Legal Research

"No Surprise Here: BigLaw Rescinds 'Deferred' Offers"

Posted by Allison Shields: "Arent Fox has confirmed that some offers made to 'deferred' associates have now been fully withdrawn. This comes as no big surprise, particularly as the old BigLaw model becomes increasingly less viable.

 

The economic downturn and added client scrutiny into law firm staffing and billing issues makes it less and less likely that lawyers whose offers have been deferred will ever actually work for the firms that made the offers. Next year, there will be a new crop of lawyers graduating from law school - will these new lawyers be more or less attractive to firms than the 'deferred' lawyers, whose experience over the past year may or may not be beneficial to the firms that made them offers? 

 

Arent Fox Chairman Marc Fleischaker was quoted in a post by Jeff Jeffreys of the National Law Journal on The Blog of Legal Times as saying that the firm was concerned, in part, about a 'logjam' when this year's graduates are ready to receive offers. But it's difficult to believe that the firms that deferred offers didn't consider this issue when they made a decision to 'defer' some of the offers made to 2009 graduates. After all, these firms continued with their summer associate programs and were well aware that these summer associates would be graduating in 2010, just when their deferred lawyers were ready to return to the firms for full time work...

Full text and the active link are available at the source site listed below.

Source: Legal Ease Blog, 25 September 2009

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on September 28, 2009 (boomark / email).