The firm was relatively generous to the associates it fired. It typically gave them three months’ salary and benefits. It let them work from their offices while they looked for jobs and provided them with career-counseling services. After the second round of layoffs in 2009, it tried to avoid a third by placing associates in-house with major clients and paying them $60,000 plus benefits for a year, in the hope that the client would hire them permanently. The blow to morale was nonetheless enormous. “Once you have one round, pretty soon you’re cutting into good people,” says a former associate. “There was almost a survivor mentality—sort of guilt mixed with rage. ... The partner at the top made the choice of who stays, who goes. It colors your view of that person.”

Over time, the remaining associates began to subtly turn on each other. J. Davidson started in the firm’s finance practice in September 2007. Initially, there was enough work to keep associates busy, and they would beg off less desirable assignments. “It was like, ‘Who wants to do that?’ and you’d pause and stare at each other,” says Davidson. Once the bottom completely fell out in 2009, however, associates would lunge for even the most tedious tasks. “You were lobbying for the work before it was even happening.”

Davidson’s mentor had recently moved to the firm’s Charlotte office, making it even more difficult for him to score assignments. Face time, always a crucial commodity in law firms, became oppressively so. Every day, he would make the rounds of the partners in his practice to let them know he was free. And, almost every day, they would give him the runaround: “They’d say, ‘Give me a call later.’ I’d call later, and they’d said, ‘Ehhhh.’”

Somewhat perversely, when associates like Davidson finally did get an assignment, it became more important than ever to turn it around quickly. The faster you worked, the less you appeared to have on your plate, and the more partners might send your way. Even if a partner gave you several days to complete the task, the last thing you wanted to do was take the whole time. Suddenly, a new phenomenon was born: The gratuitous all-nighter.

And then there was the nagging fear that one day a partner would drop by your office and, instead of handing out an assignment, would shut the door and explain apologetically that the firm was staffing down. In normal times, getting fired wouldn’t be the end of the world. But in the middle of a brutal recession, it could be disastrous: Every other major law firm was laying off associates. Corporations were slashing their in-house legal staffs. “There was no place for people to go,” says a former associate. Even contract work was unavailable: The staffing firms often deemed the out-of-work associates “overqualified.”





In May, I spoke to a former Mayer Brown associate who joined the firm’s finance group out of law school in 2001 before transferring to the pensions department so she could work saner hours. The associate, call her Helen (not her real name), survived two rounds of layoffs, then got pregnant in 2009. Helen had previously felt she was on track to make partner—her performance reviews were consistently strong—but she began to worry as she was preparing to go on maternity leave. “We would have these group meetings where we’d talk about billable hours, how down they were for our group. I knew that, if there was another layoff, we were going to be hit.”

Helen’s son was born on March 19, 2010. Just before he turned three weeks old, she received the call she’d been dreading. Mayer Brown gave her the rest of her maternity leave, plus another three months pay as severance. It was, under most circumstances, a fair offer. But Helen was in a bind. Her husband was a stay-at-home dad, and the couple owned a condominium in downtown Chicago. “I sent out a ridiculous number of resumés,” she says. “If I didn’t have a job lined up by time the time the severance ended, I didn’t have a way to make payments on my house.” She landed two or three interviews and no offers. “The market was so bad in the spring of 2010. Not a single law firm was hiring.”

Inevitably, the bank foreclosed on her condo. She and her husband relocated to the Michigan town where he grew up, and she eventually joined a local firm. Her annual salary when she left Mayer Brown was $230,000. Last year she made $40,000. It was barely enough to put food on the table and clothe her children, much less keep up with tens of thousands of dollars in law school debt. “There’s probably a bankruptcy in our future. I don’t think there’s a way out of it,” Helen told me. “In ten years, hopefully we’ll be financially recovered, we can buy a house, have a credit card again.” Before we hung up, I pointed out that the legal market had improved since 2010. Why not look for another fancy job in Chicago? “There’s no way I would go back to Big Law,” she said. “I’m doing a lot of criminal law now. I love it. It’s originally what I’d intended to do when I went to law school.”

