Not even Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney would suggest its recent associate hiring decisions are the sign of a trend or something the firm plans on repeating, but they are noteworthy nonetheless.
Noteworthy because the hiring of 13 associates across class levels in the span of three months is not something most large firms have been doing since the economy turned south two years ago.
Most firms have scaled back first-year associate hiring, bringing in much smaller classes, if any, in the fall — just three of Buchanan Ingersoll’s new crop are first-year associates — and the lateral market for associates at other levels has been pretty much non-existent.
Buchanan Ingersoll Chief Executive Officer John A. “Jack” Barbour said the trend of minimizing associate hiring by keeping class sizes small and strictly limiting lateral movement still applies at his firm as well. The firm is having a strong year when it comes to hours and went looking for associates in very specific practice areas to fill a perceived need.
“We went into the market looking for them,” Barbour said. “Each one was a fairly targeted hire because of the workload.”
The bulk of the hires came to the Pittsburgh office, two were in Philadelphia, one in Harrisburg and another in Alexandria, Va. Two of the Pittsburgh associates were part of a recent three-person group to join the firm in an effort to further grow its Marcellus Shale practice. That group included shareholder Carl F. Staiger from Dinsmore & Shohl and associates Shawn Gallagher and Terry Roberts.
The new crop of associates ranges from first-years to those who have clerked for two years to associates with five or six years of experience. The practice areas they have joined run the gamut and include intellectual property, corporate finance and technology, litigation, health care, labor and employment, financial services, real estate, the Marcellus Shale oil and gas group and the bankruptcy and creditors’ rights section.
Buchanan Ingersoll never conducted mass associate layoffs, focusing its cuts on support staff. But the firm did say it was giving tougher performance evaluations last year that would result in a lower headcount. Barbour said Thursday “there was a lot of concern” internally about making associate hires in an era when clients don’t want to pay for younger attorneys and law firms are hiring fewer and fewer of them.
“We really made sure that we felt that not only would we have work today but we’d have it for the foreseeable future,” he said.
Barbour said there was almost a sense of urgency to hire these associates to help handle the work. He said, however, that the firm is not looking to return to hiring large groups of associates on a regular basis.
“We’re not going back to large summer associate classes or starting classes right out of law school,” Barbour said. “We’ll hire to fulfill our needs, and, fortunately, our firm is very busy.”
Three of the 13 associates hired made up the entirety of Buchanan Ingersoll’s 2010 fall class. There were also just three summer associates this year and, Barbour said, there most likely will be a similarly sized summer class in 2011.
Cathy Abelson of Abelson Legal Search said there is no question that activity in the lateral market at all attorney levels, be it associates, counsel or partners, has picked up in 2010 compared to 2009. The attorneys are being pushed harder to produce at all levels and are expected to handle more on their own. Firms are still putting off hiring until they absolutely have to, she said.
“Based on previous recessions, it takes a couple of years and then there will be the need to add people into the pipeline,” Abelson said.
The difference with this recession that is confusing is what to do with the junior lawyers, she said, because of the alternative fee arrangements being pushed by clients and a general push back on the use of younger attorneys.
Until firms figure out just what their new model will be, it’s difficult to know how to proceed with hiring, Abelson said.
For some firms, the changing economic model for associate hiring has made the prospect of bringing on younger attorneys more palatable. Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott CEO Timothy Ryan has said he is now interested in hiring first-year associates after more than five years of not doing so because the salaries for that class have dropped so dramatically in many markets.
