As we were going through the archives for our look back at our first year, we came across Putting a Price on Layoffs.
In that article from March, we reported on the National Law Journal’s calculation, based on conversations with a number of consultants, of the average amount saved by law firms for each lawyer and staffer they lay off.
How we came up with the headline number, after the jump.
According to the NLJ, the average saving was $250,000 per lawyer laid off, and $100,000 per staffer. Multiply that by the final numbers from the 2009 Year in Law Firm Layoffs and here’s what you get:
4,633 lawyers were laid off in 2009, which means an aggregate save of $1,158,250,000.
7,563 staff were laid off, which would be an aggregate save of $756,300,000.
The grand total is $1,914,550,000 (or just a little less than Latham & Watkins’s gross revenue for 2008).
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Nice savings. Now, let's buckle up and see what the disruption costs are going to be.