The New Republic just  published a gripping story entitled, “The Last Days of Big Law: You can’t imagine the terror when the money dries up.” Written by By Noam Scheiber it chronicles the pending doom of the top 150 law firms, spotlighting the snakepit of practicing law at Mayer Brown in Chicago, where some partners earned more than a million dollars a year:

Here’s a snippet:

There are currently between 150 and 250 firms in the United States that can claim membership in the club known as Big Law, the group of historically profitable firms that cater to the country’s largest corporations. The overwhelming majority of these still operateaccording to a business model that assumes, at least implicitly, that clients will insist upon the best legal talent instead of the best bargain for legal talent. That assumption has become rickety. Within the next decade or so, according to one common hypothesis, there will be at most 20 to 25 firms that can operate this way—the firms whose clients have so many billions of dollars riding on their legal work that they can truly spend without limit. The other 200 firms will have to reinvent themselves or disappear.

So far, the transition has not been smooth. In fact, the more you talk to partners and associates at major law firms these days, the more it feels like some grand psychological experiment involving rats in a cage with too few crumbs.

If you set out to pick a single firm to capture the escalating plight of Big Law, it would be hard to do better than the Chicago-based Mayer Brown.

Read original article


Tags: Big Law, Mayer Brown