<p>Sakky, I have to say I don’t quite understand your post #20. Do you mean to say that people who go to work for law firms like Skadden feel entitled and that they think they are immune to or better protected from lay offs than your average Joe? Or that the law firms themselves view themselves (i.e. the partners who own the firm) as somehow better than a lot of other people?</p>
<p>I can tell you, from personal experience, that although the partners at Skadden may think highly of themselves, in general they do not do it to a larger extent than other leaders of corporate america. These law firms are some of the largest private businesses in the country. In past lay off climates, I know people who worked for Lucent who got large “buyouts” to “retire” early. At The Equitable, in its day, this was also done. The package could have been a year or two of salary. In other places, people got salary, plus the use of the office, plus “outplacement” assistance.</p>
<p>The difference now is that it is the worst job climate in 30 years. I was there the last time. Many people are not old enough to remember these things.</p>
<p>Actually, wrong. They’re supposed to be doing something on their sabbatical, whether it’s writing a book, or serving as a visiting scholar somewhere, or a similar academic pursuit.</p>
<p>Now, I grant you that some profs probably do indeed do absolutely nothing during their sabbatical. But they’re not supposed to do that. But, as the article stated, that woman really could do absolutely nothing during her ‘sabbatical’, and it would be “fine by us” according to the Skadden representative. </p>
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<p>So? Just because you work extremely hard does not mean that you’re immune from losing your job, as many an investment banker has recently learned. One Ibanker that I know once told me that the few weeks that he worked ‘only’ 80 hours felt like a vacation…and he just recently lost his job. No opportunity to be paid $80k a year to do nothing with complete layoff immunity. No opportunity to do pro-bono work for a year at a reduced salary. His job is simply gone. As are the jobs of many of his colleagues who worked even harder than he did (if that’s possible). </p>
<p>Or take high-tech. Google is a company infamous for long hours such that the company has built an entire campus of amenities, including dry cleaning and hair-stylist, the goal of which is to keep you onsite working for as long as possible. Google recently underwent its second series of layoffs just this year, with perhaps more to come. Microsoft’s culture was once infamously characterized as offering ‘flex-time’: you can work any 12 hours of the day that you want. Microsoft just cut 5000 jobs, with rumors of more to come. </p>
<p>The point is, lots of people work extremely long hours and then get mercilessly laid off anyway. I don’t see why BIGLAW associates are entitled to be immune. </p>
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<p>Well, I don’t prefer it, as I never want bad things to happen to anybody. But it would certainly be fair. After all, lots of people are losing their jobs in this economy. </p>
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<p>Uh, yes it is. Completely ridiculous. After all, what you seem to be arguing is that just because somebody racks up a lot of debt, they automatically deserve to be immune from layoffs. I would argue that that notion is truly ridiculous. After all, why do law school debts deserve special treatment over any other kind of debt? If I launch a small business using personal loans, and the business fails, the creditors don’t care, I still have to pay back those loans. If I bought a house with a regular mortgage - no subprime, no NINJA, no other shenanigans - and I lose my job because of the poor economy, the bank doesn’t care. I still have to pay the mortgage or else lose the house and have my credit rating ruined. If I enter debt to get my MBA because I want to get a job in finance, and I’m graduating now and I can’t find any jobs in that sector, or even if I did but just recently got laid off, again, the bank doesn’t care, I still have to pay back those loans. Why should lawyers deserve special treatment? </p>
<p>Look, I’m happy that some people have gotten ridiculous deals like being paid $80k for an entire year to do nothing, with complete layoff immunity. Good for her. I think we would all like to have a deal like that. I know I would. But, at the same time, we should all acknowledge that the deal is indeed ridiculous, for the vast vast majority of people could never even dream of working for an employer that would provide a benefit that is comparable in any way. Instead, they work for employers who they know would cold-bloodedly slash their job at any time and for any reason, or for no reason at all. </p>
