Mitch Kowalski, a UWO Law grad and writer for the Legal Post, has been covering how the economic downturn has affected the legal industry.

His entry today mentioned a meeting with Omar Ha-Redeye, where they discussed the impact of these changes.

Another old US firm bites the dust – reprise

As Julius Melnitzer recently blogged, 160 year-old Thatcher Proffitt & Wood LLP will be closing its doors on January 1, 2009. The Wall Street Journal reported that the firm was heavily focussed on work in ”mortgage-backed securities and other types of capital markets transactions,” which allowed the firm to grow to over 300 lawyers and making it one of the top 100 most profitable firms in the US. That work, as we all know, doesn’t exist any more.

“‘It has been the worst year for the legal market in many decades and maybe ever,’ Elliott Portnoy, the chairman of Sonnenschein, told WSJ.” Sonnenschein will pick up 100 of Thatcher’s lawyers in the new year.

Fellow legal blogger, Omar Ha-Redeye (SLAW), popped in for a coffee last week and we chatted about what Portnoy just noted. What most lawyers forget is that the era of the mega-law firm is a short one (perhaps no more than 40 years, if that). AND, these firms have never seen an economic crisis like this before. Large law firms in the 1930′s were comprised of perhaps no more than 5 lawyers. As a result, there is no precedent for legal behomenths to withstand huge, worldwide economic shocks and we’ve already begun to see that many will not. What makes this recession different from those since the 1930′s is that there is no country and no industry sector in which to hide. One can’t simply move to another jurisdiction that is “hot” or to another industry that is “booming”; everything is down. And, unfortunately from all that I’ve read and from all those that I have spoken to, 2009 will be another dismal year; more firms will shrink and more will die.

The silver lining? More clients will refuse to accept hourly billing and more will insist that routine legal work be out-sourced to low cost service providers, thereby revolutionizing the way law is practiced.

Omar’s write-up of the meeting can be found on Slaw and Law is Cool.

The Legal Post is up for the ABA Journal 2008 Blawg Awards.

They are the only Canadian blog in the “News” category, so you can help them win by voting now.  Slaw is also up for the ABA Awards.