2008 Job Hunt for BigLaw Layoffs Forum

[urbancowboy]

Flashback to 2008. You just wrapped up your third year of law school. Last summer, you had the time of your life getting wined and dined at your white shoe firm. You have a six-figure entry salary lined up and are on top of the world.

All of a sudden, you learn that you won’t be starting on time at your firm—or maybe ever.

How much does the BigLaw summer gig help you to grab a lifeboat and salvage your career in this predicament? How often were people permanently derailed here?

(You can probably guess where this line of questioning arises from…)

[Anonymous User]

Flashback to 2008. You just wrapped up your third year of law school. Last summer, you had the time of your life getting wined and dined at your white shoe firm. You have a six-figure entry salary lined up and are on top of the world.

All of a sudden, you learn that you won’t be starting on time at your firm—or maybe ever.

How much does the BigLaw summer gig help you to grab a lifeboat and salvage your career in this predicament? How often were people permanently derailed here?

(You can probably guess where this line of questioning arises from…)

I will start. My own 2023 answer to your 2008 question.
No offered this past summer by one of the firms that did public layoffs. Firm tried to blame it on me of course, but I (also others that were no offered, at least in my office) didn't do anything wrong. Started looking right after I got the news, and luckily there were still firms hiring first years back then. Applied to every single one of them. Interviews went fine, but, you guessed it, rejected by all after the "did you get a return offer" question. lol.
Now comes 2023. Now the world knows that my summer firm let a lot of good people go because of its own financial issues. Now firms are also not hiring first years. I can't even remember the last time I saw an opening for first year transactional associates.
I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be an attorney at this point. Will still take the bar for shits and giggles, but I don't care too much at this point. Luckily I will graduate almost debt free, and I can still rely on my undergrad degree to find a nice job. Does it suck that my legal career is probably dead before it even started? Yeah, but I'm also glad that this happened when I'm still relatively young and don't have a ton of responsibilities.
Sure, you can say that I wasted 3 years of my life and $200k+ for nothing, but this is nevertheless still meaningful experience, and you never know if this experience will be the key factor for you to get your next dream job. I don't think my career is chalked or somehow "permanently derailed" just because I cannot find a biglaw job in this market. Sotomayor was no offered by Paul Weiss, and there's not a lot of people successful enough to call her career "permanently derailed".
If you simply got your start date delayed, there's honestly nothing to worry about. Sure, there's a slim chance you get your offer rescinded, but take it from me -- it's not the end of the world. There are still great opportunities out there, and being a lawyer is not the only way, or even a reasonable way, to have a fulfilling life.

[Anonymous User]

Flashback to 2008. You just wrapped up your third year of law school. Last summer, you had the time of your life getting wined and dined at your white shoe firm. You have a six-figure entry salary lined up and are on top of the world.

All of a sudden, you learn that you won’t be starting on time at your firm—or maybe ever.

How much does the BigLaw summer gig help you to grab a lifeboat and salvage your career in this predicament? How often were people permanently derailed here?

(You can probably guess where this line of questioning arises from…)

If you simply got your start date delayed, there's honestly nothing to worry about. Sure, there's a slim chance you get your offer rescinded, but take it from me -- it's not the end of the world. There are still great opportunities out there, and being a lawyer is not the only way, or even a reasonable way, to have a fulfilling life.

I'll second this. There were lots of people who spent 2009/10 on the bench/doing fellowships as a result of deferrals, then showed up in 2010 or 2011. Often they were star associates and became partner even sooner. (And then, once they did become partner, some of them lateraled to firms that offered them more money as soon as possible - those sorts of things did have scars.)

[Anonymous User]

I was slated to start fall 2009 at my biglaw firm. Once the crisis was in full swing, they offered my class two options: delayed start in January 2010, or a one year public interest fellowship paid by the firm and a start date in fall 2010. I took the fellowship and ended up in Hawai'i for a year - one of the best years of my life. The biglaw job was waiting for me when I got back, and although my career has experienced some hiccups, it's been on a general upward trajectory.

