Legal News

The Good News: We Have Work! The Bad: We Need You To Do It!

By Ashby Jones

We imagine that this news might be greeted with a bit of a mixed reaction to those it affects. The law firm Brown Rudnick is nixing its deferred start dates for 11 associates — putting them to work a couple months earlier than originally planned. The firm, according to the National Law Journal, will have the associates start on Sept. 14 instead of Nov. 30. The reason: Brown Rudnick has experienced an uptick in bankruptcy and litigation work.

No doubt, the news will be greeted warmly by associates who need to start gettin’ paid. At the same time, the extended May-November spring-to-summer-to-fall break they’d initially been promised has been slashed. The next time the 11 have the chance to take a two month break? The year 2040 or thereabouts, when retirement starts. Enjoy it, ladies and gentlemen.

All our gallows humor aside, it’s good news for Brown Rudnick, and possibly a rare harbinger for the industry as a whole, which has been beaten like a pinata over the past 18 months or so.

“The good news is since we made that decision [to defer] we’ve become very busy and it certainly looks like that’s going to be sustained,” said the firm’s CEO Joe Ryan.

That said, according to the NLJ, the firm is still mulling when to bring in the dozen associates deferred until next year because 10 have taken public service jobs. “We want to make sure we time [their starting dates] in a way consistent with their current commitments and our needs,” Ryan said.

Last November, the firm laid off 20 lawyers, three paralegals and 20 staffers in five of the firm’s six U.S. offices and its London outpost.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 20, 2009 (boomark / email).