<p>This reminds me of a guy I know who won a brand new sportscar on a TV gameshow. Was he ecstatic? Of course. But he also realizes that he was just ridiculously lucky. It’s not like he really deserved the car over all of the other people who applied to the gameshow and simply weren’t selected to appear, and he freely acknowledges that he doesn’t really deserve it. But of course he’ll take it, and so would anybody else. </p>
<p>There’s a major difference between obtaining a lucky deal that nobody else gets to have, and then believing that you actually deserve that deal. Let’s call those deals for what they really are: ridiculous.</p>
<p>No, I am not saying that anybody at Skadden - including the woman in question - necessarily feels entitled to the ridiculously cushy benefits that were previously discussed. In fact, I suspect the woman who is the subject of the article would probably agree that the deal she is getting is ridiculous.</p>
<p>What I am saying is that we should acknowledge that the deal is in fact ridiculous, and those that will not - and who would actually argue that she deserves such a deal when almost no other American is receiving no such comparable benefit - are clearly displaying a sense of entitlement. After all, nobody seems to have any sympathy for all of the newly minted MBA’s who joined top investment banks and then got laid off. Nobody seems to care about all of the elite engineers who joined Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, or Google and then got laid off. But lawyers deserve special treatment, right? </p>
<p>Again, I have no problem with people stumbling into a wonderful benefits package that not only pays them well but shields them from layoffs. Great for them! Everybody wants to be lucky. Everybody wants a ridiculously beneficial deal. The problem comes when the argument is made that they deserve that package, when so many others get nothing at all.</p>
<p>I have to disagree. Cherokeejaw listed several other examples of BIGLAW firms bending over backwards to try not to law off their associates. Sure, those other deals don’t involve doing nothing, but in each case, the associates in question get paid a moderate salary - but still far higher than what most Americans will ever get - to do something else for a year in return and not get laid off. They would find that notion to be ridiculous, and rightly so. </p>
<p>This all seems to speak to a general cultural norm within BIGLAW that people in other professions find simply unfathomable. Engineering firms, for example, don’t care. When they run into economic troubles, they just start laying off hordes of people. Microsoft certainly won’t pay you to run off to do some nonprofit work for a year. They’ll just cut you, like they did to 5000 people just recently. Financial firms certainly won’t do that. Look at the rivers of blood on the (Wall) Street. </p>
<p>The only profession that might be analogous is academia, in which I agree that tenured faculty can never be laid off, and yes, some of them do indeed take their sabbatical years to do nothing even though they’re not supposed to do that. But that’s tenured faculty, which is comparable to making partner at a law firm. Untenured junior faculty don’t enjoy immunity from layoffs. They can and do get laid off. {And frankly, I find the academic tenure system to be rather ridiculous as well.}</p>
<p>Now, again, don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating that those perks should be taken away. BIGLAW people have a great thing going. Good for them; they’re making out like bandits. Everybody wants that. Like I said, I too would like to get paid $80k for a year of doing nothing while being layoff-immune. Who wouldn’t? </p>
<p>But that means that it is entirely rational for people to prefer to enter BIGLAW, because they know that it provides a level of layoff-resistance (as opposed to layoff-proof-ness), that is simply unfathomable in other industries. I think we should also agree as to just how much luckier BIGLAW people really are relative to the rest of the country. Relatively speaking, it’s a bountiful gold mine. And of course all of this simply serves to encourage the mercenary, careeristic adverse selection of people interested in BIGLAW. The more protection your industry provides against layoffs, the more people who are interested in avoiding being laid off are encouraged to enter.</p>
<p>Corporate America can be brutal. Running your own business can be painstaking, tremendously time consuming and, in many instances, destined to fail. Working for others as an engineer, teacher, sanitation worker, nanny, farmer, investment banker or attorney can be harsh, requiring long hours, little pay (when calculated on an hour-by-hour basis), and other personal sacrifice. At the end of the day, employment-at-will can be a tough pill to swallow for anyone faced with a job loss for any reason, whether in a good economy or bad. </p>
