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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.
I mean, this couillon was a lawyer, I wonder how many of those other 4000 employees are? Maybe the legion of secretaries, paralegals, etc can't send out firm-wide emails unless they're, like head of HR and lawyers have the privilege regardless of how junior.
Regardless, this employee was highly stupid. There's probably about 100 people behind her waiting for her job, and she's probably 1% better than the next one. That's not worth putting up with employees who cause drama, regardless of if you agree with it or not. I wonder if this will further feed legal affirmative action for conservatives.
I think she genuinely believed that a large number of the other young lawyers at the firm felt likewise but were afraid to say anything, that the whole thing was a coordination problem, and that if she got the ball rolling others would follow suit and that while losing one associate is no big deal losing double digit percentages would be. And who knows, 10 years ago when SJWism was riding high maybe the company would have dithered for a few days instead of firing her immediately and during that time others would have been emboldened to join.
I think the lower appetite of others to join is obviously a big deal, but the main issue is the decreased willingness of companies to bend the knee. They fired her quickly giving no time for others to join and no sign of weakness or uncertainty that would encourage them to do so. Mozilla buckled like a belt under employee pressure and that really kicked off the SJW movement of corporate pressure. This is a signal, though a small one, that those days are over. Mozilla booting Eich was a signal to others, they will capitulate to young employees throwing a temper tantrum so go throw one. This will hopefully be taken as the opposite signal, if you throw a tantrum you will get fired and put a big "Don't Hire Me" sign around your neck.
The biggest mystery to me has always been why corpos bent the knee in the first place. An angry twitter mob consisting of people who will A) Forget about the story in a week no matter what you do and B) People who will cite this incident as proof of hate forever regardless of what you do, should not be reasoned with. But so many institutions were convinced that if they gave the sharks a few drops of blood, they'd be sated, and the institution spared. So they resorted to emboldening cancel warriors with insane stuff like a company firing employees of ten years because their kid said the n-word on the internet, or school principals expelling children because a one-sided video with no context made them seem guilty.
Why did it take so long for anyone to just try not listening to them?? The standard response was to only ever give the crazy people exactly what they want and hope it goes away.
After a decade of Twitter mobs exploding at the main character du jour, we know how it plays out now. But in 2014, thousands of people suddenly coming out of the woodwork demanding that you fire employee X was a relatively new experience, and one they were obviously struggling to grapple with: there was an obvious fear that failing to capitulate could gut their brand reputation and share value. After a decade of these blow-ups, companies have started to cotton on to the fact that these mobs are ultimately impotent. The mobs can kick up a stink on Twitter, they can get journalists who use Twitter to publish sympathetic articles damning the company - but I'm not aware of a single instance of a Twitter mob eventually snowballing into a genuine boycott from consumers at large (except Bud Light, as noted by @FCfromSSC below - and even then, that wasn't a case of "one of this company's employees said something dubiously offensive in their private life, therefore we're boycotting the entire company").
Bud Light.
Here's your boycott.
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