The recent post about Paul, Hastings’s idiocy (made worse by rumors that two of the anonymized partners, and not the nice one, are fellow Boaltholes), got me to thinking about the other group of a-holes who pop up in the context of layoffs: headhunters. Don’t get me wrong; not all headhunters are a-holes. Headhunters have the same problem as lawyers, bankers, Palestinians and used car salesmen: 99% of them make the rest of them look bad. The headhunters who placed me (rather quickly, I might add) after I got shitcanned last year were great. So I’m not talking about them, just all the other guys.

Like, for example, Lawcrossing, who today sent me the follwing email under the subject line “Bad News: Law Firm Layoffs Increasing.” No shit. not sure why the spammed the message to me, as I don’t work for a firm, but that’s neit her here nor there. The email continues:

One of the most frightening things about any job

…including any job one might hope to obtain from Law Crossing, but never mind that…

is that you could potentially be let go at any moment. When the work inside law firms starts to slow down, when performance reviews get “weird,” and when you start hearing about people you know leaving under unusual circumstances, it is often a good reason to be nervous.

Indeed it is. However, if you’re insinuating that anyone should necessarily quit his job – as opposed to simply updating his resume and keeping abreast of what’s out there – all because other people have either gotten canned or quietly left of their own accord without giving proper notice (don’t laugh – that happens too, and a lot more often than you might think) then it bears noting that too many job hops also doesn’t look too hot in the eyes of prospective employers, especially if you can’t explain them better than saying “I thought they were going to can me so I canned them back first.”

If You Are Laid Off From a Legal Job, Your Chances of Finding a Job Just as Good Are More Difficult
Legal careers are fragile. If you are out of work for even a few weeks, it can be extremely difficult to find another job-the perception is that you must have been fired and with good reason (even if this is not true).

Really? My own experience does not bear that out. When I quit private practice to go in-house in 2002, I got no signing bonus, no relocation assistance, just a slight pay cut in exchange for an implicit (but, as it turned out, illusory) quasi-promise of working fewer hours. When I quit that job to get the hell out of California, I did get a healthy relo package, but the process of getting that job to begin with lasted a good four months. Then, when that employer turned around and canned my ass for no good reason (OK, from the perspective of the idiot I worked for and the complete moron that he works for, it’s probably a great reason) I ended up out of work for a whopping 7 weeks, or 6 if you go by the day I was offered the job as opposed to the day I started actually working there.

Ah, but you ask, is the new job “just as good” as the last? Actually, no, it’s better. The pay is identical, assuming I piss my employer off badly enough to preclude me from receiving any year-end bonus whatsoever. If I get a $1 bonus, the pay is better, despite the fact that I now work far saner hours, and despite the fact that the cost of living in Winston-Salem is about 10% below Richmond’s. That, plus the fact that everyone I work with is really cool, which is a lot more than I can say for my prior employer. As to the companies themselves, let’s just say I’m now working for a Fortune 100 company, while my prior employer barely made the Fortune 500 in my first year there, fell out of it in the second, and is nowhere near it now. Nor is my experience out of the ordinary; once I took that cursed job I soon learned that my predecessor had been canned under equally shady circumstances; he too quickly obtained employment from another, more prominent company in the same industry.

So no, I don’t think getting canned is a death knell to one’s career. The possibility that it might be once scared the crap out of me, as this email was intended to do. It doesn’t anymore.

If you are at a major firm, losing your job (even if you are laid off) may mean you never work for a major firm again.

Nice weasel word, “may.” Are firm jobs really that different from in-house? Maybe, but I rather doubt it, since the usual scare-stories from headhunters imply that if anything, in-house is worse.

At LawCrossing We Consolidate Every Legal Job in the United States and the UK and Are Exceptional at What We Do

Nicely tautological, that. Of course they’re very good at what they do. What they do is scare the crap out of you. The email didn’t scare me much, but probably would have if I’d gotten it as recently as a year ago. It probably did scare most other recipients. So yes, I concede that they are good at what they do, if only they would try applying that skill toward something more productive.

Remainder of email deleted for space.