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Notes -
Lay doomer take.
I’ve been expecting a recession since late 2020 and was surprised that it took until q1 2022 to actually arrive. You think the fundamentals aren’t as bad as 2008 - I disagree. The 2008 financial crisis was a US-created speculative bubble that had knock-on effects in other countries. The EU was stronger then. China was ascending. Russia was not engaged in self-immolation. There were limits for how much damage US housing speculation could inflict.
Right now, all I see are dominoes. Europe is facing a major energy crisis. Russia’s economy is being strangled. China was always a house of cards. The current US administration does not appear capable of recognizing things that have already happened, let alone accurately predicting coming events. We ate a lot of seed corn during COVID, and have continued feasting afterwards too. What possible backstop is there against a major downturn?
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I think your evaluation of legal hiring is a bit optimistic, though your identification of “safe” areas of law is apt.
Since 2008, the big 4 consulting firms have been building larger legal services departments. It has really only been large corporate legal departments, which are almost entirely composed of biglaw alumni, that has kept corporate finance from moving the largest part of legal work to cheaper legal services providers. Recession-type hits to the bottom line should be enough to force gc’s to look for ways to trim the legal budgets, which will mean moving significant amounts of money away from biglaw. Cut off those revenue streams from biglaw firms, and I think you will see hiring freezes generally while law schools continue to churn out new grads. If and when the law firm hiring picks up again (expect a lag behind the end of the recession) you’ll have double or triple the number of applicants looking for the same number of jobs.
I predict the major earthquake for law to be ABA permitting Arizona-style changes to rules about who can own a law firm, meaning Deloitte can have its own subsidiary law firm covered by MSAs that already exist with most fortune 500 companies. If that happens, biglaw is going to take more than a haircut.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by changes to rules about who can own a law firm? I'm a 1L so I'm only just starting to get a grasp on these sorts of things.
Current ethics rules in most jurisdictions state that lawyers cannot be managed by non-lawyers. This extends to ownership of law firms - they can’t be owned by corporations or other non-lawyer entities.
In 2021, Arizona broke with the majority and made it so that non-lawyers can hold an equity stake in a law firm. It has been piquing interest from legal-adjacent entities.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/litigation-finance-companies-eye-law-firm-ownership-in-arizona.
Biglaw took a major hit in 2008 that it never really recovered from and will take another one when tight belts force companies to get creative in how they deal with legal needs.
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Ethics rules typically prohibit non-lawyers from entering profit-sharing agreements for legal services. Arizona has loosened these restrictions in recent years to allow non-lawyers to be partners in law firms. The reasoning behind this move was that lawyers aren't necessarily the best business people so larger law firms could get an advantage by hiring experienced corporate managers.
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