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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.
I really would have to know more about her to figure out what her motivations are. One possible motivation that no-one else seems to have mentioned is that she simply just actually believes that we are headed for a fascist dictatorship that will take away women's rights and so on.
In the course of the last few years I have seen several very smart friends of mine become rabid Trump-haters who genuinely, not in a virtue signalling way, but genuinely are worried that Trump is taking the country towards dictatorship and that there are plausible mechanisms by which Trump could create such a dictatorship. These are well-read, sharp people who do not normally display any sort of cognitive derangement or hysteria.
I myself have some worries about Trump and dictatorship and so on, which I have expressed here before, but not to the level of these friends of mine. I think that Trump would absolutely love to be a dictator, I just see no plausible path by which he or any other politician could accomplish this. Any major steps that Trump took towards dictatorship would literally cause a civil war. For example, California wouldn't sit around letting it happen, it would secede from the Union. I don't know, maybe I am overestimating the left's willingness to resist, but in any case I just can't imagine any plausible path to dictatorship as long as the politically non-apathetic Americans are split about evenly 50-50 between the left and the right. This isn't like Russia, where basically 80% of people supported Putin in the early 2000s, which gave him an opportunity to consolidate a dictatorship while backed by a huge fraction of the population.
Some of my smart friends, however, very much disagree with this.
Anyway, my point is that it's perfectly possible that this woman just genuinely feels like she has to do something, anything. Do I think that's the most likely explanation? No, but it's a possible one.
But this woman is surely bright enough to realize that this stunt won't actually do anything? Ca cest coullion.
You're way overestimating liberal capacity to resist-in-practice. California in particular(and the west coast more broadly) relies on being part of the broader US in order to avoid local state failure. Now that doesn't mean blue states need reds more than vice versa. But it means blue states(or at least, the kind that could spearhead resistance) are more dependent on the rest of the union than red ones.
Why is everyone so confident in Skadden's HR? When I was graduating some really talented people did make it into the top biglaw firms, but so did quite a few mediocrities. 2nd/3rd year is right around washout time for those people to go to firm #2 at a bump down where again they washout before taking a federal job where they do nothing for GS-14 salary till the end of time.
Young people in genera suck right now in the legal field. I am in an adjacent field and feel it. Friends in biglaw complain about it all the time.
Standards were already out of fashion at law schools, and went off a cliff with covid. There is no appetite at the schools to bring them back
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