Risks from reductions in force among the lawyers of a legal team include the following:
- Increases in time to accomplish tasks, reduction or delay in services, for example, contracts or patent filings, and any contractual work
- More legal work pushed back to clients to handle or simply not done
- Pressures to spend more on external counsel to compensate
- Client dissatisfaction from slowness in turnaround, responsiveness or quality of work
- Difficulties retaining and hiring staff
- More mistakes made
- Difficulties in implementing new arrangements, since everyone is too stretched to think or change
- Burn-out of legal staff from over-work
- Change-management obstacles, such as the hibernation of initiatives on technology, training, diversity, pro bono or family-friendly policies
- Departures of the most talented lawyers, who might succumb to opportunities in a less stressed situation
Since you can’t measure the risks avoided by lawyers who practice in-house, you can’t measure the risks added on when you lay off those lawyers (See my post of March 9, 2009: the hidden and high costs of layoffs; and Feb. 5, 2009: layoffs with 7 references.).