In-House Counsel

Thirty to fifty percent chance of losing your job after a merger

By Rees Morrison

One of the contributors to Yale Law School?s Career Development Office employment guide for law students is a senior lawyer at Medtronic. In his bio he writes: ?In 1990, after British company Grand Metropolitan PLC acquired Pillsbury, it cut the management staff including the legal department roughly in half." Other mergers have unsheathed similar bloodbaths (See my post of Nov. 20, 2005: Reuters legal team slashed by 20 percent; Sept.13, 2005: layoffs after Honeywell-AlliedSignal, and Oracle?s merger with PeopleSoft let go ?almost all of 50 lawyers? while El Paso-Coastal was less than a third; July 28, 2008: Linde-BOC merger reduced lawyer count by 40%; Aug. 4, 2008: Sprint-Nextel merger resulted in 30% reduction in legal staff; and Dec. 9, 2008: Akzo Nobel-Imperial Chemicals merger caused 25% reduction.

Other posts address cognate issues (See my post of April 14, 2005: morale boosters after layoffs; May 5, 2008: layoff repercussions; Feb. 19, 2007: BellSouth/AT&T and GC left; and Sept. 13, 2005: GC survival after a merger.).

Full post as published by Law Department Management on January 16, 2009 (boomark / email).