Blank Rome lays off 79 more employees

The law firm Blank Rome L.L.P. said today that it had laid off 27 lawyers and 52 additional staff in offices around the country to deal with the ongoing falloff in business.

The announcement follows the layoffs Monday of 55 lawyers and 161 other staff at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius L.L.P., another Center City law firm.

The layoffs at Blank Rome come on top of a round in January, when 20 lawyers were let go.

"Global economic conditions continue to affect business in all sectors of the economy," said Blank Rome spokesman Topper Ray. "The firm's leadership recently engaged in a comprehensive review of our staffing levels. This review led us to conclude, regrettably, that further adjustments to our associate and staff complements were necessary."

Besides the layoffs, the firm said it would delay the start date of its entry-level lawyers to at least January of 2010 and reduce the length of its summer associate program, essentially an apprenticeship for third-year law students, from 10 weeks to six.

The announcement today marked the latest development in a broad retrenchment in the legal industry that began late last year and has been gathering intensity.

Industry leaders say they are under pressure from clients to reduce rates, and to greatly increase efficiency. That has meant in some cases that they have discarded the traditional hourly billing system in favor of flat rates for certain legal services.

Blank Rome, one of the larger firms based in Center City, had 550 lawyers in 10 offices in the United States and Hong Kong as of December.

Because the lawyer layoffs involved associates and not partners, the cutbacks announced today seemed to fit the pattern of staff restructuring under way throughout the industry. The deepest cuts appear to be taking place in associate ranks, while partners, though not entirely protected, have not been as dramatically affected.

Indeed, firms, including Blank Rome, continue to recruit them. Several weeks ago, Blank Rome announced that it was opening an office in Los Angeles to focus on entertainment and intellectual-property matters, among other practice areas, and that it had recruited five new partners to staff it.