Citing a drop in demand for premium legal services that he called the “new normal,” executive partner Barry Wolf announced Monday that the firm is trimming associate head count by 7 percent, laying off 110 nonlawyer employees, and cutting the compensation of about 10 percent of its 334 partners.
In a speech to the partnership and in a firmwide memo distributed via email, Wolf also said Weil is scaling back its complex commercial litigation practice, a group that includes some 200 lawyers, with the Houston and Boston offices seeing the biggest cuts.
Wolf noted in the memo that a steady diet of financial crisis–related work over the last several years—most notably, Weil’s role as lead debtor’s counsel in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy—had allowed the firm to avoid making dramatic cuts on the expense-side of the ledger amid what continues to be a sluggish market for high-end legal work.
