Layoffs are a brutal reality of corporate America. During fallow periods, publicly traded companies, including the big banks, routinely cull their ranks. The country’s largest law firms, by contrast, have historically taken a kinder, gentler approach, rarely firing employees en masse.

The news on Monday that Weil, Gotshal & Manges, among the nation’s most prestigious and profitable law firms, was laying off a large number of lawyers and support staff while also reducing the pay of some of its partners, sent shock waves through the industry and underscored the financial difficulties facing the legal profession.

Sixty junior lawyers, known at firms as associates, lost their jobs. That amounts to roughly 7 percent of Weil’s associates. Annual compensation will be reduced for roughly 30 of the firm’s 300 partners, in many cases by hundreds of thousands of dollars. And 110 non-lawyers — roughly half of them secretaries — were let go.

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The “new normal,” in the view of Weil’s management and echoed by legal industry experts, is that the market for high-end legal services is continuing to shrink. Dan DiPietro, chairman of the law firm group at Citi Private Bank, said he believed that the profession could experience a wave of job cuts. He said that there were too many lawyers at the country’s largest firms, estimating the excess capacity at as much as 10 percent of the lawyer population.

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“We believe that this not just a cycle but that the supply-demand balance is out of whack across the industry,” he said. “If we thought this was a cycle and our business was going to pick up meaningfully next year, we would not be doing this.”

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