Following the Publication of Julie Triedman's Article, Why Is Paul Weiss Firing People?

4/02/06- Good Job, Mr. Youngwood! This weekend I spoke to one of the people that you fired. This person was smart, engaging, and well-credentialed. By firing this individual (and many others like him/her), you did your clients a huge disservice. As a fellow poster recently said:

Firing JD's is a token resistance that will only result in negligence, malpractice, and professional embarassment for any firm using such tactics.

Wake up! Paralegals cannot make substantive legal judgments regarding responsiveness and privilege. Do you really think defense firms are going to risk producing reams of privileged documents to hungry plaintiff's firms? Or not producing documents they are required to produce under procedural law. Paralegals are simply not equipped to understand the substantive distinctions between responsiveness and non-responsiveness, especially in cases involving complex legal issues and hundreds of thousands of documents. A competent plaintiff's firm would benefit immensively from sloppy discovery work. Privilege judgments are extremely important and associates routinely blow privilege calls and produce privileged documents, even smoking guns, that should not be produced. How much worse would it be with paralegals doing the first level reviews?

Have some repect for the skills required to perform your job.

The question is will Mr. Youngwood have respect for our work?

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3/31/06- Today, I received the following e-mail. It is from a source with a verifiable/proveable identity. Apparently, the e-mail was written by a Paul Weiss Supervisor:

Hi {name removed for privacy reasons},

{removed for privacy reasons}. We also wanted you to know that it was not our fault that you were let go from the project. That happened from way on high, because of Tom the Temp and his blog/news article. Since the article said the JD's were coding documents ours was the team that got hit... All the JD"s are now gone and we have to retrain all non-JD people to replace them. It all sucked big time!

Anyway, {removed for privacy reasons}. Good luck with the job search, I am sure if you don't already have something that you soon will.

Take care and keep in touch.

{name removed for privacy reasons}

Wow! What an admission. Could it actually be the case that Paul Weiss is firing people for speaking to the media about safety and ethical violations? Need I remind Alfred Youngwood that whistleblowing is a legally protected activity?

The only way to deal with these problems is by improving the working conditions/raising the pay of temporary employees, and by reducing fees/providing better value to clients. The answer will not be found in mass-firings.