And the hits keep on coming...

According to the Daily Journal, the pace of law firm layoffs accelerated drastically nationwide in January, but Atlanta's largest firms do not yet appear to be caught up in large-scale terminations of attorneys and staff.

Of the seven large Atlanta-based firms contacted for this story, four confirmed layoffs of attorneys or staff, with varying degrees of detail. Two firms said they haven't had layoffs and another declined to comment. Recruiters at six firms contacted by the Daily Report, however, said they're seeing résumés from lawyers at all the large firms.

Since the beginning of the year, about 30 firms nationwide have announced layoffs totaling 1,528 staff and lawyers--compared to 1,762 layoffs announced by firms for all of 2008, according to Lawshucks.com. The Web site has meticulously compiled national layoff figures from confirmed reports in the legal press in a feature called Layoff Tracker.

In the last week of January alone, a whopping 858 lawyers and staff lost their jobs at big law firms nationwide, according to Layoff Tracker.

The figures compiled by the Layoff Tracker do not include so-called “stealth layoffs” that have not been confirmed, where firms lay off personnel in small increments in order not to attract attention.

Atlanta has not seen the large-scale layoffs that have hit firms in New York and California that invested heavily in structured finance practices. San Francisco's Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe, for example, announced in November it was laying off 75 associates, counsel and staff.

Firms in other cities that publicly are announcing cuts are shedding eye-popping numbers of lawyers and staff. Just last week, San Francisco's Morrison and Foerster announced it was laying off 201 people: 53 lawyers and 148 staff.

Other announcements last week that sent shockwaves through the national legal community came from Palo Alto, Calif.'s Wilson Sonsini, which cut 113 people (45 lawyers and 68 staff) and Boston's Ropes and Gray, which let go of 106 staff. The British firm Linklaters terminated 270 people: 120 lawyers and 150 staff.
Atlanta's legal recruiters say that most of the city's big firms are laying off lawyers, but they agree that the numbers, so far, are smaller than those seen in California, Chicago and New York.

“We're seeing firms very quietly trying to trim the fat, I think, at all levels from equity partner on down,” said Ilene Rosh, a recruiter at Hughes Consultants.
“We're seeing résumés from a lot of large firms that we don't normally see,” said Richard Rice, the head of attorney recruiting at firstPRO.