An ugly side of working life

A few years back, I remember one partner telling me about the pressures at Allen & Overy (A&O) during the tech-crash depression when tensions sparked between the firm’s corporate and banking practice. Though at the time it was viewed as infighting between departments, in retrospect this partner saw it quite differently: “The truth is that everyone was under pressure to perform. Everyone was being squeezed, and when people feel like that, they try to divert attention to someone else and say, ‘look, it’s those bastards that aren’t performing’”.

That observation seems an apt description of some of the comments that have been appearing on legalweek.com that have been strongly critical of support staff at City law firms that are making lawyers redundant. The gist of this criticism is that support staff are of little use, and have, in the words of one poster, “sat around doing nothing the past year” and, in the opinion of another liberal-minded contributor, should be sacked without notice.

There’s no doubt that the root cause of such tension is the same as that which caused A&O’s stressed corporate and banking teams to finger-point: when under pressure, it’s a sad part of human nature to accuse others to divert attention from yourself.

That’s perhaps the most charitable way to view such claims, as they do not hold much water. Of course, there are some support staff that contribute very little to the business, but such deadbeats also exist among lawyers; you get stars and wasters in all walks of life.

It’s fair to say that the contribution of the lawyers to a firm is more important than that of support staff, as they are obviously more central to the business, but the lawyers are clearly far more highly compensated for their more specialised skill-set and the higher demands placed on them by the business.

The argument that support staff are deadweight in a downturn also makes little sense. You still need adequate infrastructure unless you want to waste the skills of your lawyers on non-legal tasks, and if there is not enough actual work to bill then you don’t - in purely economic terms - need as many lawyers.

What such comments do, however, is paint a very unappealing picture of the legal profession, especially coming from the same constituency that argued that they were being exploited by partners during the boom. Yet there is no way assistants can credibily argue that partners should take a long-term view of their employment and retain lawyers during a downturn, only to turn around and say that it is support staff that have given loyal service that should be the ones to 'take one for the team'.

Presumably – or maybe hopefully – those that hold such views are in the minority. If not, then law firms hopes of attracting quality staff in non-legal roles are going to take a pounding - as will assistants’ hopes of attracting much sympathy the next time that a boom pushes work levels to the limit.

See Rival City firms decline repeat of CC job cuts to read the comments and join the debate.