It’s been a busy first year here at Law Shucks. Right from the beginning, our plan was to report on stories of interest to the population of big-firm lawyers and alumni.
We started out covering general legal news, but realized pretty quickly that a trend was brewing: layoffs. Above the Law, the WSJ Law Blog, and a few others had been doing a great job of reporting the stories as they came out, but no one was curating and synthesizing them, so it was hard to get a handle on what, exactly, was going on.
In this multi-part series, we trace some of the highlights of a year that started from scratch and ended up with a nomination as one of the ABA Journal’s Blawg 100
After the jump, January 2009 – in which we the first rumblings of the layoff wave appeared.
We should have known from Kirkland’s announcement of layoffs right after the New Year that it would be a busy year on that front. We actually called it on January 7, calling Freeth Cartwright’s layoff “a harbinger of worse things to come.” Boy, were we right. We also wrote about one of the first mainstream-media coverage of the subject. A few weeks later, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times got in on the action.
Another notable layoff-related post from January was “Just Who Gets Laid Off, Anyway?” in which we predicted some rumblings of some of the less-recognized factors that go into firms’ decisions of whom to let go. We also wrote “Firms Trying to Have, Eat Cake,” which was the beginning of our thinking on what ultimately wound up as “The Hypocrisy of Stealth Layoffs,” one of our most-popular posts of all time.
Speaking of getting laid off, we heard of Deidre Dare for the first time in January. Allen & Overy had just found out about her blogging and told her to stop. Then the crazy started coming out. She preemptively said she fight if she were to get fired. And on and on. Just click her name to read about her. You know she’s interesting if she got her own tag. (Come to think of it, she and Harvey Miller might be the only lawyers to have been so honored by us).
One recurring theme for the month was President Obama filling his cabinet posts with BigLaw veterans, a subject we first addressed in December, but had to return to when Greg Craig and others took jobs in the administration. Unfortunately, Craig’s tenure was pretty short. Later in the month, Neal Wolin took the role of “Deputy Counsel to the President for Economic Policy and Deputy Assistant to the President” but that lasted even shorter than Craig’s job. Of course for Wolin, it was a happier ending as he ended up taking a job as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury about two months after he returned to Washington. We also wrote about just how much these people were giving up in immediate compensation to serve in government. Millions, in many cases.
As we mentioned in the December writeup, we quickly learned that sex sells, so we were pretty proud of finding a BigLaw angle to justify posting the amazing “Last Sitting” pictures of Marilyn Monroe and the re-enactments by Lindsey Lohan.
From the pure-schadenfreude file, the piece about Justin Lazard’s arrest for indecent exposure at a playground, which involved him getting tasered, is one of the posts that just keeps chugging along getting search traffic from people apparently interested in the Lazard heir’s fall from grace.
The top posts for January 2009 (all-time pageviews)
- Just Who Gets Laid Off, Anyway?
- Firms Trying to Have, Eat Cake
- Kirkland Rings in New Year with a Bang
- Bay Area Firms Getting Hit
- Cadwalader in Trouble
This would also be the first month in which an episode of “This Week in Layoffs” makes the top 5 (January 30 would be #3), but those are all available on the series’ dedicated page and later on in the year they’d totally dominate the rankings, so we’ll just list the standalone pieces going forward.
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