No surprise here: BigLaw rescinds ‘deferred’ offers

Arent Fox has confirmed that some offers made to ‘deferred’ associates have now been fully withdrawn. This comes as no big surprise, particularly as the old BigLaw model becomes increasingly less viable.

The economic downturn and added client scrutiny into law firm staffing and billing issues makes it less and less likely that lawyers whose offers have been deferred will ever actually work for the firms that made the offers. Next year, there will be a new crop of lawyers graduating from law school – will these new lawyers be more or less attractive to firms than the ‘deferred’ lawyers, whose experience over the past year may or may not be beneficial to the firms that made them offers? 

Arent Fox Chairman Marc Fleischaker was quoted in a post by Jeff Jeffreys of the National Law Journal on The Blog of Legal Times as saying that the firm was concerned, in part, about a ‘logjam’ when this year’s graduates are ready to receive offers. But it’s difficult to believe that the firms that deferred offers didn’t consider this issue when they made a decision to ‘defer’ some of the offers made to 2009 graduates. After all, these firms continued with their summer associate programs and were well aware that these summer associates would be graduating in 2010, just when their deferred lawyers were ready to return to the firms for full time work.

These firms didn’t really defer the offers – they just deferred the task of telling the lawyers that they wouldn’t be working for the firm – at all. Perhaps many of them were keeping their fingers crossed and closing their eyes, hoping that everything would go back to the way it was, the economy would improve and clients would retreat into complacency. But it just isn’t happening.

Is this the beginning of a trend? Lawyers who have been deferred would be well advised to seriously consider their options and, at the very least, start working on ‘Plan B.’ But really, who didn’t see this one coming as soon as firms started ‘deferring’ offers? Once this news started circulating, I started talking to lawyers, practice management advisors, other legal consultants and many others connected to the legal world. All of us came to the conclusion that few, if any of these offers would ever come to fruition.

The legal landscape is changing and law students, law schools and law firms need to figure out how to adapt to the changing world, new technologies and new wants and needs of clients.