As someone who long ago was an equity partner at a mid-sized Chicago firm, more recently the GC of a public company and now the owner of two private companies, even if I agreed with the choice, I would not hire the firm to do work in the currently disfavored practices. If I'm paying for the "best", I don't want to take on a known risk of low morale associates working on my matters. I disagree with the choice though. There's mountains of research showing that supportive and accountable environments lead to better job performance and any firm that continues to operate this way is almost guaranteed to be doing suboptimal work.
This may be my bias as a litigator, but there's a certain amount of "what's good for the goose" here if things start going this way. By all means, hand out bonuses to M&A folks this year, but then I want my retroactive practice area bonuses from the early to mid teens given that litigation was crushing it in that era and not only did we not get more, bonuses were cut *across the board, including for litigators* because transactional practices weren't doing as well.
As someone who long ago was an equity partner at a mid-sized Chicago firm, more recently the GC of a public company and now the owner of two private companies, even if I agreed with the choice, I would not hire the firm to do work in the currently disfavored practices. If I'm paying for the "best", I don't want to take on a known risk of low morale associates working on my matters. I disagree with the choice though. There's mountains of research showing that supportive and accountable environments lead to better job performance and any firm that continues to operate this way is almost guaranteed to be doing suboptimal work.
This may be my bias as a litigator, but there's a certain amount of "what's good for the goose" here if things start going this way. By all means, hand out bonuses to M&A folks this year, but then I want my retroactive practice area bonuses from the early to mid teens given that litigation was crushing it in that era and not only did we not get more, bonuses were cut *across the board, including for litigators* because transactional practices weren't doing as well.
This strikes me as a Pandora's box. I worry about unintended consequences.