Biglaw

Biglaw Firm Fires Multiple Attorneys Without Warning Over Zoom

Even assuming the firm is correct... this seems very wrong.

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947451[UPDATE: Additional tips suggest the firings might be particularly harsh]

Imagine being told to pull out all the stops to deliver for the client on an office-spanning discovery project. Then imagine, months later, being unceremoniously fired “for cause” while a disembodied teleconferencing head characterizes all that brute force effort as a “billing error.”

That’s what tipsters claim happened at Reed Smith earlier this month.

On January 4, Reed Smith allegedly fired numerous associates across multiple offices over a Zoom call, informing the impacted attorneys that the decision could not be contested and that they would receive no severance. The calls reportedly based the move on “billing errors” on a document review project that ended in October. These firings arrived, by all accounts we’ve seen, without warning and without any consultation with the managing partners of the offices or groups involved.

When asked about this mass firing, a firm spokesperson responded, “We do not comment on personnel matters.”

Billing shenanigans aren’t unheard of on a massive discovery project. A Dentons associate billed 277 hours to review 20 documents once. The idea that attorneys across numerous offices acting independently all screwed up their bills in the same way pushes the envelope of credulity, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that there was some sort of systemic billing problem.

This response still seems wildly suspect.

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Why was there no intervention beforehand? According to one tipster, not only were the fired associates never approached about their billing beforehand, partners had encouraged the attorneys to “allocate as much time as possible on the project” in order to complete it quickly. This detail makes the claim that the firm axed associates without consulting the intermediary partners more troubling because it raises the prospect that attorneys lost their jobs for following their local marching orders.

If management contributed to the problem, then management needs an opportunity to take responsibility. A chance to say, “you can’t fire this person… we told them to come in every Saturday” or whatever. And while consulting the managers before pulling out the termination stick amounts to the bare minimum of prudent leadership, the firm needn’t have waited all the way until January to reach out. The project began in August and ended in October! Modern law firms don’t wait months at a time to check time entries — if there are entries egregious enough to warrant firing someone, the firm had ample time to address that through its management structure before January.

One tip suggests that this move stems from a client mandate to audit the billing and the project. That would explain the firm’s lack of action from August to January to the extent the firm itself didn’t have a problem with the billing until the client complained.

But the proper remedy under those circumstances would seem to be writing off some of the time, a thorough review of how massive projects are managed when they span multiple offices and management structures, and reevaluating how bills went out the door in the first place that might jeopardize a client relationship.

Not firing a bunch of associates “for cause” and putting a stain on careers that, by all accounts we’ve read, had only received positive reviews up until that point.

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And, again, this all assumes the associates actually DID commit some egregious category of billing error. If instead they really just dutifully followed direction from management for several months without any contrary guidance… then this stinks way worse.

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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