Reply to Big Law - HR meeting out of the blue

Forum Index » Jobs and Careers

Reply to "Big Law - HR meeting out of the blue "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is op. This has been an insane few days. Is anyone with me that this is 100% retaliation? I had great reviews with no issues, I came back from leave in September, I had my review in early November where they discussed my great evaluations and everything is fine and dandy and now all of a sudden in Jan, they have this meeting with bogus excuses and when I refer to my evaluations and good reviews they say “we’re not good at giving reviews” and “let’s not focus on reviews” and “law firms are notoriously bad at giving reviews”. Smells like and feels like retaliation for maternity leave. [/quote]

OP, I get that this is a tough situation for you, but it’s unlikely to be retaliation. Big Law is up or out, and strong performance at the mid- to senior associate level is not a guarantee of advancement.  There are many things that are more likely to be the cause of something like this, practice group economics being the major driver in most cases.  It’s unfortunate and a bad practice that some firms are not more candid when it’s an economic decision, I think it’s fairer to people to shoot straight.

I’m not sure how it is at your firm, at ours maternity leave is an understood and anticipated cost of doing business—admittedly frustrating to cover gaps at times, but in the “I wish so and so were here” sense not the “so and so is going to pay for not being here” sense—and getting rid of someone as “retaliation” the moment they are back and able to work and make money for you is just cutting off your nose to spite your face.  Maternity leave is routine and anticipated, I’ve never heard anyone ever sound mad about it in a way that might suggest retaliation.

Big Law firms are all about the money these days, and it’s likely just optimizing headcount relative to anticipated demand, as cold as that sounds.  The PIP thing as described here is a little confusing though, typically I would expect a PIP to say “you need to do X, y, or z” and if you don’t achieve those targets we will have to consider letting you go, with some sort of severance/job hunting period thereafter.  Is there anything like that in what they asked you to do?  My guess is that you are being treated better than a similarly situated associate to manage the optics of this decision coming shortly after maternity leave, and that has that not been in play this decision would have come sooner. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics