Jones Day apparently thinks it's better than we are. Or at least one of their partners wrote a memo claiming so. Didn't name us personally, but I'm sure we're one of the firms he's referring to. "[P]rotecting partners' incomes on the corpses of associates and staff," "slash[ing] and burn[ing]" -- I'm pretty sure that's us. Describes our behavior in this economic downturn pretty accurately.

I'd like to argue in our defense. What's wrong with firing staff and associates? What's wrong with protecting partners' incomes? What's wrong with using the recession as an excuse to trim the dead weight and put the firm in the best position to thrive not only when the economy recovers, but right now?

Why not protect our partnership above all else?

Our value is in our partnership, entirely-- sad to say, but staff and associates are fungible. No firm in the top 50 can stand up and say its associates are any better or any different from anyone else's. No matter how discerning the hiring partner wants to think he is, no matter how many times you read a resume or how carefully you evaluate a second-year law student's ability to eat lunch at a fancy restaurant without choking, we're all interviewing the same pool of students and making offers based on four or five twenty-minute interviews and a cursory glance at a transcript.

We're all making the same offers to the same students, and they're choosing us based on whatever intangibles they can pretend set one firm apart from the next, but, really, if you switched our first year associate class with Latham's or Jones Day's or any of the top firms, it's a crapshoot. And once the economy recovers, we'll be able to go out and pluck a whole new batch-- a whole new, younger, cheaper, hungrier batch-- of associates to do the scut work. You think law students are going to be in a position where they're turning down offers anytime soon? You think they're going to care which firms laid people off and which didn't? They're going to be grateful for the jobs. And it's not like they all can't do this work. We're not asking our associates to do rocket science. Any graduate of a decent law school can do everything we ask them to. That's why offer rates for summer associates are 95%+, everywhere. And that's why in good economic times, no one ever gets fired. We can pretend we have the best associates, the best training, the best whatever-- but it doesn't matter even if we do. We just need bodies. Bodies to bill out to clients, bodies to do document review, bodies to burn out and throw away when we're done with them.

So if the associates don't matter-- and, sorry to say, they don't-- why not dump them when we don't need them, save the money, and hire some new ones back later?

The alternative is a fair bit worse. Jones Day may be proud of lowering partners' incomes to save associates, but how happy are the partners about it? How many wouldn't be just as happy keeping their old salaries, or even getting bigger ones after we cut expenses by 30% by firing the idiots we don't need anymore? Truth is, not everyone is so giving. For a lot of us, there's a number we're waiting for-- a number in the bank account that tells us we can finally leave and not worry about our future. The faster you can get me to that number, the more I'm willing to stick around. So why not move over to a firm that's willing to fire people to protect my partner income?

And as far as clients? What do they care? We're service providers. We provide good service, what difference does it make whether or not we're laying off staff and cutting summer programs? In fact, we lower our overhead enough to trim 10% off the bill, and I think they'd be mighty happy with that trade-off.

Associates felt no loyalty to us when times were good. They left in the middle of projects, they went in-house, they switched firms at will. Why do we need to be loyal to them now? How about we reward the people who make the business run, who bring in clients, who actually add value through their own competence and hard work? Partner vs. associate, I choose the partner, every time.

Take that, Jones Day.