This is another example, I think, of how smaller firms and solos are better positioned to handle the economic downturn.

Bob, I agree that the eventual outcome for law firms will be substantially fewer staff positions than there are today — or at the very least, substantially fewer of the kinds of positions we have now. So many tasks currently done by people within the law firm will soon enough be done by computers or people offshore that firms just won’t need that many bodies on site. As you suggest, my presumption is that the culling now taking place isn’t a systematic re-assigning of tasks lower down the expense chain so much as it is straight short-term expense reduction. But yes, whether done sensibly or otherwise, reduced staff levels are inevitable.

John, you make a good point that firms already have the wherewithal to reduce unnecessary costs, and to better identify the costs they do incur. My preference would be not that firms then turn around and pass these more accurately measured costs directly to the client — a flat amount added to the bill or integrated into the fee itself should recover the costs without annoying the client with every 17-cent disbursement. But anything that introduces more efficiency into a law firm is almost always good.

Bobo, that was me trying to be funny — riffing on the notion that lawyers in law firms treat their non-lawyer staff like second-class citizens. Like pretty much everything else with this post, it didn’t work out so well.

Do golf and country clubs coddle their staff, or do they exploit them? Not being a member of either type of club, I don’t know what you’re referring to.

I take your point that firms appear, at first glance, short-sightedly to be cutting administrative positions simply because eliminating those doesn’t cut to the heart of the self-preservation instinct of the profession, but it strikes me that, on any fair reading of your proposals, at some point the administrative staff is going to have to be culled, and rather drastically at that. It would of course be better if firms were doing that culling in a programmatic fashion, rather than what, again, *appears* to be a panicky one, but if firms are going to need to re-structure along the lines you envision, then they are going to need to be radically down-sized – and, for the reasons you outline among others, unfair as it is, administrative staff are the logical point in the chain to make those cuts.

That said, I do think that legal research is going to be transformed, just as every other aspect of legal practice is. As you note, there are already “gradients” of research tasks, such that less trained or experienced professionals like students and paralegals can carry some of them out. Just as every legal task need not be performed by a lawyer, not every legal research task need be performed by a research lawyer. Over the next several years, that latter category will expand for lawyers of all kinds.

As legal knowledge becomes more widely disseminated and as knowledge management systems become more powerful, the market for legal research will evolve, and the range of research providers — from the most highly trained research lawyer to the mot sophisticated program to the most entry-level person — will stratify accordingly. Research lawyers will of course be able to adjust and evolve too. They’ll become masters of the new knowledge systems, just as adept as they’ve always been at extracting precisely the right information at the right time. But just as some lawyer jobs will disappear as the marketplace reinvents itself, so too will some research lawyer jobs — the challenge to continually upgrade the value provided or be replaced by a less thorough but less expensive option will be the same for both. I would issue the same caution to research lawyers about dismissing Indian legal research that I issue to all other lawyers about underestimating what offshore lawyers can do and will be called upon to do in future.

No question, research lawyers are fully lawyers too. But precisely in that respect, they’re going to face the same sorts of challenges over the next several years that their colleagues will.

I have watched with some dismay while members of the profession and various pundits have promoted the idea that legal research is is something which can be relegated to a student, paralegal or someone who has no background in the laws of the particular jurisdiction. Firms think that research lawyers aren’t as ambitious as their other associates, they pay their research lawyers less than other associates, they often don’t offer them equity partnerships, they write down research hours before other time and generally treat research as an afterthought. Perhaps these attitudes arise from the fact that most lawyers don’t like and do not know how to do good, cost effective research – they don’t like the library (actual or virtual), have the patience and skill to determine, review and analyze the relevant law or the imagination to take the logical leaps that are sometimes required to formulate interesting and winning arguments.

There are research “tasks” which students or paralegals can perform but I would love it if someone will let me know the next time a complex piece of litigation or appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada concludes on the back of research conducted by an Indian lawyer or paralegal. And my answer to to that senior lawyer – go tell it to Bertha Wilson.

Peggy

You’re right, firms (correctly) perceive it in their best interests to keep news of lawyer layoffs away from potential recruits. And if they can manage it in dribs and drabs — a few here, a few next week, a bunch more later that month — then more power to them. But when you cuts dozens of non-lawyer staffers at once, that’s a red flag — the marketplace suddenly turns a very keen eye to the rest of your operation, and the hyper-sensitive denizens of ATL put you on close watch. That’s a major risk, and it’s an unwise firm that runs it.

Do you really think that those firms are not also pushing lawyers out the door? Sure, they may not have announced attorney layoffs, but they must be pushing people out the door, “performance review” style.

Big law firms live on attrition. Anyone can compare the number of new associates big law firms hire each year to the number of partners made each year and see the disconnect.

Frankly, there is little difference between performance review style attrition and layoffs. Law firms will keep the most talented and let the others go. Call it whatever you like.

Law students and law school recruiter remember layoffs. That is very true here in Boston. So firms are playing the game of announcing staff layoffs and not lawyer layoffs.