TOO MUCH, TOO FAST – Despite impressive gains at the top of the Am Law 200 charts and a mindset geared more toward growth, layoffs and cuts continue to rattle the industry. Productivity and utilization remain a problem, observers and analysts have told Law.com’s Andrew Maloney , as some firms expect deal work to improve only ”incrementally” and the tech sector in particular just hasn’t shown enough resilience. Those assessments come as Fenwick & West told employees on Tuesday that it was laying off “just under” 10% of its professionals, including attorneys and staff. The firm cited a surge in demand from 2020 through early 2022 that caused Fenwick & West to hire “quite aggressively,” said Richard Dickson, the firm’s chair, in a memo viewed by Law.com. “It felt necessary at the time. But, with the benefit of hindsight, it represented a deviation from our core principle of managing for the long-term,” Dickson said.
LEGAL ORGANIZATION – From the casinos on the Las Vegas Strip to Hollywood’s writing rooms, workers are turning to their unions to seek protections against the risks that emerging technologies like genAI may pose to their jobs. Could a growing movement by employees to prepare for the impact of generative AI spread to an industry that hasn’t traditionally been prone to unionization, like legal? As Law.com’s Cassandre Coyer reports , in many ways, the legal industry is now at an inflection point. Stuck between the prospect of roles being transformed, if not entirely threatened, by the technology, an ongoing push toward business-oriented structural changes, and questions around the longevity of the billable hour, some believe this could be the industry’s first real opportunity to meaningfully consider collective bargaining.
