A&O confirms up to 155 London layoffs ahead of Belfast launch

Readers' comments (15)

• Anonymous | 5-May-2011 4:09 pm

  Surprise, surprise. What a choice for the employees concerned - take redundancy or move to Belfast.

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• Belfastest Gun in the West | 5-May-2011 4:09 pm

  And here was me thinking loads of support staff would have jumped at the chance to move to Ireland. What an idiot I am.

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• on the fence... | 5-May-2011 4:25 pm

  “There was a lot of detail that we couldn’t get into before announcing the proposals". Do you mean to say that before A&O announced the move to Belfast they already knew that there might be redundancies? No sh*t Sherlock.
  That said, if the jobs are going to be maintained what difference should it make if its in London or in Belfast? Firms are under pressure to reduce their cost base, so this would be a logical step for A&O management. Shame about the staff in London though...

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• Anonymous | 5-May-2011 4:38 pm

  You've got to love the myth of outsourcing. At least, unlike CMS, A&O isn't spinning it as something that clients require. The cost of redundancy for 155 people isn't going to be cheap, on top of hiring 250 in NI. It would be an expensive waste of time and effort if it wasn't for that nice big grant they're getting.
  
  Anything to keep PEP up!

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• Vinny Samways | 5-May-2011 5:21 pm

  You've got to love these stealth redundancies: you can keep your job, there's just one condition....
  
  How many partners would stay at a firm if they were told they had to move to a different country?

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• Anonymous | 5-May-2011 10:46 pm

  As an A&O client I will await details on how they plan to pass on the cost savings

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• Anonymous | 6-May-2011 0:55 am

  While legal, highly immoral.
  
  Who taught those A+O people about humanity? Who did these people have for parents? What values did they teach them? Is this what one of the supposed best of the UK law firms produces? Is this what is taught to them in schools? Shame.
  
  May their children be treated as badly.

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• Anonymous | 6-May-2011 9:48 am

  " How many partners would stay at a firm if they were told they had to move to a different country?"
  
  As someone who works at an international firm, plenty. It's not unusual for it to be a prerequisite of being made up to partner to spend at least a few years in another office. Junior partners are often at the whim of business need as well, they have value that firms might well want to relocate.

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• Welcome to The Free Market | 6-May-2011 9:52 am

  @Anonymous | 5-May-2011 10:46 pm
  
  'As an A&O client I will await details on how they plan to pass on the cost savings'
  
  There is no way on Earth clients will see any extra cost savings from this - not this year anyway. The plan is to reduce the costs to A&O of agreeing to lower rates for process work that clients have already demanded.
  
  Many City firms now accept they have no choice but to reduce rates on commoditized work, but if they don't cut their own costs it will mean a nasty erosion of PEP - which they are not going to let happen - hence Belfast.
  
  The interesting battle will now be to see which firms can still own the process work while providing it at the cheapest cost to themselves - (and without the standard getting so low the clients start to notice.)
  
  It's the beginning of a new phase for City law firms: with price pressure steadily increasing on process fees. We may even see that in five years' time process work fees are considerably lower than they are today. Sounds crazy in the legal world, but this retail price erosion/battle to reduce wholseale production costs is how the rest of the economy works.

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• Anonymous | 6-May-2011 10:43 am

  err...Belfast is not " a different country". Last time I looked, it was part of the UK. It is not in "Ireland" (unlike Dublin) but Northern Ireland.I would not want to move so far away from home/my life/my friends. I would not want to move to Newcastle either.

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• Kim Kardashian | 6-May-2011 10:46 am

  @Welcome to The Free Market | 6-May-2011 9:52 am
  
  90% of the work A&O lawyers they do is commoditized work – Finance / Corporate etc is just cut and paste and precedent based so the logical step would be, looking down the line in 5 or 6 years, to cut virtually all their associates and have paralegals do the work (in Ireland no doubt) – as most of the work done in finance / corporate a 14 year old could do. UK technical legal work would be done done in London (i.e. real “advice” work) and then they would rent the rest of their London office space out. A&O is a commoditized legal factory if you like – at some point they will structure themselves to reflect that – that is if they really want to give the client a good deal. Why clients pay associates £300 an hour for work that someone barely out of puberty could do is beyond me.

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• IHateBPP | 6-May-2011 12:16 pm

  I might be mistaken but did A&O not say that no jobs would lost due to the new sausage factory opening up?
  
  On a related note, does anyone know how the new HS sausage factory's going?

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• Anon | 6-May-2011 12:45 pm

  GREED.
  
  Sadly the predominant characteristic at all City firms, not just Allen & Overy.

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• anon | 6-May-2011 4:21 pm

  Of course it's largely precedent based, Kim. Clients don't want (and won't pay for) you to draft free-hand. What they want (and pay for) is that you don't stuff it up. That's why big clients use expensive firms.

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• Anonymous | 6-May-2011 6:26 pm

  Clients don't pay for A+O not to stuff it up, they pay A+O so that if it is stuffed up the person hiring a 'brand' won't be fired. That is the scam.
  As to quality, I once heard an A+O partner (and still a partner) from CEE claim (in front ofnhis client) that there was a robust m+a practice in CEE before 1989. Duh.

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