The legal jobs cuts at Clifford Chance have set a gloomy start to the New Year, although by no means unexpected. At Clifford Chance’s London HQ lawyers from each of the firm’s eight practice groups piled into the firm’s windowless auditorium to hear the same pep talk from London management partner Jeremy Sandelson: the decision to make around one in ten of them redundant was not taken lightly.
The Lawyer magazine reports that as preferable as cuts may be to underhand ‘performance reviews’, that will be scant consolation for those 70 to 80 London lawyers facing limited job prospects in a difficult market.
One headhunter said that half a dozen senior Clifford Chance banking and capital markets lawyers’ CVs landed on her desk only yesterday as the news broke.
With a redundancy programme the size of Clifford Chance’s, they will not be the last, The Lawyer reports.
The firm will obviously try everything in its power to minimise the hit on morale and productivity, and is currently seeking several associate and paralegal representatives from each practice group to consult with management about the terms of the redundancies.
Other firms have been making cuts and bonus cuts to weather the increasingly severe financial storm.
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