One may be surprised to learn that BigLaw associates actually like stealth layoffs–especially if they aren’t laid off–for several reasons, most of wich involve the BigLaw associates over-inflated ego and ability to survive in an alternative universe.  First, stealth layoffs allow those who are laid off to suspend reality and pretend it hasn’t really happened.  I know I was laid off, and the partners know I was laid off, but if I can just keep it a secret I can pretend that I wasn’t laid off and come to work like nothing ever happened.  Sometimes this ploy works so well that a laid off attorney sticks around past the time they’re supposed to go–so long in fact that they end up keeping their job permanently and even making partner.  

 For those that aren’t laid off, stealth layoffs provide the opportunity to expose their soon to be former colleagues and tell the world how much they suck.  The BigLaw associate will tell the world that the laid off associate should have been fired long ago, that they only got a severance out of sympathy and that they don’t understand why the firm had them around so long.  The BigLaw associate will have so much information about the quality of the laidoff associate’s work that people will think they are a partner (which is something else BigLaw associates really like).  The stealth layoff also allows the BigLaw associate to assume that everyone who leaves the firm in the next 6 months to a year was asked to leave–even if they leave to do something that pays more and requires less hours of work.   This helps to inflate the  ego of the BigLaw associate because they convince themselves that everyone left because they couldn’t handle the work or perform at the high level required.  This further convinces the Biglaw associate that they are actually going to make partner and someday be rewarded for their work.  (See supra re: living in an alternative universe. )

And lastly, stealth layoffs give biglaw associates an opportunity to engage in their favorite activity of all time: gossiping and complaining about their jobs, especially on the internet (present company included).   It’s a sick combination of schadenfreude, narcissism and masochism.

Let’s face it, I don’t need to list out all my activities and achievements for the year because we all know the truth–I’m fucking awesome. I’m the most fucking awesome associate you have ever seen. I walk on water. I piss excellence. Just having me walk the hallowed halls of this institution makes people want to hire you. My briefs are so profound I’m submitting them for a Nobel Prize in Literature. The deals I draft and negotiate are so ground breaking they deserve to be profiled on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The only reason everyone in the world doesn’t know my name is because I’m holding back out of the spirit of teamwork and cooperation. Which brings me to my other skills. I’m the best fucking leader, motivator and delegator to ever walk the earth. I am so effectively leveraged I earn money in my sleep. And let’s not even get started on my business development skills because that would just be arrogant. But since you want to know, let’s just say that the CEO and GC of every Fortune 500 company has me on speed dial. When there’s bet the business litigation or an earth shattering merger I’m the first name that comes to mind. In a nutshell, you’re lucky I allow you to employ me and pay me so little. But I do it out of respect for the team and for this esteemed institution. Hopefully I w, i will grace you with my presence for another year. You’re welcome.

I know all of you guys are pretty scared right now about your jobs but let’s not forget that we are BigLaw associates because we like to blow money big time. It’s funny because in light of the market and all the waves of lay offs, you people should be saving saving saving. But, almost as if in a willful self-destruction, you guys are spending spending spending. Is it to make yourselves feel better about having a crappy job that will eventually kick you to the curb in some shape or another (either by lay off or degenerating your mind and body into a billing slave?)? It can’t possibly be that you’re in denial, not after the NY Times did an article on White & Case basically saying that the old BigLaw firm structure is dead. So what is it?

Is it that you don’t have any self control?

You don’t understand that ordering $15 martinis is not economically savvy?

You don’t understand that a designer dress on sale for $400 is still spending $400 too much?

Or is it that that’s all we know as BigLaw associates? We conform even in our habits.

Sad.

We don’t care if you have student loans or if you don’t. We don’t care if you want more out of BigLaw than you got as a summer associate. We really don’t care what your dreams and hopes are. And we certainly don’t give a shit if you are told to clean up after yourselves. We BigLaw associates don’t clean up after ourselves. We have custodians at the firm, maids at home, and wives in the bedroom to do all that shit. I don’t ever clean up after myself or even clean myself for that matter.

