Legal Research

New York Times on White and Case

By Simon Fodden

If you haven’t yet had your fill of reading about the sea change that’s running through the legal profession, you should read “A Study in Why Major Law Firms Are Shrinking” by Alan Feuer, published in the June 5 edition of the NY Times. Among the myriad points of interest within the article — I won’t attempt a summary — are references to blogs, where the aftermath of the lay-offs got dealt with, particularly abovethelaw.com and what the Times describes as “the wildly popular” lawshucks.com (what a great name).

From everything I’ve read, firms in Canada are laying off fewer associates and partners by far. Or am I reading the wrong sources? Do you think that means “lawmageddon” is simply delayed here?

We can hope that out of what’s pretty close to a literal decimation there is a transformation of the profession — a sea change of the sort that the Bard imagined in Ariel’s song when he coined the phrase:

Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
into something rich and strange…

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on June 09, 2009 (boomark / email).