It’s here. It’s happened. Apocalypse Now [1]. While your Unemployed Lawyer was suffering from connectivity problems, the legal world has made great leaps down its path to hell. More notices and more notices. Thirty-three from Mayer Brown. Brown Rudnick cuts 20. Squire Sanders dumps 30. Dewy & LeBoeuf cuts 11 in NYC. Fried Frank cut 15 lawyers from the corporate department and rumor has it that an equal number will fall in litigation. We’re all so accustomed to this sort of news that your Unemployed Lawyer might just make a note of it in the Journal of Sorrows, if some of these these soul-destroying layoffs had not also been made life-destroying for the benefit of certain of the firms involved.

Mayer Brown and Brown Rudnick had the decency and honesty to state that the layoffs were to due to economic conditions. Could it have anything to do with the name "Brown", the Unemployed Lawyer wonders?

Squire Sanders seems to be trying to have its cake and eat it, too. This, to your Unemployed Lawyer, has always seemed a good way to choke. SS went through performance reviews and then announced it was letting 30 lawyers for economic reasons. Can't decide which side you're on?

Dewey & LeBoeuf went the straight review-based firing route to axe 11 from its NYC office. Who can say. Who can say?

But Fried, Frank? How can anyone claim that 15 senior associates are being fired based on performance? Those fifteen people, I repeat, people, work at the same firm for years and years, and suddenly their performance reviews become unsatisfactory en masse? For the past five to seven years nobody at the firm ever noticed that their work was bad? Now the entire partnership has had an epiphany? Your Unemployed Lawyer senses a severe credibility problem.

Layoffs and mass firings are bad enough for the legal community at large and especially bad for those of us on whom the axe falls. All you Management Committees and Policy Committees and corner office partners out there, at least be honest and spare your victims’ reputations. “Who steals my purse steals trash. “’Twas mine, ‘tis his, ‘twill be another’s. But he that filches from me my good name, robs me of that which not enriches him, but makes me poor indeed.”[2] Fried Frank had no right to take the good names of its victims. Let them go for business reasons, meaning you want more PPP or are looking for a merger. But let them go because it’s your fault, not theirs.

Don’t take away their reputations this way. Blot your own reputation with the tinge of avarice and indifference. "This is business, not personal."[3] Do not, do not, portray your sins as their fault. Those whose respect you want and need know the truth already. But that might not be true for some hard-working senior associate sitting across a desk at an interview trying to explain why she was fired for cause.

This is as bad as I have seen. Shame on you who have made this apocalypse.

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[Title] Zoetrope Studios, 1979, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Frederick Forrest, Marlon Brando, Laurence Fishburne, Harrison Ford, Dennis Hopper and many others.
[1] Id. (You don't know how I've been dying to do that! UL.)
[2] Othello, Mercury Productions, 1955, directed by and starring Orson Welles; BHE Films, 1965, directed by Stuart Burge, starring Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith; Castle Rock Entertainment, 1995, directed by Oliver Parker, starring Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh.
[3] The Godfather, Paramount Pictures, 1972, directed by francis Ford Coppola; starring Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Michael Caan, Robert Duvall, and Diane Keaton.