Seriously, some one needs to tell Above The Law that they really should only report on the shit we BigLaw Associates Like.

Stop sticking up for your firm like the stupid fat kid who can’t make friends on his own mainly because he hits and bites people. Your firm is hurting. Our firm is hurting. Quit spitting out the rawhide that they made you chew and say stupid statements like:

“We’re doing fine in this market. Other firms are hurting, but we had a good business structure.” Bullshit. How many corporate attorneys are doing document review? And if your answer is none, maybe your litigation department sucks.

“We had some lay offs but they were all performance based.” Really? If you are that stupid to believe that, then I doubt your “performance” is up to par so why the hell are you still there?

“We’re still growing.” The only thing growing is the brown stain on your mouth from all the bullshit you are eating. Nobody is growing in this market. No BigLaw firms are growing in their US offices, especially with the ridiculous $160K first year salaries and the blown up billing rates that price them not only out of the current market but also outside of reality. They might poach a few good candidates here and there, but they are also dumping a bunch of monkeys out the other side so if they are adding less than they are subtracting, they can’t be growing….

You guys are idiots. Why don’t you just face the reality. Your ass is on the line. Your firm doesn’t love you. And your friends don’t really like you. So instead of drinking the koolaid, why don’t you just drink? In the famous words of Homer Simpson: Alcohol, the source of and solution to all of life’s problems.

We here at Stuff Big Law Associates Like want to cut you and cut you deep and go to jail for it.

While we here at Stuff BigLaw Associates Like are still employed (for now), we are definitely thinking ahead about our severances, god willing we don’t get there though.

But we spent 3+ years studying the law in addition to the mandatory 4+ years of undergrad. That’s 7 years before we even get to the first rung of the ladder and that’s not including the grueling studying for the bar exam, taking the damn thing, and waiting for results (if I have to fill out another character and fitness application asking me everywhere I’ve lived since I was 16, I will go guerilla on someone’s ass) to just be shown the door because some idiot(s) couldn’t manage their business well enough to know how many peope to hire or how to keep client business to make sure the people they hire have enough work.

It’s not our fault for the lack of work or low billables. It’s yours. It’s yours and I hope you know this as you hand us our pink slips so that you can keep up your overindulgent lifestyle because we know it. Don’t hide behind stealth lay offs (and kudos to the BigLaw firms that have admitted to lay offs) or performance based lay offs. Law is not that difficult. If you want to work and want to learn, you should be able to perform competently. It’s the market. It’s the fact that our fearless firm leaders are bad business people and got too arrogant of their own success that they thought they were untouchable. 

We here at Stuff Big Law Associates Like feel the worse for those whom BigLaw firms hired who had offers from other places that are more stable (and less arrogant) but turned down the other offers for BigLaw only to find their overqualified butts on the street. Yes, they were probably being greedy and distracted by the glitter of BigLaw that was stuffed down our throats like most little monkeys are but as we all know, not everything that glitters is gold. Soemtimes it’s shit straight from a bull’s ass.

Don’t believe it when they tell you it’s performance based and try to screw you on your severance. Be greedy.  We became lawyers because we’ were potentially greedy. BigLaw chose us because the potential in us they saw just like Anakin. They trained us well in the ways of greed. So be greedy when it comes to your severance. Don’t leave with your tail between your legs.

...replace the ruler with a symbol of the law, and the army with a law firm recruiter, and this image accurately represents the biglaw experience.

Yes, BigLaw Associates like homogeny. It’s not so much that WE like it, but the procrustean man likes it. While we’re all freaking out about losing our jobs (but for some reason we the authors still have jobs and still have time to post on this blog–life is unfair. suck it) let’s examine the BigLaw structure.

