© 2013 The Texas Lawbook.
By Natalie Posgate
Staff Writer for The Texas Lawbook
Leadership at Weil, Gotshal & Manges informed its employees in a firmwide e-mail Monday morning it will let go approximately 60 associates and 110 support staff and cut annual salaries for roughly 30 of Weil’s 300 partners in order to keep up with the tough legal market that continues to linger post-recession.
Barry Wolf, Weil’s executive partner and chair of the firm’s management committee, would not specify how many Texas partners and associates were affected, but said attorneys from the Lone Star State were included in each of the firmwide cutbacks. There are 116 lawyers based in Weil’s Houston and Dallas offices, according to the firm’s website.
The firm is also deemphasizing its complex commercial litigation practice in both Weil’s Houston and Boston offices. For Texas, Wolf said, that means a majority of the resources of the CCL practice will shift to the Dallas office, and the Houston office will draw more resources from other offices to support its litigation practice.
Even Weil’s prestigious bankruptcy practice – what the firm is universally known for – will be affected by the cuts, Wolf confirmed.
Wolf said the reasoning for the cuts is the industry-wide observation that supply is exceeding the demand of premium legal services.
He emphasized, however, that cuts were not made to reduce costs.
“This was really about making sure that the firm was the proper size for what we think the expected demand is in the future,” Wolf said.
Robert Lennon, Weil’s director of business development, said in a follow-up e-mail the associates affected by the cuts have already been contacted.
Weil’s robust bankruptcy and litigation practices (most notably associated with the Lehman Brothers case) allowed the firm to avoid cuts in the past. But that is no longer the case as financial crisis work for those practice areas and demand in the transactional market slow down.
“We must now make adjustments we avoided over the last few years to position the Firm to continue to thrive,” the firmwide memo says.
Weil’s job and pay cuts are most likely not unique.
An original report by The New York Times DealBook blog quoted a legal industry expert who said there are too many lawyers at the country’s largest firms and estimated an excess capacity at as much as 10 percent of the lawyer population – which, he says, could result in a wave of job cuts at other big firms.
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