Big Changes on The Legal Scene: Layoffs and Outsourcing

Incisive Media, the owner of American Lawyer Magazine and Law.com announced more layoffs last week. This comes after the layoffs announced in April of this year (see the American Lawyer layoff memo below from ALM CEO Bill Pollak below).

Folks,Several weeks ago, I wrote to you about our business results for the first quarter of 2008 and shared some of the challenges we face as a result of the credit squeeze and other market factors. I also described our intention to tighten our belts and reduce costs. With no change in sight on the economic horizon, the senior management team and I have spent the past few weeks examining our business options. Our goal was to find solutions that would lower expenses without compromising quality, and which would allow us to continue to invest in and meet our long term business goals. In particular, we all strongly agree on the need to continue investing in our Web infrastructure, while expanding ALM’s ability to generate and publish content online.

We looked at each business with these questions in mind: Are we getting the right return on our investment? Do we need to keep doing this work? Can we do this work another way? We believe that while we are primarily doing the right work in the right way, there are changes we need to make immediately to respond to economic conditions.

Some of these changes involve revising the timing or scope of planned initiatives. Others, however, are staff related and go beyond simply delaying the filling of open jobs. In total, we have decided to eliminate forty-two current positions across ALM and Incisive’s US operations. These staff reductions are distributed across businesses, locations and job levels and all the employees involved have already been notified.

The business changes we will be making are also broad in scope. These include scaling back plans to grow Real Estate Media’s Florida publication intoa monthly magazine; closing down the Operations Department of Incisive’s Norwalk, CT office; and shifting Law Firm, Inc. from a print magazine to a digital product.

Another change in business strategy — and the one that will have the greatest impact on staff — is our decision to restructure ALM’s Event Division and reassign management responsibility for many of our existing SRI conferences to Insight in Canada, Incisive’s Events group in London and ALM’s Legal Publishing Division. A number of SRI’s financial events will be eliminated.

Accepting and working through change is never easy, and changes that affect our colleagues and friends can be particularly painful. We did not make these decisions lightly. But we know that our future success depends on our ability to align ourselves with our markets and clients, and to ensure we have the resources we need to develop and grow our brands. The changes announced today will not only help us during the current economic turbulence, but will make us stronger in the future.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to drop me a note at
[Redacted].

Bill

This memo concerns me because ALM does not appear to see a brightening horizon coming to the legal field anytime soon. This is very dire news indeed.

A report I read in the Wall Street Journal this week really concerned me as well. This report started that up to 35,000 legal jobs will have moved offshore by 2010–and 79,000 will be offshore by 2015. We are talking about people writing legal briefs and doing patents in India. This is pretty scary stuff to a lot of lawyers.

What this means, essentially, is that a lot of the work American attorneys are doing at the moment is moving overseas. A lot of the work junior attorneys do at the moment can easily be done by people in other countries making a lot less money.

Is the Versatility of a Law Degree Just a Myth?

How easy is it to use your law degree to secure a position in an alternate field? Ever wondered just how versatile your law degree will be? Steven Seckler, managing director of BCG Attorney Search, notes that a law degree might not be as flexible as one might hope in Is the Versatility of a Law Degree Just a Myth?, a National Law Journal article.

Date Night

This topic has been covered many times, but it bears repeating. Marketing is key, and you need to get started early. I say “get started early” not because, as a first-year associate, you really have much to market. I remember sitting in these marketing meetings that my first firm forced the associates to attend and thinking, how do I market my “practice”? At that point, my “practice” consisted of document review, and, strangely, I didn’t view this talent as very marketable. Naturally, it wasn’t.

So if you technically have little to market, why should you get started early? Well, because “marketing” is really less daunting than it sounds. You don’t have to start scheduling dinners with the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Not yet, anyway. In the early years, marketing can be as simple as forcing yourself to eat lunch away from your desk. Invite your law school friends to join you for lunch. These law school chums may very well advance to a General Counsel position with a company whose business you would like to acquire. Also, you can simply get involved in your community. What interests you? Art? Dogs? Well, then maybe you should get involved at your local museum or humane society. Attend their functions. Meet people. There are always a wealth of business people and lawyers who share your interests and, also, view such events as networking opportunities.

It doesn’t so much matter what you do, but you need to step away from the desk and put yourself out there. As my wise partner mentor told me, he would work to target a particular client and, in the process, meet other people that he wasn’t directly targeting who would later give him business. Marketing, he said, is like dating. It is hard to say exactly how you should go about meeting people, but the one thing that doesn’t work is staying at home.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Best wishes for a very happy Thanksgiving from all of the recruiters at BCG Attorney Search. Even in challenging economic times, we all have so much for which to be grateful.

Enjoy the holiday!

Online Job Boards Help Job Seekers

Try as we might, recruiters cannot help everyone. There are many unemployed professionals who are looking for their next position. The Wall Street Journal recently featured an article about online job boards, For the Jobless, Web Sites Offer More Options. Online job boards can definitely help job-seekers find their right match!

BCG’s parent company, EmploymentScape, has a job board custom-tailored for the needs of attorney job hunters: LawCrossing, the largest legal job portal in the United States. I have been a long-time LawCrossing subscriber - for many more years than I have been employed by this company - and definitely think that it is a phenomenal site for legal positions. I always recommend it to my job-searching friends. Check it out at www.lawcrossing.com.

Boutique Firms Better Positioned?

Are firms with lower overhead, cheaper billing rates and less associate leverage better equipped to weather the current downturn? That is the premise of an article in today’s NLJ. The article quotes Jose Astigarraga, chairman of a litigation boutique in Miami who says that the difference between boutiques and big law firms is basically the difference between driving a Lincoln Towncar and a Ferrari.

