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XO's position:

1. Effects felt by firms are structural. Biglaw = broken
2. China next bubble to burst
3. Has not been a sufficiently large pickup in work to justify more staffing

Curious to know what the tls community thinks

thanks for ruining my day

Not trying to ruin days but xo is somewhat notriously pessimistic. I personally don't agree with their position but if china is a super bubble, and that is a big if, they'll probably be vindicated

byunbee wrote:thanks for ruining my day

Haha +1.

But seriously, I don't think there is any way to know one way or the other. We can all speculate, but it is hard to know. It definitely does seem like biglaw hiring will be down for years to come (and will probably never bounce all the way back), but whether or not it is better this year compared to last is hard to say.

But really... we gotta consider the source. What did you expect from XO? A rosy picture of law? I think the TLS 1Ls, 2Ls, and 3Ls are more reasonable than XO, and they seem to expect a minor bounce back.

tl;dr

XO's notorious for being shittastic

tl;dr

miamiman wrote:XO's position:

1. Effects felt by firms are structural. Biglaw = broken
2. China next bubble to burst
3. Has not been a sufficiently large pickup in work to justify more staffing

Curious to know what the tls community thinks

XOXO is full of mouth breathing socially inept retards.

thesealocust wrote:

James Bond wrote:XO's notorious for being shittastic

They also have hardly 'one voice', and have about 10,000 trolls and non-law students who post things for the lulz. Reporting what 'xo says' is an unabashedly noobish thing to do.

To be fair, I'm not trying to Rouse any rabble or down any debbies. I read their oci 2010 thread and gathered a very negative outlook and the reasons supporting that outlook. I'm actually more curious about why they might be wrong

tl;dr

1. Effects felt by firms are structural. Biglaw = broken

I keep seeing this, and I've yet to hear a persuasive argument as to how or why it's broken. Despite all it's imperfections, it's actually pretty efficient relative to many other industries out there.

2. China next bubble to burst

2010 OCI will start happening in a couple of months. Are we to expect China to implode before then?

3. Has not been a sufficiently large pickup in work to justify more staffing

Possible, but conjecture nonetheless. Also doesn't explain why more firms are signing up for OCIs than last year.

All in all, consider me less-than-persuaded.

frankly i'm most worried about #3 here. that is the only thing that i think is really going to effect law firm hiring from last year to this coming year. why? bc law firms were, like most everyone else, caught with their pants down when the rug got pulled out, and so they responded in a very immediate way to the problem, and they will follow whatever the obvious market signals are in the upcoming months and re-up on hiring in a very predictable, short-term way. what makes anyone thinks law firms are institutionally capable of gauging the truth of or preparing for #1 and #2?

so what is anyone basing #3 on? i'm guessing anecdotal evidence. the anecdotal evidence i have from my old firm is that things are actually picking up, and most practice groups are indeed staying pretty busy. like i said, anecdotal, and i'd like to hear about whatever is on the other side of the coin.

Edit: also, decent points above. i mean, idk, it just seems like c/o 2011 was a stop-gap year; the situation at that point was a known quantity, they gutted that year to, so to speak, clear out the backed-up gutters, now let the water start flowing back through the pipes. maybe not with the volume you use to see back during the rainy season but...well i've lost the thread of that metaphor. i think oceans 13 being on the television is making me stupid.

anyway, that's my narrative and i'm sticking to it, for my own mental health.

...

dood wrote:

miamiman wrote:XO's position:

1. Effects felt by firms are structural. Biglaw = broken
2. China next bubble to burst
3. Has not been a sufficiently large pickup in work to justify more staffing

Curious to know what the tls community thinks

BigLaw Bigschmaww. If you truly want BigLaw, you can still get it. Hustle hard and you can pretty much achieve anything. The economy is natural selection, the weak, lazy, stupid are weeded out of every industry. Good luck broski.

miamiman wrote:XO's position:

2. China next bubble to burst

Curious to know what the tls community thinks

The bubble referenced is the housing bubble.

The housing market in China may burst, but it will not derail their growth. Chinese households are not overly leveraged, unlike America, Britain and parts of the EU, and the property boom in China only affects a small percentage of the population (the top 20% to 30% of households). Furthermore, the Chinese government is already taking steps to preempt a shock to the housing market and is deflating the bubble.

http://www.economist.com/business-finan ... tures_box3

romothesavior wrote:

QF absolute cuteness

miamiman wrote:XO's position:

1. Effects felt by firms are structural. Biglaw = broken
2. China next bubble to burst
3. Has not been a sufficiently large pickup in work to justify more staffing

Curious to know what the tls community thinks

1) Bullshit. Look at firm profits per partner. They stayed high in the worst economy since the great depression. Big law isn't broken.

2) I don't know, but unless this shit hits the fan between now at sept, it won't matter.

3) Staffing won't be working until fall 2012. Irrelevant.

Desert Fox wrote:

miamiman wrote:XO's position:

1. Effects felt by firms are structural. Biglaw = broken
2. China next bubble to burst
3. Has not been a sufficiently large pickup in work to justify more staffing

Curious to know what the tls community thinks

1) Bullshit. Look at firm profits per partner. They stayed high in the worst economy since the great depression. Big law isn't broken.

2) I don't know, but unless this shit hits the fan between now at sept, it won't matter.

