Wake Up Call: Staff Cuts, ‘Stealth’ Layoffs Reported at Two Big Firms

In today’s column, U.K. firm Osborne Clarke brought back more than 80 furloughed employees; California law school deans and students want the state’s recently lowered bar exam passing score to be applied retroactively to February; judges in northern California and West Virginia paused trials because of increasing numbers of Covid-19 cases; distributed firm FisherBroyles hired former Troutman Sanders corporate and venture capital attorney Justin S. Nahama as a partner in Los Angeles.

• Leading off, New York firm Sullivan & Cromwell laid off as many as 50 staff members across several departments in the last three months, offering severance packages of two weeks’ pay for every year served at the firm, American Lawyer reported, citing six sources. Many older employees were offered voluntary retirement packages, and six chief or director-level people also left the firm, though it’s not clear whether their exits were tied to the layoffs. (American Lawyer)

• Meanwhile, legal blog Above the Law said it received reports that Fox Rothschild, which was already among the dozens of Big Law firms that have made cost-cuts in the last several months to cushion their liquidity against the impact of the pandemic crisis, has recently been making an unspecified number of “stealth” layoffs of attorneys. Stealth layoffs allow firms to cut head count without acknowledging they were for economic reasons, the blog said. ATL said the firm confirmed firing six associates but said they were for productivity and performance reasons. (Above the Law)

• U.K. firm Osborne Clarke brought back 80-plus staff that it had furloughed under a government scheme earlier this year because of the Covid-19 downturn. (TheLawyer.com)

• Hertz Global Holdings Inc.'s main bankruptcy lawyer, White & Case partner Tom Lauria, said the car rental company reached a deal that will cut the debt it owes lenders who financed its rental car fleet to less than $5 billion from $11 billion by Dec. 31. (Bloomberg News via BLAW)

• As another wave of Covid-19-related commercial Chapter 11 filings looms, the market for bankrupt companies’ intellectual property is favoring sellers, bankruptcy and IP attorneys said. (BLAW)

• Because of an increase in Covid-19 cases in California, courts in the state’s Northern District will pause new jury trials—criminal or civil—until October, according to an order by Chief Judge Phyllis Hamilton. (The Recorder)

• In West Virginia, a judge who had pushed hard for trials in asbestos lawsuits cited “frightening levels of Covid-19 cases in the state for his decision to delay one trial. (Law.com)

• Ballard Spahr’s recently launched stimulus enforcement tracker, among other things, monitors CARES Act and Covid-19-related fraud enforcement across the nation. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

• After coronavirus shutdowns forced firms into months of remote work, law librarians are finally getting to demonstrate their skills at accessing online resources, not just print books, Hogan Lovells U.S. senior research services manager Emily Florio told Legaltech News. Floria is the new president of the American Association of Law Libraries. (Legaltech News)

Lawyers, Law Firms

• Hogan Lovells associate Sengova Kailondo arrived in London in 2003 after fleeing war in his native Sierra Leone. “I treated everything like it was my last chance to make it,” he says. (Law.com International)

• Indivior Plc agreed to pay $600 million to resolve U.S. criminal probes of illegal marketing of Suboxone, a popular opioid-addiction treatment. (Bloomberg News via BLAW)

Laterals, Moves

• Distributed firm FisherBroyles hired former Troutman Sanders corporate and venture capital attorney Justin S. Nahama as a partner in Los Angeles. Nahama, who calls himself a “fixer, connector, and protector,” was a Marine Corps chief prosecutor and special assistant U.S. attorney. (FisherBroyles.com)

• The former global leader of Sidley Austin’s project finance and infrastructure practice, Nicholas Grambas, left Sidley to join Australian firm Johnson Winter & Slattery as a partner based in Singapore and New York. (Law.com International)

In-house

• The Pittsburgh Pirates promoted its general counsel, Bryan Stroh, to senior vice president of baseball operations earlier this year. Stroh, a former Katten Muchin Rosenman partner, has been in-house at the Major League Baseball team since 2011. In another baseball move, the Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network LLC in January hired former Proskauer Rose lawyer Derek Heuzey as general counsel. (BLAW)

• A former Homeland Security top lawyer, Gus Coldebella, joined Paradigm, a San Francisco-based cryptocurrency investment firm, as general counsel months after leaving blockchain payments company Circle Internet Financial Ltd. Earlier in his career, Coldebella worked in private practice for nearly a decade at Fish & Richardson P.C. and Goodwin, according to his LinkedIn profile. (BLAW)

Technology

• The tech development branch of London-based Clifford Chance created a subscription-based data privacy compliance tool that for now covers 17 European countries. (Artificial Lawyer)

Legal Education

• California law school deans and over 100 alumni asked a court to make the state’s recently lowered bar exam passing score, from 144 to 139, apply retroactively to people who took the test in February. (Law.com)

• Some states going ahead with their bar exams despite the pandemic are limiting law grads’ access to menstrual products and opportunities to pump breastmilk during the exams. (ACLU.org)

• With bar exams getting canceled and starting dates at firms getting postponed because of the pandemic, law students and recent graduates are finding its hard to plan their careers. Podcast (Law.com)