Not that I know anything about philosophy except that I throw it out there to impress the girls (but let’s be honest, as soon as I say I’m a BigLaw lawyer and I make X amount of money with SIX digits, I don’t need to say much else), but let’s take a look at Nietzsche and his Ennoblement through degeneration passage in Human All Too Human.

“History teaches that the best preserved tribe among a people is the one in which most men have a living communal sense as a consequence of sharing their customary and indisputable principles….The danger to these strong communities founded on homogeneous individuals who have character is growing stupidity, which is graduatlly increased by heredity, and which, in an case, collows all stability like a shadow. It is the individuals who have fewer ties and are mjuch more uncertain and morall weaker upon whom spriritual progress depends in such communities, they are the men who make new and manifold experiements. Innumerable men of this sort perish because of their weaknes without any very visible effect, but in general, especially if they have descendents, they loosen up and from time to time inflict a would on the stable element of the community….those who degenerate are of the highest importance whereve progress is to take place; every great progress must be preceded by a partial weakining. The strongest natures hold fast to the type; the weaker ones help to develop it further.”

Ok, I know your natural response to this is:

1. If you’re a woman, you want to jump my rich and philosophical bones and
2. what the hell are you talking about.

You see, the Man is the homogenous community. The old white fat men who hire young soon to be fat white men, or the sons of clients, or the ones who gufaw and golf even if they aren’t the smartest or the most progressive. law firms are, as we all know, risk averse, but this risk averse has made them incestual where they hire only their “own kind” and like Brittish royalty that used to marry sisters to brothers or first cousins or uncles and nieces to keep it in the family, the product has been a bunch of intellectually hunchbacked six fingered men (seriously, whenever I think of six fingers, I have to think of Christopher Guest in Princess Bride and then that makes me think of This is Spinal Tap and that makes me think of a an amp that goes to eleven and then I giggle apparently for no reason and my office mate thinks I do drugs, which I might do but drugs have nothing to do with my giggling in said siutation). So, now, back to Nietzsche.

The structure of BigLaw has been to hire the same old damn people that look like the same old damn people in charge. As as Nietzsche said, homogeny breeds stupidity (and six fingered people (insert giggle)) because in this world where the whole damn world is suffering from this economic crisis, we need to think outside the box. If law firms are going to survive, they are going to have to hire the weird black girl with a fro, or the (gasp) non-nerdy outspoken Asian girl, or the white guy who likes other guys if they have the law degree/grades to back it up. you can’t keep hiring the same second tier b.s. attorneys who tuck in their polo shirts into their khakis even on a saturday night. Got it?

Homogeny breeds stupidity. And that takes us to the state of BigLaw.

So if you find yourself one of the “weaker” ones that got the axe, well, you fought the good fight because changes were needed. And Nietzsche meant “weak” in the sense that you are outliers without a mob army to follow you, not that you are weak in the plain meaning of the word (yes, shut up, I am a corporate attorney, that had to be thrown in there).

Now, monkeys, hump other monkeys outside of your circle and diversify your genetic code and fuck the Man while you’re at it. Being different is a good thing, even if law firm don’t recognize it yet.

How did this love of self begin? Many blame the moxy of Generation Y (or whatever the hell they’re calling junior associates these days) on 80′s and 90′s style parenting that encouraged every child to believe they are special and that their shit is golden. We however think that the Biglaw’s self promotion stems from a situation that is exactly the opposite–somewhere in childhood they were told they weren’t good enough and now they must spend every waking moment proving to the world (even anonymously through blog comments) that they are good enough. The Biglaw associate is the kid who looked forward to those mandatory guidance counselor sessions in high school, not because they needed guidance, but because they needed an adult to give a shit about what they had to say. And then, just like now, usually that adult doesn’t really give a shit, they’re just paid to pretend. High school self-promotion reached it’s penacle at the moment which many a student dreads but which the Biglaw associate adored–the personal statement. Ask any Biglaw associate and they will tell you that they are so fucking awesome that it took them weeks to edit down their personal statement. How could their bounty be contained in a mere few pages of double spaced text?