<p>However, doesn’t every worker facing a layoff feel a sense of entitlement to their job, particularly when they have put in years of their lives and plenty of their sweat? Don’t they feel angry? Doesn’t every worker wish their employers felt more sympathy about their personal situations, their tax and mortgage bills coming due, their children in college and their need to feed their families, heat their homes and pay for gas? If an attorney similarly feels this way, why is this deemed a sense of entitlement in a negative sense?</p>
<p>If attorneys feel a sense of entitlement (and I agree that some attorneys, particularly younger ones, do), I often find it where attorneys feel entitled to the big paycheck without the sacrifices that that paycheck demands, rather than feeling entitled to the jobs where they work or which they have been promised. I think that the latter feeling of entitlement is more universal.</p>
<p>Why is it so terrible that an employer might try to treat their current and future employees better than what the law would otherwise require? How is it such a problem that BIGLAW firms (and, mind you, certainly far from all BIGLAW firms) might go to great lengths to avoid layoffs? Should the fact that many employers have zero sympathy for their workers set the gold standard for how corporate America should operate, and should other employers be judged harshly for exceeding that standard?</p>
<p>My biggest problem with what is going on in the legal industry right now is that young attorneys have been promised jobs and those promises have been sometimes broken and sometimes deferred. That’s not to say that this isn’t happening to other people in other industries, and, of course, it is, but this is the Law School forum so I will confine my discussion to the legal industry. When law students make plans to move to a certain city to begin work at a promised job, find roommates, enter into leases, prepare themselves to repay their student loans (some of which must be repaid as soon as 6 months after law school ends), and otherwise arrange their lives around this promised job, they should have this job when promised. Of course, that’s not to say that these newly minted attorneys might not be fired just a very short time after starting work (the joys of employment-at-will), but they should have the jobs that they were promised when they were promised. Many of these law students turned down other, similarly lucrative, offers of employment during the interviewing and hiring process (and, I might even be tempted to argue that they might have a decent case for detrimental reliance suits against their presumptive employers – that is, if they never want to work for those employers ever after filing suit).</p>
<p>Moreover, I don’t understand why the fact that some BIGLAW firms would try protect their employees in creative ways would be viewed so negatively. There’s nothing out there to guarantee that any attorney taking a sabbatical or whose employment start date would be deferred will then have a job for any length of time after they begin working at the firm for the first time or again. That makes these attorneys no different than anyone else in any other industry in America.</p>
<p>Of course, let’s not forget the large numbers of law firms that have laid off hordes of associates and kicked out partners, that have reduced salaries for new and current attorneys, that have “asked” attorneys to join new practice areas with more work, sometimes asking that they give up seniority (and pay) in doing so, that have terminated their summer associate programs (recently, long after making offers and receiving acceptances of those offers) and that have told new attorneys who had been promised jobs that they are being terminated before they ever begin. </p>
<p>Some BIGLAW firms have come up with extraordinary responses to the crisis at hand that attempt to preserve jobs. Most BIGLAW firms have simply fired people or taken other steps, some of which I’ve listed above. BIGLAW isn’t as universally kind as the Skadden program might have you believe.</p>
<p>I never said that it was a problem for the attorneys to feel the same sense of connection to their jobs as anybody else does. That is not the sense of entitlement that I find troublesome. See below. </p>
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<p>Again, I never said I had a problem that BIGLAW firms may go to great lengths to try to protect their employees from layoffs. Good for them. My problem is that many people on this thread seem to think that lawyers should be entitled to that sort of protection from BIGLAW employers. That is the entitlement problem with which I take great issue. </p>
<p>To give you the analogy: if my friend wins a car on a gameshow, then good for him. We would all like to win free cars on gameshows. The problem comes when people begin to argue that he is actually entitled to win a free car on that gameshow. No, that’s not how it works. Nobody is entitled to win a gameshow. Nobody is entitled to a free car. If you are lucky enough to get it, that’s good for you, but nobody is entitled to it. </p>
