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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]is this affecting your wachtells and cravaths?[/quote]

This is an industry-wide trend. You think trends skip firms by vault ranking? "Oh, whoops, this one's a V10, let me go affect the V50."[/quote]

wsj article posted by op said that the market is bifurcating into the ultra elite and the rest one could hypothesize that WLRK and others at the very top aren't seeing the hit in billings that perhaps lower v50 or v100 firms are[/quote]
Oh, well since the WSJ said that, I guess it must be true. Has it occurred to you that the media only catches legal trends long after they take hold? The deequitization of partners has been a real problem since 2008, but the media is only now devoting real attention to it because Shearman & Sterling couldn't keep its business under wraps. By the time the media realizes this trend has spread to V10 law firms and is actually the norm industry-wide, another 5-10 years will have passed.[/quote]

Biglaw partner here:  de-equitization isn't a "real problem."  What has happened is that the market is fragmenting, with certain practices becoming incredibly lucrative due to relatively high margins and amenability to leverage, while other practices are subject to intense rate pressure or aren't as suitable to leverage.  Some less fortunate practice groups have become essentially commodities and those groups either have been or will be dropped from Big Law entirely.  And demand is flat-to-down mostly, with an increasing number of companies taking chances with cheaper firms because of sticker shock.

You can tinker around the margins for a while with ratio adjustments and bonus pools and such, but it is now clear that the market is fundamentally changing and the organizations need to restructure, not just tinker, in order to survive.  And everyone is going to have to do it.  Firms that don't will not survive because their best people will be poached by other firms willing to be more aggressive.   [/quote]

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