How college played out for the typical Biglaw associate largely depends on what type of school they went to, and if they were able to fit into some fringe group on campus that would recognize their awesomeness. In college many Biglaw associates were in student government, did volunteer work that somehow got them noteriety, or they were emo slackers who nobody understood. Eventually they saw an opportunity to promote themselves once again without much work. Unlike Med School, which requires interviews, actual knowledge of something useful, and that you think about it in advance and take prerequisites, law school only requires the LSAT, an essay, and a GPA. And in the recent past there was also a potential future of a job with a big salary and “perks” that the future biglaw associate could brag about at reunions.

The economic woes of our recent past has left the self-loving Biglaw associate with limited options. If the biglaw associate hasn’t been fired yet, they can’t really brag about their job because everyone just assumes they’ll be fired next week so that their firm doesn’t have to share headlines with Pilsbury or Latham. So both the fired and the un-fired Biglaw associate are left with one venue…the legal blog. The fired associate can talk about how awesome they are and how their firm is now TTT since they won’t be there anymore. The still employed associate can say the fired associate was never cut out for the BigLaw in the first place and that’s why they were fired. Everybody can be happy because the blog gives them the opportunity to anonymously promote themselves and saves them the embarassment/ridicule of doing it publicly.

…Wait a minute…did we self-promoting biglaw associates just write an entire blog about self-promotion that actually promotes our blog? See! The behavior cannot be unlearned.

We just can't seem to get past the passion for your work and taking the initiative parts...

Why They Really Laid Your Ass Off

BigLaw Associates like Goodbye emails. In light of the current economy, we here at Stuff BigLaw Associates Like, have been drafting goodbye emails in anticipation of being laid off (or, for those who have already been laid off, feel free to use our emails):

Dear [Random Ass BigLaw Firm]:

After [x] years at the Firm, I have finally faced the truth: law students are just a bunch of socially awkward pompous students and BigLaw lawyers are just a big fat bunch of socially awkward pompous assholes and when I couldn’t stand the former, I should have know the latter was even more unbearable. While I would like to stay at the Firm just purely for comedic purposes hearing about which junior associate slept with which senior partner who is already on his third wife or the stories about the attorney employment director who is sleeping with a senior partner or the hundreds of racial slurs that at which even the unreconstructed South would be impressed, I have to return to Earth and real society filled with real people and not just a bunch of walking archetypal discontent malcontent bastards right out of a B movie where the screenwriter lacked creativity. So, hasta luego suckers (but I don’t really want to see you later.)

Dear [Random Ass BigLaw Firm]:

I came to this Firm thinking that it I had the opportunity of a life time. I, however, cannot in good conscience thank the firm for such “opportunity” as I’m shoved out the door. The firm is filled wih disloyal backstabbers (before BigLaw, I thought that might have been a redundant description but you have taken both disloyalty and backstabbing to a higher art form that respect must be paid to both), shit talkers, and women who are only rebels from the waist down like they were straight out of the novel 1984. I learned nothing at this firm except that in the toilet of BigLaw, shit floats to the top when gold sinks to the bottom. I hope everyone achieves their goal of being the best BigLaw associate they can be: i.e. padding your hours with no ethical remorse; stealing work from your fellow coworkers; feeling up the summer associates; and just being general incompetent a-holes.

Dear [Random Ass BigLaw Firm]:

I have decided to leave this job to save my soul. When I started at [random ass firm], I was an atheist but after [x] years here, I believe there is a Hell as I reported to said Hell 6 days a week for 70-80 hours a week, billing my time in said Hell in 6 minute increments. I used to think that if there was a Hell, there must be a God but after working here, I think God has abandoned us. Like the albatross around the Mariner’s neck, so hung the stench of the unethical b.s. and incompetence around this Firm. No amount of xanax and alcohol will allow me to overcome the trauma of working at this Firm.

Dear [Random Ass BigLaw Firm]:

Fuck you.