Daily News Pic
More details have come out about the lawyer who was posting flyers for her services as a cleaning lady.
Her name is Alice Lingo and the Daily News got in touch with her:
Just over a year ago, Lingo says she was earning $160,000 a year as a litigator at a white-shoe law firm when she was laid off because of the economic downturn.
She has been on unemployment ever since, despite sending out 308 resume and cover letters, she says.
“From the moment I stopped working till now, I haven’t stopped looking for a job,” said Lingo, who graduated Fordham University School of Law in 2007.
Forgive our snobbery, but when we first read the story, we thought she was going to be yet another of the countless hordes laid off from smaller and mid-sized firms.
Turns out, she really was in BigLaw.
Her firm and a few details we’ve been able to put together (plus her old pic!), after the jump.
First, the question you’ve all been waiting for. Which firm?
Looks like Katten Muchin (or KMZ Rosenman or KMZ or Katten or whatever they’re calling themselves now)
Here’s how we got there:
New York attorney registration returns one “Allison Danielle Lingo,” who was admitted in 2008 and is registered through 2012. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have a current address on file.
Fortunately, though, Avvo hasn’t updated its entry for Ms. Lingo. Her address back in 2008 was 575 Madison.
There are a bunch of small firms in that building between 56th and 57th, and one big one: Katten.
We did a little further digging and can’t get her archived profile, but we did find her in a few publications. Just last year she was co-author on a short memo entitled “Statute of frauds bars claim for recommending investment in Ponzi scheme,” with partner Steven Shiffman. She and Shiffman are also litigation contacts in the firm’s Corporate and Financial Weekly Digest for July 31, 2009.
As if that weren’t enough confirmation – that’s the picture of her from the first article. It’s pretty clearly the same woman.
There’s another unfortunate aspect to this story.
Katten’s only reported layoffs were much earlier than that: 23 lawyers and 46 staff in March 2009, and 21 lawyers in October 2008.
It looks like she was a victim of a stealth layoff. Not only are stealth layoffs (obviously, by their nature) flying under the radar, but they continued for far longer than expected. This is a firm that was one of the first to lay people off – something for which they were seen as prescient, by the way – and ‘fessed up to another round, but continued letting people off after all the hubbub had died down.
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