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Die unbeliebten First Years

Im Interview mit dem Philadelphia Inquirer erläutert Francis Milone, Chairman bei Morgan Lewis im Zusammenhang mit den jüngsten Entlassungen in der eigenen Kanzlei einen Trend:

Question: Law firms are still very profitable. Why do they need to downsize?

Answer: You have to make a judgment about whether you can keep people busy going forward. It is not healthy for a lawyer to not be busy, to have free time on his or her hands. You don't grow, you don't develop, you're not happy.

And from a cultural perspective, you don't want to build a firm that culturally is populated by a lot of people, or too many people, who don't have enough to do.

Q: Is that the only reason?

A: The other piece of it is the feedback we got from clients. Because they're looking at the way they want law firms to act. They're not going to be as willing to pay, frankly, to train new lawyers. So it's going to be harder to find things for new lawyers to do. And when we're paying new lawyers $160,000 and clients don't want to pay for them, you're putting them in a position where there may not be a lot of things for them to do.

Q: Were you hearing from your clients that they really didn't want to pay for first-year associates on their jobs?

A: We're hearing from some clients. It's a trend. We literally have some clients who are telling us they do not want us to put brand-new associates on their matters.

Ein Plädoyer für ein obligatorisches Rechtsreferendariat im Anschluss an die Law School oder nur die argumentative Vorbereitung von sinkenden Einstiegsgehältern?

Was meint die ...jurabilis!-Leserschaft?

Full post as published by jurabilis - German bLAWg from Berlin. on April 19, 2009 (boomark / email).