So, last december, my firm fired a handful of the poor performers, but on Friday, they actually "downsized" a sizeable amount of people.

What pisses me off the most about it, is that the two fellow paralegals that they fired were the attractive female ones. So, now I have nothing good to look at during the day. The only attractive female lawyer is on a different floor than me, plus she already turned me down when I first started working there. Thankfully, the hispanic/arabic paralegal who was fired stopped by my office today to say goodbye and I gave her my number, so hopefully I'll at least see her again.

What I really don't understand about it, is that according to the profit-sharing program, the firm is making money hand-over-fist, and they had the Christmas party at the plush Metropolitan Club in the Sears Tower last December. If they have to layoff people, why are they wasting money on an expensive Christmas party? I understand the business end of it - most of the other paralegals, including myself, have been complaining about the lack of work the past nine months, so, technically, they had too many workers for the amount of work they had available. Yet, in my law group (Labor & Employment), they have been continuing to hire new attorneys. So, I don't understand the logic of a lot of these things. I don't know, maybe I just have "survivor's guilt."

Thankfully, at least my job is secure. I've been told that I'll be taking on some of the former paralegals' responsibilities, and I'm involved in several ongoing projects. So, I'm safe for now at least.

Well, I've finally witnessed the recession first hand now.

Opty, I'm gonna have to kill you for your fake sig quote of me.

Heh. Now, I couldn't have possibly disagreed with him on every issue, could I?

For example, we're both White Sox fans.

If this was 1920.

The curse was broken in '05! Yay!!!!

GP is right to an extent, but a good number of the 13 people (almost 10% of our workforce) who were fired from my firm on Friday were good workers, it's just that we didn't have any work for them anymore, and they had the lowest seniority. I'd say around half of the terminations were poor performers/troublemakers, and the rest were the low seniority folks.


It's funny, my group (Labor & Employment) didn't have any terminations, as we didn't lose that much money - the poor economy actually created more jobs for us; however, the bad financial picture is making it hard for our clients to pay our invoices. A senior partner even said in a meeting we had today that we had a check bounce on us this morning, which was apparently the first time one of our clients did that to us (We are a young firm, only about 15 years old).

Even funnier, is that the senior partners are now really hoping that Obama passes some new labor laws like the Employee Free Choice Act, since it will create a shitload of new work for us, helping companies comply with the new legislation. I'd be happy, except that law takes the democracy out of choosing union membership.