3) Staffing won't be working until fall 2012. Irrelevant.

i disagree only with (3), and only insofar as i think it is indeed relevant, because imo the only real metric law firms are considering is how much work they have coming in and if they think that workload will continue/increase in the near future (read: 1-3 years). my theory being that law firms, like other large inertia-ridden institutions, can only react (usually poorly and myopically) to what is shoved right in front of their noses. so, if work is picking up, biglaw will go "o well we should start hiring again, bc we'll need folks in x months." if incoming/ongoing business has remained at dismally low levels, i don't think they will pick up hiring even though they may in fact end up understaffed in 2 years.

this is all just conjecture based on my opinion of how i think these places are probably run. that is, poorly, myopically, ineptly, blah blah blah u get the idea.

AngryAvocado wrote:

1. Effects felt by firms are structural. Biglaw = broken

I keep seeing this, and I've yet to hear a persuasive argument as to how or why it's broken. Despite all it's imperfections, it's actually pretty efficient relative to many other industries out there.

That's because there isn't one. People are saying it's broken because they're butthurt about how it works. The real world is too cutthroat for these types.

...

dood wrote:

d34dluk3 wrote:

AngryAvocado wrote:

1. Effects felt by firms are structural. Biglaw = broken

I keep seeing this, and I've yet to hear a persuasive argument as to how or why it's broken. Despite all it's imperfections, it's actually pretty efficient relative to many other industries out there.

That's because there isn't one. People are saying it's broken because they're butthurt about how it works. The real world is too cutthroat for these types.

180. You gotta hustle hard for most desirable things/positions...nobody is entitled to biglaw, nobody entitled to anything in the real world.

xoxo is actually surprisingly accurate. Just like TLS, you have to use your noodle to figure out what's accurate/inaccurate... who's trolling and who isn't. Leave it to rayiner to respond with an ad hominem.

The problem with 1Ls here is that you all seem to place an unjustified degree of weight on certain opinions. The more pessimistic, the less credible. The more associated with some official entity (i.e., a law school OCS), the more credible. What you've got to know is that OCS, surprisingly, knows about as much as you do about whether or not 2010 OCI will be better. At this point, all you can do is make an educated guess. And what's funny is that some people here vigorously defend their educated guesses.

Some economic factors to consider (really, miamiman? THOSE were the factors you thought would influence things?)
1) Euro Debt Crisis
2) Debt Crisis of Local Municipalities

Whether or not these things will influence firms is a mixed bag. Just like the last economic crisis (I'm referring to the one precipitated by the Lehman Bros. collapse), some firms are poised to succeed from it, and others fail. The firm I'm working at, for example, has a large department that stands to gain significantly from the euro debt crisis (as does one other, similarly situated firm). Other firms, not so much. Yet other firms will get hurt. It really depends on the departments, and using your noodle to figure out their clients and how business will turn out.

Voice of Optimism: I think the doom and gloom regarding litigation is overstated. People keep saying that junior attorneys are redundant because you can just outsource doc review, etc. But the problem is that a lot of firms have been "farming" out litigation shit-assignments like that for years now, so I don't expect litigation hiring to deviate significantly from the status quo.

Transactional departments are just really tough to figure out. The reason the economic crisis was so damaging was that it led to a significant decrease of credit (a freeze, in fact), and this reduced the number of deals. As a consequences, there was a race to the top. What deal work was left shot up to the few firms with a complete badass expertise in the field (WLRK, DPW, S&C, CSM, Skadden, etc.), and other firms suffered. Deal work has increased in the last year, but not enough to sustain the leverage that lower-tier firms took on to handle their former predictions of a booming M&A world.

This is just scratching the surface. To keep tabs on things, I rather obsessively read:
amlawdaily.typepad.com
lawshucks.com
abovethelaw.com
The Deal Blog
WSJ Law Blog
Adam Smith, Esq. (HIGHLY recommend this)

So read up and get educated.

3) From what I have seen this summer (and what friends at other firms have anecdotally verified), people are busy. Some departments absolutely swamped even. Both transactional and litigation. And before someone mentions that it is because they laid everyone off, one firm I am referencing actually made no layoffs.

Does not prove anything. But anecdotally, things are not looking awful everywhere.

rando wrote:3) From what I have seen this summer (and what friends at other firms have anecdotally verified), people are busy. Some departments absolutely swamped even. Both transactional and litigation. And before someone mentions that it is because they laid everyone off, one firm I am referencing actually made no layoffs.

Does not prove anything. But anecdotally, things are not looking awful everywhere.

Yep. And one of the partners at mine even went so far as to say that it's pre-ITE busy. Personally, I've gotten a lot of "real" work so far (and 0 doc review!!!). Some firms are just advantageously situated, however. Not everyone can be the S&C's of the world (and no, I'm not at S&C).

RisingMich3L,

I cited those forces because they were the forces xo referenced, not the ones I see as necessarily the most plausible. In my own view, I view 1 as specious for the same reasons DF points out but I can see how another market downturn, especially one that would cripple Chinese growth and, by proxy, global economic growth, would be the catalyst for a severe recession. Anything even approximating that kind of a correction would probably scare away firms from being caught again with their pants down. That said, I really don't know how firms are going to forecast for #2 given that they have to recruit a class in a few months, are not economists, and the people who are experts are torn on the issue as well. I read two things: (1) China can slow down growth if it has to (2) China is too big and too decentralized to coordinate.

If anything, I think the biggest reason firms are going to be cautious in 2010 is because the American GDP is recovering slowly, far slower than it has following prior recessions, and the lionshare of growth has come by way of government expenditure; firms also know if they understaff they can always go to a 3L OCI and/or the next class coming out of the law school pipeline.

So, I'm skeptical.