What do you do when the general stops being your general? [1] Quite a few bankruptcy associates in New York and Chicago have to be asking themselves that question right now. Although you may not have paid much attention to the news, while hundreds of associates have lost their jobs, several prominent bankruptcy partners at several prominent firms have been playing an intricate game of hopscotch. Over the past few months, several bankruptcy partners, some of them department heads and global department heads, have left their former firms for what your Unemployed Lawyer can only assume are greener pastures (Kramer Levin to Gibson Dunn, Gibson Dunn to Milberg, Mayer Brown to Orrick, Kaye Scholer to Herrick Feinstein, Cadwalader to Greenberg Traurig, DLA Piper to Neal Gerber, and Winston to Proskauer Rose, to name a few).
 

As far as your Unemployed Lawyer can tell, all of the defecting partners left someone behind. From what I can gather, most of the moves in New York were individual moves that left departments more or less intact. I don’t state this as a fact—it is just what I understand based on my readings.

There is a different story in the Chicago offices. The DLA defectors traveled in a group of five, but a few of the group that was there six months ago remained at DLA, either from choice or from lack of choice. Now DLA has just laid off 80 lawyers. I don’t know if any of the bankruptcy group was affected, but I wonder if they felt like prime targets with the global department chair and most of their co-workers off on new adventures. Did DLA view them as a rag-tag group that it might as well cut or did it view them as a foundation for something new? I don’t know. I don’t work there, obviously.

Now comes the news of the Marwil/Thomas/Possinger defection from Winston & Strawn to Proskauer Rose. It’s all over the legal headlines. They’ve been doing this rather frequently and publicly over the past few years. The story begins when they made a surprise move from Katten Rosenman to Jenner & Block, bringing several people (almost their entire department), with them and jumping at least one associate to partner as part of the deal. A few years after that, they left Jenner for Winston & Strawn, leaving behind a few of their former Katten crew, some of whom shortly jumped back to Katten, taking a few Jenner associates along. Those Jenner associates then jumped from Katten to Winston, to work with Marwil and Thomas.

Now Marwil and Thomas are gone again, this time to the Chicago office of Proskauer Rose, bringing the total number of attorneys there up to twelve, the stories say. I’m not an insider, but that seems to leave at least a few Jenner-Katten followers and a few Katten-Jenner followers all alone in a Winston department that seems to have been built entirely around the presence of Marwil and Thomas. There doesn’t seem to be much chance that any of them will become Jenner-Katten-Winston-Proskauer followers or Katten-Jenner-Winston-Proskauer followers unless Proskauer intends the Chicago outpost to become a bankruptcy office. That seems unlikely because, like it or not, although bankruptcy is supposedly “hot” right now, almost all the chapter 11 filings are in Delaware.
 

What does it feel like to be these people? Are they blithe and carefree because they know something that we who read the papers and collect gossip do not? Are they scared to death because their department is crumbling and it might be cheaper to cut it altogether than rebuild it? They can’t help thinking that 700-800 people in the legal profession lost their jobs yesterday. They can’t help thinking what we all think: that the worst is yet to come.

As I have said, I don’t know. It just feels bad to your Unemployed Lawyer. I can’t help wondering how to react in such a situation. You can look for lateral positions, certainly; but those are very hard to come by. You can stay and hope. You can singly or jointly approach management with a proposal to run the department as is. You can ask to move to a different practice area.

Although I am using the Marwil/Thomas move as an example because it has drawn so much attention, there must be hundreds of parallel examples these days. Entire departments get cut. People jump ship in anticipation of cuts. Department sizes are reduced. In any economic situation, another firm can always make a better offer to a key player. Unless you are the key player, it’s not you that gets to decide.

Maybe that’s what I hate about this whole mess: the seeming total lack of self-determination. These days we all seem to be in someone else’s hands.
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[1] See, White Christmas, Paramount Pictures, 1954, directed by Michael Curtiz, starring Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Danny Kay, Vera-Ellen.