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<p>Hey, to that, I will say, welcome to the real world. Yes, I know that you acknowledged that the same occurs in other industries, but it still bears in mind that job offers get pulled all the time. Heck, some companies will fall down between the time they give you the offer and the time you start. I knew a bunch of people who thought they were all set to work at Bear Stearns. Oops. I remember during the tech boom-turned-bust how a bunch of people took job offers at dotcoms that died before they could even start. That’s life. </p>
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<p>Again, what I view negatively is not the act of protecting lawyers from layoffs, but rather the notion that lawyers should be entitled to that protection. I still don’t fundamentally see why lawyers should be fundamentally more deserving of job protection and special treatment in this economy than anybody else. If they get it, then good for them, but they’re not entitled to it.</p>
<p>Well, I certainly live in the real world, as do many practicing lawyers, and I feel strongly that absent a company going out of business between the time a job offer is accepted and the agreed upon starting date (when nothing could be done in any event), to the extent that a company/law firm/employer makes a promise of employment at a certain salary and on a certain date which is accepted, and if the acceptee has relied to his or her detriment on the company/law firm/employer’s revoked promise, it is not only unfair but could lead to a quantum meruit based law suit. </p>
<p>Just to put things in perspective, I put myself through college and law school (as well business school). My student loans were large and looming by the time I took the bar exam the summer after graduation. If my law firm had pushed back my starting date by even a couple of weeks, my very broke self would not have been able to pay even the first installment of my student loans. I hardly think that I am the only one who found or finds themselves in this position.</p>
<p>Later on in my career, while I was still busy paying off student loans (considering that even taking every bonus and almost every spare dollar to pay down my student loans, it still took me seven years to pay them off), I could never have taken advantage of any kind of sabbatical offer, even if I was paid a portion of my salary to do so. It simply wouldn’t have even been an option. I couldn’t have afforded it. My fixed costs (rent, electricity, gas, subway, etc.) plus my monthly student loan payments ate up the vast majority of my take home pay, and I promise you that I was not living large. Again, I hardly think I am the only one who found or finds themselves in this position.</p>
<p>The interesting thing among law firms, and one of the reasons why the law firms laying off attorneys (whether publicly or stealthily) are so discussed in the legal press and legal blogs is that law school career offices and law students have long memories. Many BIGLAW firms compete for the top graduates of the top law schools year after year after year. Most of these top law students will have their choice of job opportunities for their summer and post-graduation employment. When deciding among job offers, one of the things that many of these top law students will consider (and I saw it when I was in law school for certain) is which law firms seemed to remain most loyal to their associates even in extraordinarily difficult times. Attorneys at law firms know this quite well, and likely treat their associates as well as possible (at least in the context of lay offs, salary cuts and similar measures related to the difficult economy) not necessarily for altruistic reasons, but rather to ensure that their actions are remembered favorably during future recruiting efforts.</p>
<p>Moreover, with all due respect, I still don’t see the unique sense of entitlement to their jobs among attorneys that you describe, sakky. I think that attorneys are in no different a position than many others in this economy (except perhaps for the massive student loans that many carry). I’m sure that the tremendous number of out-of-work attorneys collecting unemployment will attest to that. No one wants to get furloughed or laid off, and no one wants promises upon which they have relied to be broken.</p>
<p>Workers should never feel a sense of entitlement. That is why we have unions to protect our rights.<br>
But in our society, we do have an air of entitlement especially from those who are in the upper income brackets. Somehow they cannot view themselves as just another poor working slob who is at the mercy of their boss or stockholders of the company. </p>
<p>Will this downturn in the economy strenthen the Union movement and protect the rights of all workers?? I certainly hope so- but all I’m seeing is that companies are trying to get more givebacks from employees, trying not to honor collective bargaining agreements and trying to weaken the unions.</p>
