EDD: Issues, Law, and Solutions: Job Loss and the Economy

Friday, February 13, 2009

Job Loss and the Economy

The headlines screamed 800 Law Firm Jobs Lost in One Day.

Law firms cite a declining demand for legal services, decreased fees for the work that's left and a lack of usual attrition as reasons for cutting attorneys loose. In plain english : "its the economy...dummy"

It is now apparent that this downturn will be deeper and broader than past recessions, and all business sectors will be adversely affected in some way," Goodwin Procter Chairwoman Regina Pisa wrote in a memo announcing that the firm would lay off 38 associates and 36 staff, about a 4 percent reduction. DLA Piper cut 80 associates, or 5 percent of its U.S.-based lawyers DLA also let go of 100 staff members across the firm's 26 U.S. offices. Before the cuts, DLA Piper had about 1,500 attorneys in the United States and 3,800 attorneys worldwide.

“In light of the deepening economic downturn over the last number of months, we have carefully considered and reduced expenses across virtually all of our operations,” the firm said in a statement last weej. “While we had hoped for a rebound in economic activity, we believe that a major improvement in 2009 is increasingly unlikely.

The lawyoffs have hit all levels of the Amlaw 200 and the Global 100.
It is important to realize that most attorneys don't work for top Am Law firms so in reality is the news is much worse for the legal industry. . Imagine how many jobs have been lost at small to mid size firms with no press or fanfare.

We are in the middle of what will likely be the worst U.S. economic contraction since the 1930s. I can understand various attempts to prop up the financial system but as the owner of a litigation support business I think that more of the government's focus should be on incentives for people and businesses to invest, produce and work.

I know I am severely underqualified to comment on and understand the policy and decison making that goes into the stimulus package - as is 99.9999% of the U.S.- so I find myself watching; worrying and hoping that Obama gets it right and I ask - who has more incentive to get it right than President Obama?

At the end of the day however , a great deal of the debate between the Democratic and Rebublican parties is about how to apportion our nations wealth.

It's too bad the debate has ceased being about whether the government should be in the business of apportioning wealth.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Sedona Principles 2nd ed.

1. Electronically stored information is potentially discoverable under Fed. R. Civ. P. 34 or its state equivalents. Organizations must properly preserve electronically stored information that can reasonably be anticipated to be relevant to litigation.
2. When balancing the cost, burden, and need for electronically stored information, courts and parties should apply the proportionality standard embodied in Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(2)(C) and its state equivalents, which require consideration of the technological feasibility and realistic costs of preserving, retrieving, reviewing, and producing electronically stored information, as well as the nature of the litigation and the amount in controversy.
3. Parties should confer early in discovery regarding the preservation and production of electronically stored information when these matters are at issue in the litigation and seek to agree on the scope of each party’s rights and responsibilities.
4. Discovery requests for electronically stored information should be as clear as possible, while responses and objections to discovery should disclose the scope and limits of the production.
5. The obligation to preserve electronically stored information requires reasonable and good faith efforts to retain information that may be relevant to pending or threatened litigation. However, it is unreasonable to expect parties to take every conceivable step to preserve all potentially relevant electronically stored information.
6. Responding parties are best situated to evaluate the procedures, methodologies, and technologies appropriate for preserving and producing their own electronically stored information.
7. The requesting party has the burden on a motion to compel to show that the responding party’s steps to preserve and produce relevant electronically stored information were inadequate.
8. The primary source of electronically stored information for production should be active data and information. Resort to disaster recovery backup tapes and other sources of electronically stored information that are not reasonably accessible requires the requesting party to demonstrate need and relevance that outweigh the costs and burdens of retrieving and processing the electronically stored information from such sources, including the disruption of business and information management activities.
9. Absent a showing of special need and relevance, a responding party should not be required to preserve, review, or produce deleted, shadowed, fragmented, or residual electronically stored information.
10. A responding party should follow reasonable procedures to protect privileges and objections in connection with the production of electronically stored information.
11. A responding party may satisfy its good faith obligation to preserve and produce relevant electronically stored information by using electronic tools and processes, such as data sampling, searching, or the use of selection criteria, to identify data reasonably likely to contain relevant information.
12. Absent party agreement or court order specifying the form or forms of production, production should be made in the form or forms in which the information is ordinarily maintained or in a reasonably usable form, taking into account the need to produce reasonably accessible metadata that will enable the receiving party to have the same ability to access, search, and display the information as the producing party where appropriate or necessary in light of the nature of the information and the needs of the case.
13. Absent a specific objection, party agreement or court order, the reasonable costs of retrieving and reviewing electronically stored information should be borne by the responding party, unless the information sought is not reasonably available to the responding party in the ordinary course of business. If the information sought is not reasonably available to the responding party in the ordinary course of business, then, absent special circumstances, the costs of retrieving and reviewing such electronic information may be shared by or shifted to the requesting party.
14. Sanctions, including spoliation ﬁndings, should be considered by the court only if it finds that there was a clear duty to preserve, a culpable failure to preserve and produce relevant electronically stored information, and a reasonable probability that the loss of the evidence has materially prejudiced the adverse party.
Copyright © 2007 The Sedona Conference®. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted courtesy of The Sedona Conference®.
Go to http://www.thesedonaconference.org/ to download a free copy of the complete document for your personal use only.