In late June, I traveled to the Chicago headquarters of Mayer Brown to meet with the company’s chairman, Paul Theiss. The firm moved into the gleaming 48-story Hyatt Center a couple years before the recession. At the time, it occupied twelve floors and had an option to lease more. As of this year, it hadn’t exercised the option and had even shed a floor. An associate who left in 2012 estimated that, before the firm gave up that floor, there were five attorneys in a space that could accommodate more than 50.

The firm had resisted making any member of management available to me for weeks, and when I finally did turn up, Theiss’s team seemed to be on edge. He was flanked by the company’s marketing director, Peter Columbus, and head of public relations, Bob Harris, in a conference room on the thirty-second floor. As I entered, Harris invited me to have a seat in a chair next to a large brown accordion folder. It was packed with documents attesting to the firm’s basic humanity—promotional literature, industry reports, press clippings. The three of them spent a good 45 minutes reviewing it before I could get off a question I’d prepared.

Theiss, who just finished his first year as chairman, was jacketless, with weary eyes and a throaty voice. He had a winning blue-collar affect—similar to a police lieutenant’s or fire captain’s—that was at odds with his corporate-lawyer resumé. I could immediately see the appeal of anointing him chairman after years of internal strife: He is someone who, by his mere presence, makes you feel embarrassed to lobby on your own behalf. When I alluded to “income partners,” Theiss interrupted and said, “partners, we’re all partners.” He invoked the word “team” several dozen times during our two-and-a-half-hour conversation, only part of which was on the record.

More than anything else, Theiss was at pains to transmit an upbeat image of life at Mayer Brown. In his telling, associates are energetically nurtured—he had just returned from an associate retreat in Virginia where he spoke about career development—and they have a better shot of being promoted than at competing shops. As for partners, he said: “We regularly have people approach us from other firms who are very unhappy with exactly what you’re describing, who not only hear about the way we do things here, but when they get here, they invariably are happy that it’s actually true. That there is a premium on teamwork and cooperation.”

There is certainly some evidence to support this. The firm’s Washington office, with its prominent Supreme Court practice and antitrust lawyers, has been notably cohesive for years. Some industry-wide surveys of associates rate life at Mayer Brown very highly (though others give it middling grades). Still, it was hard not to feel as though we were talking past each other. Theiss seemed most eager to show how favorably Mayer Brown compared with its competitors when it came to its lawyers’ personal fulfillment. I was, in turn, happy to concede that Mayer Brown was no laggard in this respect, and in many ways above average. That was, in fact, the point. If Mayer Brown is what passes for civility, then what should we make of the rest of the profession?

In any case, the real question hanging over the conversation was economic. If corporate America continues to be so stingy in its legal spending, Theiss could be as well-intentioned as a Peace Corps volunteer and still not have much to offer his lawyers beyond competently managed decline—charging clients the same for more work, or less for the same work; shedding bodies, or keeping the same number and paying most of them less. Theiss talked excitedly about “the drive for efficiency.” But it was hard not to see this for what it is: the further immiserization of the legal class.

It was only when I suggested that a mere fraction of the world’s Big Law firms would survive another decade or two that I grasped the bone-fatiguing chore of running such a business. Theiss wouldn’t endorse the premise, but he didn’t exactly refute it, either. Demand had stopped growing, he told me. There was “substantial overcapacity.” Billable hours were way down industry-wide. “I don’t think anybody who follows the profession would suggest that this is only a temporary situation,” he said. The longer Theiss spoke, the bleaker the picture became. Finally, Columbus, the marketing director, attempted to steer the discussion in a more upbeat direction.

“I think it’s fair to say as well, as the general economy improves ... legal demand should increase,” he interjected brightly.

But Theiss cut him off. “Uh, OK,” he said, looking rather skeptical. “I mean, maybe.”



Noam Scheiber is a senior editor at The New Republic. Follow @noamscheiber.