<p>better get used to it- if you are making $30,000 at walmart or $300,000 at Skadden- we are all in this together. And as a worker, you should have no sense of entitlement to your job as you are at the mercy of the powers that be-- unless we act as a nation to protect the rights of workers. It takes an economic crisis like this for people to realize that they are just a working slob like the next guy- regardless of what your salary or social status is.</p>
<p>I think this employment model at BIGLAW separates it from other industries. During the tech boom, HP, Microsoft, Intel, Sun, Apple competed for top personnel by providing stock options,huge sign on bonuses, amenities (free cafeterias, free drinks, game rooms, free concierge services) etc. But after the tech bubble, there were so many unemployed engineers that surviving companies could cherry pick new employees without offering the expensive perks discontinued during the tech bubble.</p>
<p>Perhaps when this economy recovers demand for legal services won’t match the volume it once has and that BIGLAW will wring free of its “reputation” constraints described in the above post and lawyers will be laid off, fired, offers rescinded without being egregiously compensated. There won’t be such fierce competition in hiring practices when there’s a big glut of experienced unemployed lawyers. BIGLAW’s flawed business model based on years of good times may be changed forever.</p>
<p>Actually, I know for a fact that some Wall Street banks are doing this as well… I think it’s $40K to take the year off (and, yes, do whatever you want) for analysts, not sure for MBAs. So, it is not only BIGLAW doing this.</p>
<p>Sakky, frankly, I am surprised to see you, apparently, take this to heart. It sounds like they ought to have you guys read some Marx in addition to all the Weber they make you put up with in your doctoral program. This is, fundamentally, a class issue. No surprise here.</p>
<p>And, yes, like Sallyawp said, what Skadden and these i-banks (not sure who thought of it first…) are doing is not out of altruistic motives, there is plenty of calculation involved; you don’t want to **** off potential talent, it’ll come back to hurt you once the economy picks up. I wouldn’t get all touchy-feely (or rattled up) just yet. Business is business.</p>
<p>Again, so? I look around and I see all these Class of 2009 MBA’s who thought they had secure jobs who just had their offers rescinded. Not just had their start dates delayed but had their offers completely rescinded, in some cases because the company itself has gone completely bust. What about those guys? Don’t they have loans to pay off? Yet nobody seems to be crying for them. Oh, but when the law students have their start dates threatened, well, all of a sudden, it’s a huge problem. </p>
<p>So, again, I would say, suck it up. A lot of people are hurting out here. I see no reason to believe that lawyers should be entitled to special treatment that others don’t get. If they get it, fine, good for them, but they’re not entitled to it. I have no sympathy for that notion. In fact, I have negative sympathy. </p>
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<p>The air of entitlement has been clearly demonstrated throughout this thread. Numerous posters - including yourself- have declaimed that BIGLAW associates have to work long hours and law students have to take on large student loans, the logical conclusion being that sort of excuse-mongering necessarily entitles them to immunity from the economic problems that the rest of the nation faces. To that, again, I would have to say, suck it up. Lots of people work long hours. Lots of people have large debts. Yet nobody’s coming to rescue them. I don’t see the guys who recently earned their MBA’s and lost jobs at firms like Lehman or Bear Stearns receiving any special treatment just because they too worked long hours and racked up huge student loans. Oh, but when it’s the lawyers that may lose their jobs, well, then that’s different, right? </p>
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<p>Yet I wonder why so many firms in other industries have not seemed to have learned these lessons regarding labor relations and reputational costs that the law firms somehow seemed to have learned. Even Google - which in recent times had become one of the most desirable destinations for engineers and nonengineers alike - has recently started eliminating workers. Those people didn’t receive any opportunity to take a year off or to do some pro-bono work for partial pay. Those people are simply gone. Nor is Google the only one. Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Oracle, HP, Apple, Dell - a veritable list of greatest hits in the tech industry - have all laid people off. It’s rather interesting that none of these firms seem to care so much about whatever damage they may inflict upon their own reputations as desirable workers. What does BIGLAW know that the tech industry doesn’t know?</p>