All through October, a second-year law student got upbeat emails from Weil Gotshal & Manges, the firm where she'd landed a coveted summer job. A very different message arrived on Oct. 29, the day after the 95-year-old firm announced it was dissolving. The recruiters said they could no longer honor the 2027 offers. She posted her resume on LinkedIn that day.
The collapse of a large, respected law firm almost overnight is without precedent. Weil's roughly 600 associates and the students with future offers are likely the hardest hit. For many, the firm's end pulled the professional rug out from under a plan. Jobs for first-year associates at big New York firms pay more than $200,000 a year, plus sizable bonuses. Hiring follows a rigid calendar, with firms interviewing future associates as early as their first semester. "This is a paradigm shift," one law-school career dean said.
The market moved fast
The good news for the lawyers is that talent gets absorbed. A headhunter said his team scheduled more than 100 interviews for Weil lawyers within days. Top firms interviewed candidates over the weekend to snap them up. One litigation firm's co-managing partner emailed his own lawyers that he'd already received a significant number of resumes and wanted to grab some of the trial talent. The last time a major firm collapsed like this was Dewey & LeBoeuf in 2012. A study found that soon after, 80% of its partners stayed in big law. About half its associates did.
By the weekend the demise had entered parody. A Harvard Law student saw a peer in a Halloween costume: an angel outfit with a Weil sign.
Our read
This is a Careers and Cash Flow story, module M5. The people hit here weren't in a struggling industry. They were at the top of a profession, with $200,000 offers and a 95-year-old name behind them. The firm vanished anyway. The lesson isn't to be afraid of your job. It's that a high income and a safe income are not the same thing, and the gap between them is an emergency fund.
An emergency fund is what turns a disaster into an inconvenience. The associate who loses an offer and has six months of expenses in cash can take the right next job instead of the first one. The one living paycheck to paycheck on a big salary has to grab whatever's offered. Here's the check this week, whatever you earn. Add up one month of must-pay costs, rent or mortgage, food, insurance, minimums. Multiply by three to six. That's your target. Then look at what you actually have in cash, outside your 401(k). If there's a gap, the fix isn't dramatic. Route a fixed amount from each paycheck into a separate high-yield savings account, where it earns around 4% while it waits. A 13-week Treasury bill recently paid about 4%, too. The higher your income, the more tempting it is to skip this, and the more it hurts when a 95-year-old firm closes on a Wednesday. If you want help sizing the fund against your real expenses, that's fifteen minutes.