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Notes -
A third year Skadden associate sent out a firm-wide - including overseas offices in Europe and Asia - email with her "conditional" resignation, where she laid out her terms not to quit. The terms were basically to fight Trump better. She also posted the email on her LinkedIn.
A few hours later, she could no longer access her firm email - it appears Skadden accepted her resignation. She is now making news appearances talking about #resisting in the face of authoritarianism. It's unclear how many firms want a corporate associate that desires to "fight" so badly - in the few firms interested in disrupting client work for challenging the administration, social justice is reserved for the litigators.
Ultimately, all BigLaw is soulless, putting profits over justice. It's about dealwork and defense, not upholding the law itself - that's more plaintiff-side work that very few BigLaw firms can swing litigating. Not many clients wants to hire a law firm that paints a target on their back, not when NGOs and civil rights firms exist - there are more appropriate "mechanisms" in the legal world to fight these fights, and those mechanisms are in play. It is not the duty, nor the skill set, of BigLaw.
I admire her confidence that the world-wide firm would care about a junior leveraged finance associate's opinion regarding the rule of law in the United States. Posting an internal email on her LinkedIn also feels concerning from a disclosure perspective - associates have been fired for filming tiktoks in their offices before because of the risk of showing client materials.
She has previously circulated an anonymous statement "signed" by BigLaw associates listing their firm name and class year, because she believed it would pressure BigLaw firms into Doing Something.
It seems that statement culture is no longer a tool of the culture war - firms don't really seem to care. Being willing to resign is a step in the right direction, I think, although I wonder if she really thought she would be considered so valuable to the firm that they would meet her conditions. She seems to truly believe that she Accomplished Something, and I wonder if that's a residual impact of the COVID corporate social justice era, in which empowering employees to Defend The Current Thing took off.
I'm waiting to see if she's going to try to file a workplace retaliation claim or anything crazy for Skadden accepting her resignation, because that kind of feels like the vibe of things. Realistically, I know that this is going to be like when random tech workers quit over how their employers "handled" Palestine - it will be swept under the rug and forgotten about.
Crazy that a firm with 4000 employees allowed a junior to send out a firm-wide email, everywhere I’ve worked heavily restricts that kind of thing to very senior management and the internal comms team.
Could have been worse. Could have started a "Reply all" chain. It took my company a surprisingly long amount if time to figure out how to stop those.
And it can get worse yet.
Fun blast from the past. Haven't thought about that since I read it at the time. :)
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That is fantastic. My funniest personal experience with a "reply all" cascade was the time it happened at a very buttoned-down corporation and not one but several people employed dank memes in their (futile, counter-productive) "Stop replying all, you fools!" replies to all.
Yeah, I love reply-all storms. I get why email admins hate them, but as I'm not an email admin I get to just enjoy the hilarity of people begging everyone to stop/sending memes.
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