“And another hundred people just got off of the train.” That’s a line from Stephen Sondheim’s Company and it seems somehow appropriate as we consider this year’s NLJ 250: The biggest law firms in America are the train in this scenario, and they continued to off-load attorneys at a blazing clip in 2009.
Revised 2010 figures show that NLJ 250 firms employed 2,868 fewer lawyers than in 2009. Expand that view to 2008, and the headcount drain is a rounding error away from 10,000 attorneys. In the 34 years The National Law Journal has been surveying large firms to gather headcount numbers, there have never been multiyear declines of this magnitude.
