These days, Texas associates, like their peers across the country, anxiously read almost daily news stories about law firm layoffs. What started late last fall in New York as a fate only befalling securitization lawyers has since spread coast-to-coast, sparing almost no practice area.
On Feb. 12 alone — known on some blogs as the “Valentine’s Massacre” — approximately 300 lawyers nationwide lost their jobs. And those are only the publicly announced layoffs. No one knows how many more lawyers have suffered so-called “stealth” layoffs, i.e., reductions-in-force handled secretly or touted as routine shedding of less productive lawyers with no reference to a slowdown in firm business.
