Transactional vs. Litigation and the Recession Forum

[redbullvodka]

Anybody have any impression as to which of these two broad practice area categories seemed to get hit less during the recession-era layoffs? Lit would intuitively seem like the more durable of the two, but I honestly haven't done enough research to say that for sure. Wondering if anyone here really has? Thanks.

[Big Shrimpin]

OCEANS RISE

CITIES FALL

IP REMAINS.

[NotMyRealName09]

At least in my market, corp took a nosedive while litigation stayed steady or improved. My opinion is that as credit markets dried up, and revenues declined, corps stopped conducting deals requiring corporate attorneys, and began pulling the trigger on lawsuits quicker to recover lost revenues, even on cases they may have let slide before for business relationship reasons. When your vendor might not be in existance a year from now, you sue.

In other words, the recession stopped businesses from expanding, but day-to-day operations still result in lawsuits. Thus, corporate dropped off, while litigation stayed nearly the same.

[thesealocust]

It's impossible to pin down.

Some corp work came to a screeching halt. Latham's great practice revolving around creating CDOs and shit from mortgages? Yeah, that went away and never came back.

During the credit crunch there wasn't much for the banking & finance lawyers to do except cry, but the credit crunch was temporary.

For a lot of work, it became feast or famine: The biggest deals went through with the biggest name firms.

It became a great time to be in banking & financial institution regulation and opened up new practice areas.

Litigation probably saw a more general slowdown (it's expensive to initiate a law suit, and there might not be the short term cash even if there are important business or financial reasons to sue).

One thing that was very obvious was that litigation was undergoing a sea change (outsourcing, e-discovery, etc.) that meant many firms had a backlog of litigators who couldn't find other places to lateral to and so stuck around longer than expected. The year I did OCI being interested in corporate made it much, much easier to get jobs with some firms that were seeing much less need in litigation since litigators were sticking around.

[imchuckbass58]

One thing that was very obvious was that litigation was undergoing a sea change (outsourcing, e-discovery, etc.) that meant many firms had a backlog of litigators who couldn't find other places to lateral to and so stuck around longer than expected. The year I did OCI being interested in corporate made it much, much easier to get jobs with some firms that were seeing much less need in litigation since litigators were sticking around.

This. Transactional is generally more cyclical (since there are fewer transactions in recessions), but it seems pretty clear that litigation is undergoing a secular shift where a lot of work previously performed by junior litigators will be either done by machines, outsourced, or done by contract attorneys. This is arguably better for the litigators that are still around (less doc review/production logs/bitch work), but it means litigation departments are going to have a lot less of a demand for people going forward.

[Anonymous User]

yea i know from several sources at vault firms, that during recruiting that took place in 2010, people who said corporate did get a bump. while this may partly be due to macro/economic factors, i also think part of the reason is that most law students want to do litigation, and fewer want to do corporate. and most nyc firms have larger corporate depts than litigation depts to begin with. thus, leading to giving a bump to students set on corporate