
What do you think? How much worse will the rankings be for these firms next year?
Related posts:
I think this will definitely affect the rankings of these firms next year and may have an effect on recruiting in years to come. But in many cases, these layoffs are symptomatic of larger problems that will affect the firms for years to come. Some of the firms are suffering particularly in this recession. I would expects PPP to be down significantly and would not be surprised if there are more partner defections.