Some more rough tales from the front. Even competent, established lawyers are facing firings as the legal industry tightens its belt.
Read the whole article at The Los Angeles Times…
Laid-off lawyer in predicament she never imagined
By STEVE LOPEZ
“I can’t get a job anywhere.”
I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails that start like that. This one was from Ellie Trope of Mid-City in Los Angeles, near La Brea, who lost her job more than a year ago. She wrote me after reading my column two weeks ago about the endless mob scene at the employment office in Van Nuys.
Trope, 43, is an attorney with 15 years of experience, and she said lawyers are losing their jobs in droves.
When people in banking and the mortgage industry were getting the heave-ho, it came as no surprise. In fact, on Friday I spoke to a banking executive with 20,000 employees under him who got fired in December after 21 years on the job. But I would have thought anyone with a law degree would be able to talk their way out of a layoff, file for an injunction, whatever.
Not so. Trope told me it’s gotten much worse of late, and when I made some phone calls and checked on the Internet, I found that law firms in California and throughout the nation have been handing out pink slips by the dozens and the hundreds.
“Job cuts in U.S. legal sector hit 1,300 for January,” said a headline at Legalweek.com.
“Today isn’t over, but it already has a name: Black Thursday,” said a Los Angeles County Bar Assn. blog this week, making reference to hundreds of layoffs in the legal biz that were announced around the world the other day.
Trope sounded weary when I spoke to her by phone. The financial pressure of losing her job took a huge toll on her marriage, she told me, and she and her husband are now living separately. They share custody of their two children, and despite the financial strain, Trope hasn’t wanted to put the nanny on the bricks too, so she’s shuttling back and forth between households with the kids.
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[S]he reluctantly decided to lower her expectations and began applying for jobs as a contract administrator, an office administrator and a paralegal. But she struck out there too, in part because other lawyers were trying the same thing.
“After a while with the paralegal jobs, the listings said, ‘No attorneys.’ I think it’s because they figured attorneys would leave as soon as they found work as lawyers.”
In mid-January she got a temporary lawyer job for hourly pay, and this week she’s switching to another temporary arrangement, hoping this one turns into a long-term job.
“In my life, things were always way too easy to get,” Trope said. “I put my head in the sand and never thought about the worst that might happen. It was way too easy to not have a backup plan, and I didn’t worry. I did a great job at work and I thought that was enough, and it’s not anymore.”
