A few years back, I remember one partner telling me about the pressures at Allen & Overy (A&O) during the tech-crash depression when tensions sparked between the firm’s corporate and banking practice. Though at the time it was viewed as infighting between departments, in retrospect this partner saw it quite differently: “The truth is that everyone was under pressure to perform. Everyone was being squeezed, and when people feel like that, they try to divert attention to someone else and say, ‘look, it’s those bastards that aren’t performing’”.
That observation seems an apt description of some of the comments that have been appearing on legalweek.com that have been strongly critical of support staff at City law firms that are making lawyers redundant. The gist of this criticism is that support staff are of little use, and have, in the words of one poster, “sat around doing nothing the past year” and, in the opinion of another liberal-minded contributor, should be sacked without notice.
