Revenge of the Serfs

Law Blog notes that McDermott Will & Emery plans to create a feudal system where overlords have their legal fields tended to by lesser-skilled, underpaid, C+ serfs who didn't study that hard in law school. These serfs will toil endlessly for little pay, harboring resentments and remembering personal slights visited upon them by the well-fed, partnership-track ruling class, until roiling class tensions boli over into a bloody October revolution.

Well, I'm paraphrasing, but you get the idea:

At a firm retreat in October, the 1,000-lawyer firm decided to create a cadre of staff lawyers outside the partnership track who will be paid less, work less and charge less per hour. Having a flexible separate staff to move from big litigation to big litigation could help McDermott make the best use of its high-priced associates.

The idea is that the new hires -- the firm is looking into starting with a pilot group of 15 -- will be lawyers "with good pedigrees" who have practiced for a few years but don't want to deal with big-firm hours, Mallory said. Instead, they'll put in more like 30 to 40 hours and be paid something like 25 percent less, though an exact pay range hasn't been decided.

"They'll have a status within our structure that's brand-new," Mallory said. "I don't know what we'd call them -- this is a new animal."

These attorneys will probably be housed in a similar fashion to accounting firms, rotating desks with no home base.

The new class of attorneys will probably take some of the more mundane tasks like document review off the plates of more expensive associates on the partnership track.

"The idea isn't that this will be a training ground," he said. "This isn't a path into the firm."

How could a plan like this not work?

Steven Siff, you have been warned.