The headline of this morning’s The Wall Street Journal, always a cheerful read these days, has given your Unemployed Lawyer pause. Stocks are now down 50% from their peak 16 months ago. It’s very hard to take in and it reduces me to a kind of stunned pity.

I imagine it will only wreak havoc at already havoc-ridden law firms and am certain that it’s likely to create even more unemployed lawyers. It will certainly drill even deeper the pit of misery in which we all are floundering. Think it through like a trial plan.

Start with the corner-office partners. If you have a corner office, you have likely spent most of your life working to get it. You’ve worked day and night for twenty, thirty, forty years to support your family and to provide for your retirement. In many firms, retirement is inevitable; your partnership agreement brings your earnings to a halt when you reach a certain age. You have planned or are planning for that, so you can live comfortably when it happens. You have carefully nurtured your 401(k) as a pillar of support for that plan. Now that pillar has been whacked in half and all your plans are in free-fall. You may not have enough money to retire. Seriously.

That’s a horrible place to be after working all your life. It’s a betrayal of everything you believed: work hard and you will succeed. Now, if you’re lucky, the best thing you can do is to keep working to make up the money gap. It’s a big gap. You’re worth only half what you were worth last year. You might have been better off keeping the money under your mattress.

So you need to keep your earnings up in a time when clients are few and hesitant about payment. You can’t take less because you have that 50% to make up and a relatively short time to do it in. You don’t have another thirty or forty years. You start thinking very hard about shrinking firm earnings and PPP. Let’s face it: you need the money.

You then have to think about where to get it. You can try to get it from clients, but that would be a circular attempt, since profits are down because they aren’t paying or playing in the first place. Further, you don’t have any control over your clients. You can only control yourself and yours.

That means you have to look around your own house. Your own house is the one place you have control, but it’s also the place you live. And you live there with all those others you have invited in: other lawyers, secretaries, PR people, paralegals, couriers, accountants, everybody at the firm, sheltering under your roof. You invited them in because you wanted and/or needed them. They’ve lived alongside you and worked to further your goals. You don’t personally know all of them, but you know that you are still personally responsible for them. You are at the top of the firm that issues everybody’s checks.

You feel trapped and you know that you have been betrayed again. You are going to be forced to do something extremely painful. You know that you can’t let the firm go down and you know that you can’t let yourself and your family go down. Even in your own house you really have no control when disaster makes push come to shove.

After all your work, circumstances have reduced you to a survival position. It’s you or them. There’s really no consideration necessary. Any business owner would do the same thing: save the business and save yourself. Here come the layoffs. Here come more unemployed lawyers.

But it still hurts. It hurts on a general level because you can’t help feeling that you’ve failed your business and your employees. You know that you’re condemning them to a terrible fate. Most of them will remain jobless for a very long time to come. You know that your decision will destroy some lives, but you cannot help but make it.

And then there are the absences that pinch your heart every day. The one associate who lit up with happiness every time she saw you, just because she truly liked you and truly liked her work. The IT guy who came to your office and kidded with you about your level of technical competence. The girl from the mailroom who seemed to float in and out of your office, never disturbing you. The brash, entertaining PR manager who could talk about branding in his sleep. They’re all gone; they’re all suffering; they’re probably blaming you; and your house will never feel the same.

This is the stuff that grief is made of. You have to inflict and endure all this pain and it only begins to solve the problem that set everything in motion. You’re still not back where you were. The firm is still not back where it was. There is lots of whispering in the halls and even more behind closed office doors. People are afraid to look at you. You can’t even feel at home in your own house. You're a Stranger in a Strange Land [2].

I’ve presented my trial plan and what I think I could prove. Now I’ll tell you that the only outcome I foresee is further sorrow, all around.

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[1] Television Rencontre, 1971, directed by Marcel Ophuls.

[2] Robert Heinlein, Putnam Publishing Group, 1961.