“When you’re in the Lincoln Towncar [a big law firm] and you go over a bump in the road, you don’t really feel it that much,” he said. “In turn, boutiques are the Ferrari. When you hit a bump, you really feel it. But you can also turn on a dime, which you can’t do in the Towncar.”

I’m not sure that the analogy is a perfect one. The lawyers in the “Towncars” are certainly feeling the bumps right now. But it is true that smaller firms can be more nimble and can adapt more quickly than large bureaucratic firms.

Tips for Holiday Networking

There are many networking opportunities during the holiday season! You need to take advantage of these opportunities.

Laura Hill, founder of Careers in Motion and career coach extraordinaire, has put together a quick list of tips for holiday networking:

‘Tis the season to be merry, and even though we may not be feeling as cheerful as usual, it’s still the best time of year to build your professional network. If you’re in a job search, take advantage of this time to build momentum going into the New Year. If you’re not conducting a job search, this is the perfect time to further existing connections and make new ones before you need them.

Here are a few tips for holiday networking which I hope you will find useful.

1. Have your answer to “What do you do?” ready at all times - this is your elevator pitch. Provide your function (human resources, chemical engineering), context (your company name, industry or sub-specialty) and something unique or memorable about what you do. Modify your pitch for the situation and practice it out loud beforehand.
2. If you’re in a job search, tell everyone - and I mean everyone - your dentist, hairstylist, accountant, relatives, and neighbors. Give them your elevator pitch and include “I’m interested in companies such as ABC, XYZ, and DEF.” They may have another client who works at one of your targets!
3. Contact former colleagues and old friends: “How’s your schedule for catching a drink to toast the holidays?” or “With things a little slower due to the holidays, I thought this might be a good time to catch up over lunch.”
4. A holiday greeting card or e-mail letter is a great way to keep your name top-of-mind with your networking contacts. Include recruiters you know who work in your field and your professional network.
5. Arrive on time and stay late at a function to allow ample time to meet as many people as possible. Briefly greet and make plans to follow up with people you already know so you can focus on meeting new people.
6. Volunteer: not-for-profit organizations need more helping hands during the holidays. It’s a great way to meet people outside your usual network and it will lift your spirits.

A light at the end of the (litigation) tunnel?

I’ve been taking stock of the current market in Texas and we are finally seeing a strong trend towards litigation work. After wide-sweeping tort reform in 2003, litigation attorneys have been in much less demand state-wide. Last week, we visited with firms in Dallas, and uniformly across the board the firms were telling us that their litigation practice groups were extremely busy. This is something we have not heard in years.

While it’s easy to focus on lay-offs, we’ve seen what amounts to great news for litigation attorneys in recent weeks. The National Law Journal predicts an onslaught of lawsuits on ballot initiatives on issues like Gay Marriage. They also recently reported on an increase in construction litigation related to failed real estate projects.

Fulbright & Jaworski recently released their 2008 Litigation Trends Survey predicting a litigation and regulatory work spike in 2008. According to Sheri Qualters of the National Law Journal:

Companies’ worries about lawsuits varied according to the company’s size, region and whether the firm is public or private.

Smaller companies, for example, indicated more concern about securities, insurance and real estate litigation than middle-market companies or companies with at least a billion dollars in revenue. Private companies worry more about contract, labor and personal injury lawsuits than public companies.

Lawsuit fears also vary across the United States: California companies have qualms about employment cases; Northeastern companies worry about environmental cases; and Southern companies expressed concerned about class actions and products liability lawsuits.

Litigators, rev your engines.

Financial Due Dilligence for Partners

Lateral partner candidates are starting to ask more questions before accepting an offer from a competing firm. According to Law.com:

Reed Smith partner Jack Nelson said that a couple of years ago, interviewees asked for a description of the capital requirements and a summary of the firm’s borrowing positions, including term debt. Now, candidates want to know more about leases, personal liability and the firm’s plans for capital and debt, “something that you rarely heard a couple of years ago,” he said. And they want to know that information earlier, long before an offer has been made, Nelson said. Today’s laterals seem to be using the information to weed firms out of consideration, rather than to make a final decision on a particular firm.

If you think about it, it is pretty astonishing that partners have historically made moves without doing more financial due diligence. In my mind, it is simply a case of “the shoemaker’s children having no shoes”. Simply put, an M&A lawyer would never allow a client to merge with another company without carefully reviewing that company’s financial obligations, balance sheet, cash flow statement, etc. So why would a law firm partner move a large book of business to another firm without first learning everything he or she could about the economics of the new entity?

Take Your Career to Dubai, Hong Kong and Abroad

At BCG Attorney Search we have been doing placements in Hong Kong, China, Dubai and other markets since the year 2000. We were one of the first placement companies in the United States to start doing aggressive placement in Asia and Europe. It is extremely important that you give yourself the most options when you are looking for a job. A search for a job in all corners of the world will help you tremendously. Look everywhere you possibly can for a job.

This is the kind of stuff that can happen when you give yourself options.

The growth in the Asia and Middle Eastern markets has been staggering. For example, a recent statistic I read from the National Law Journal stated that there was a 48 percent increase in the number of lawyers practicing in these regions from the 250 largest American law firms between 2007 and 2008. This is a massive increase. The market of Abu Dhabi grew the most–an astonishing 144 percent.

Getting a job overseas is never all that easy. The issue, however, is that you need to make an effort to do so. If things are slowing down in your current job, or you are facing a potential layoff, giving yourself an extra option is always a good idea. Plus, it is always a lot of fun living in another country.