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.
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