Weil’s Collapse & Its Coat Tailed Victims

Letter to Ephesians: When a big company or law firm goes belly up, it’s not just the execs or partners who face the financial blues. Consider the HUNDREDS of managers, associates & support staffs of all stripes who suffer. Weil Gotshal’s collapse is no exception…

The WSJ noted how the white shoes NY law firm’s “associates had a golden ticket to big law” riches, until they suddenly didn’t. A related article pinned much of the blame on the legal profession’s strict ethics rules that essentially bar firms from expanding its “product line” to contribute to the bottom line like ordinary corporations do; rather, struggling law firms are pretty much limited to merging with other struggling competitors. And too often that triggers key rainmakers getting the heck out of the worsening mess by letting themselves be “poached” by healthy firms, thereby triggering the Weil like “death spiral.” We’re told the “firm of some 1,200 lawyers” sent “shock waves through the legal job market. But that’s only half the fall out by implying the firm’s lawyers who caused the financial ruin were the only ones suffering. It doesn’t even begin to capture the upended lives of staffers … and their families … who become unemployment statistics in search of a paycheck, health insurance & 401(k) contributions.

An additional but seldom acknowledged collateral victim are the many second-year law students who had “received a series of upbeat emails from Weil Gotshal” telling them they had landed a coveted job for next summer. As the WSJ noted, “A very different message landed” with the wanna-be lawyers “the day after the 95-year-old law firm announced it was dissolving: Weil’s recruiters said it would no longer be able to honor the 2027 job offers. ‘The same qualities that we saw in you will no doubt serve you well at other firms who will be lucky to have you,’ the email said.” My reply would have been, “Thanks for the email update about your coveted firm that you had told me about in interviews. You can kindly kiss my coattails.” But then, Weil wouldn’t have bothered giving a second-year student from Chicago’s De Paul Law the time of day let alone a job offer. You think it would have been different, though, if my dad were CEO of McDonald’s; and then I’d have been offered a Weil office with a view?

Davd Soul