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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We’ve all seen this happen to people who take a lot of leave. Parental leave, bereavement leave, medical leave. Whatever. Firm doesn’t have enough work, those folks are first on the chopping block.

OP, you would have a hard time proving any kind of discrimination or retaliation claim because almost certainly your firm has done the same to many people who took leave for other reasons or otherwise had lost hours, or any host of things. They fire people all the time so it won’t be hard for them to find comparators. You could go back to them and say this feels retaliatory and try to negotiate a longer runway, like 4 months. But at the end of the day you just need to get out. I saw this happen to too many people when I was in Biglaw, and left myself before they could do it to me. It’s really common. Law suits don’t help. Even when plaintiffs win, it’s a pyhrric victory. Law suits destroy lives and careers. And I say that as an employment lawyer. I’d only counsel a suit if it was truly egregious and someone had no better options - and wanted to take a stand. For most people, it’s better to take the severance or time and move on. Screw the firm by landing on your feet. They don’t care about you and you should not care about them. [/quote]

This.  I had great reviews prior to and after maternity leave.  When the firm hit a rough patch and billables in several practice groups, including mine,  went down, they started defenestrating more senior associates as well as some in my cohort.  I knew that I was next and was lucky that a job opened at an organization where I had interned during law school.  When I told the practice group head I would be leaving, he literally breathed a sigh of relief.  The managing partner urged me to let other associates know that I had initiated the move -- presumably because he was freaking out about the "L" word.  Nothing about this is at all atypical.  My husband was a Big Law partner and saw this kind of crap happen all the time.   [/quote]

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