[Anonymous User]

As a counterexample, the only attorney I know who got truly Lathamed (from Latham) never got back on the biglaw gravy train, despite trying. I think the present environment is different from '08/'09, but it's worth remembering that not everyone had a chill year doing good for the world followed by gainful employment.

[Anonymous User]

I interned at a government office and my supervisor had been a 2009 graduate who had his start delayed and then canceled. The answer for this guy was that he never made it to biglaw and got a government job instead. He seemed happy but I just checked his salary and he makes 100k after 14 years.

[Anonymous User]

Flashback to 2008. You just wrapped up your third year of law school. Last summer, you had the time of your life getting wined and dined at your white shoe firm. You have a six-figure entry salary lined up and are on top of the world.

All of a sudden, you learn that you won’t be starting on time at your firm—or maybe ever.

How much does the BigLaw summer gig help you to grab a lifeboat and salvage your career in this predicament? How often were people permanently derailed here?

(You can probably guess where this line of questioning arises from…)

If you simply got your start date delayed, there's honestly nothing to worry about. Sure, there's a slim chance you get your offer rescinded, but take it from me -- it's not the end of the world. There are still great opportunities out there, and being a lawyer is not the only way, or even a reasonable way, to have a fulfilling life.

I'll second this. There were lots of people who spent 2009/10 on the bench/doing fellowships as a result of deferrals, then showed up in 2010 or 2011. Often they were star associates and became partner even sooner. (And then, once they did become partner, some of them lateraled to firms that offered them more money as soon as possible - those sorts of things did have scars.)

But more often than not, they never made it in the door as a parter-track associate at any full-service law firm of import, so the "optimism" in this post needs to be moderated significantly in order to be credible.

[Anonymous User]

Flashback to 2008. You just wrapped up your third year of law school. Last summer, you had the time of your life getting wined and dined at your white shoe firm. You have a six-figure entry salary lined up and are on top of the world.

All of a sudden, you learn that you won’t be starting on time at your firm—or maybe ever.

How much does the BigLaw summer gig help you to grab a lifeboat and salvage your career in this predicament? How often were people permanently derailed here?

(You can probably guess where this line of questioning arises from…)

If you simply got your start date delayed, there's honestly nothing to worry about. Sure, there's a slim chance you get your offer rescinded, but take it from me -- it's not the end of the world. There are still great opportunities out there, and being a lawyer is not the only way, or even a reasonable way, to have a fulfilling life.

I'll second this. There were lots of people who spent 2009/10 on the bench/doing fellowships as a result of deferrals, then showed up in 2010 or 2011. Often they were star associates and became partner even sooner. (And then, once they did become partner, some of them lateraled to firms that offered them more money as soon as possible - those sorts of things did have scars.)

But more often than not, they never made it in the door as a parter-track associate at any full-service law firm of import, so the "optimism" in this post needs to be moderated significantly in order to be credible.

Previous anon here - everything I said was predicated on "If you simply got your start date delayed ...". If you Summered at a decent firm to start with (which in those days included Shearman, White & Case, etc) and were deferred and made it back, you could fall within the bracket I was discussing. There were also (I hope) lessons learned from that period - like by 2013/14 when things were picking back up, there were no bodies to do the work that was needed, so firms that previously rarely had laterals started hiring all over the show. But who knows? Not all law firms are run rationally, so we can just wait to see what happens I guess.

[Anonymous User]

Was going to do a SA during summer of 2020 in a mid law fly over state. Canceled because of covid. Did a state trial clerkship, now at an AmLaw 200 firm in nyc. I get paid under market but it’s more than enough, and a helluva lot more than I thought I’d make when my SA was canceled.

[RedNewJersey]

I interned at a government office and my supervisor had been a 2009 graduate who had his start delayed and then canceled. The answer for this guy was that he never made it to biglaw and got a government job instead. He seemed happy but I just checked his salary and he makes 100k after 14 years.

Ouch. Hope he didn't have loans ...

[Anonymous User]

I interned at a government office and my supervisor had been a 2009 graduate who had his start delayed and then canceled. The answer for this guy was that he never made it to biglaw and got a government job instead. He seemed happy but I just checked his salary and he makes 100k after 14 years.

Ouch. Hope he didn't have loans ...

PSLF.

[Monochromatic Oeuvre]

Poster who said the majority (probably the large majority) never made it back to Biglaw is correct.

Remember that most of the people laid off in 2008/2009 were juniors, and once you were out of the pipeline (fired, no-offered or indefinitely deferred) you were just a lateral candidate with little or no experience, at a time when no one was hiring laterals. Firms no-offered in bulk during summer 2009 and OCI 2009 featured roughly a 50% cut in hiring. So by fall 2010 (with a wildly small number of incoming juniors) firms were finally ready to start resuming "normal" hiring again but they mostly just went back to do it at OCI. Nobody really went back to "rescue" everyone from c/o 2006-2011 who had been fucked despite the fact that they were perfectly qualified, eager to get (or return to) the job, that it would have been the right thing to do, and ultimately the most profitable move; they just did the simplest thing that allowed them to be as routine as possible. If there is another economic crisis in a firm nothing will be "fair" and above all else will be the priority to "return to normal", discarding anything that might interfere with that.

The advice for surviving in a downturn is the same advice for thriving generally--be well-regarded and likable at your job, save a bunch of money, don't have debt. Associates will already be doing those to various degrees; law students haven't had a chance yet and therefore things will either just be harder or easier depending on what the hiring cutoffs are at that moment (so "do the best you can" continues to apply). The truth is that sometimes even if you're great you will simply be fucked because you're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lots of people ask questions like these looking for some secret and it can sometimes be hard for a bunch of people who owe their success to hard work to accept that a major part of it will be outside of their control (especially if they're 22 and don't know a world outside school).

Think of it like a car crash. Drive for long enough and you're highly likely to get in *some* sort of accident. You can (and should) do all the things that protect you in such an event. But it might still happen to you even when you exercise maximum caution. 2008 was like a 50 MPH collision. So keep your fingers crossed this is just a fender bender.

[TigerIsBack]

Poster who said the majority (probably the large majority) never made it back to Biglaw is correct.

Remember that most of the people laid off in 2008/2009 were juniors, and once you were out of the pipeline (fired, no-offered or indefinitely deferred) you were just a lateral candidate with little or no experience, at a time when no one was hiring laterals. Firms no-offered in bulk during summer 2009 and OCI 2009 featured roughly a 50% cut in hiring. So by fall 2010 (with a wildly small number of incoming juniors) firms were finally ready to start resuming "normal" hiring again but they mostly just went back to do it at OCI. Nobody really went back to "rescue" everyone from c/o 2006-2011 who had been fucked despite the fact that they were perfectly qualified, eager to get (or return to) the job, that it would have been the right thing to do, and ultimately the most profitable move; they just did the simplest thing that allowed them to be as routine as possible. If there is another economic crisis in a firm nothing will be "fair" and above all else will be the priority to "return to normal", discarding anything that might interfere with that.

The advice for surviving in a downturn is the same advice for thriving generally--be well-regarded and likable at your job, save a bunch of money, don't have debt. Associates will already be doing those to various degrees; law students haven't had a chance yet and therefore things will either just be harder or easier depending on what the hiring cutoffs are at that moment (so "do the best you can" continues to apply). The truth is that sometimes even if you're great you will simply be fucked because you're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lots of people ask questions like these looking for some secret and it can sometimes be hard for a bunch of people who owe their success to hard work to accept that a major part of it will be outside of their control (especially if they're 22 and don't know a world outside school).

Think of it like a car crash. Drive for long enough and you're highly likely to get in *some* sort of accident. You can (and should) do all the things that protect you in such an event. But it might still happen to you even when you exercise maximum caution. 2008 was like a 50 MPH collision. So keep your fingers crossed this is just a fender bender.

I agreed with all of this and then the metaphor at the end really brought it home for me. Good stuff (as always).