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Well before last week’s carnage, there was no shortage of BigLaw boffins speculating on the shape of thing to come (e.g., here). Post-Black Thursday, “Change” (but not “Hope”) is certainly accelerating — but toward what? Prognostication, especially of the Cassandra type, remains among the legal industry’s few hot sectors. Of course, while every pundit has a prescription, in one regard they all agree: there’s no going back to “NY to 190!”

Predictions for a reformed BigLaw range from a (relatively) subtle tweaking of billing practices to a drastic structural teardown. Some of the former camp, including Geoff Howard, managing partner of Bingham McCutchen’s San Francisco office, and Chuck Fanning of the headhunting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa, are surveyed in the January 2009 California Bar Journal. In their view, firms will keep up appearances: “Billable rates never go down . . . Discounts go up. It’s one of those funny games that get played. A firm’s not going to lower its rates because that looks bad,” predicts Fanning. Coupled with these rate cuts discounts, theorizes Bingham’s Howard, will be an increase in staff attorney programs. These will “provide institutional, long-term quality control over electronic discovery document processes, as opposed to using highly paid junior associates.” In other words, Tom the Temp’s dystopia writ large.

If Fanning and Howard are akin to doctors prescribing moderate exercise and cutting back on trans fats, The American Lawyer’s Aric Press and LegalOnRamp’s Paul Lippe are trauma surgeons looking to amputate, and stat.

In The Coming Law Firm Hiring Crisis, an article which is surely troubling the sleep of firm recruiters everywhere, Press provides a withering assessment of BigLaw’s irrational hiring model: “This is an ugly situation made worse by the peculiar hiring schemes that were tolerable during good times but now are under serious stress … The market for labor has changed and, for now at least, there's no normal to which it can return.” What’s worse, “The calendar also tells us that we are about 180 days from the start of summer on-campus recruiting when law firms, who can't fairly predict what the third quarter of 2009 holds for them, will begin filling up their incoming classes for the fall of 2011. Even in tradition-bound law firm land, this seems a bit much.” (The specifics of what Press’s rationalized legal labor market would look like are discussed by Vera here.)

Paul Lippe, founder of the networking and info-sharing site LegalOnRamp, does not traffic in vague generalities about the future. In his 2011 Scenario and the End of Leverage, Lippe briskly breaks down hypothetical current and future law firm bills, thereby illustrating the sort of ‘substantial restructuring’ the industry will have to face:

A 2008 bill for $1,000,000 might include $450,000 for partner time, $500,000 for associate time, and $50,000 of ‘other.’

In 2011 (when Lippe assumes the recession will be over), a bill for an identical project would total $800,000($450,000 of partner time, $250,000 of associate time and $100,000 of ‘other.’)

The $200,000 difference is explained as follows: hard-bargaining clients; increased outsourcing; increased use of ‘proto associates’ (e.g., contract attorneys); and [GULP] “some associate time … replaced by technology.”

The conclusion: “The 2011 scenario locks in a 20 percent drop in firm revenues. That's right. So firms will have to find ways to cut at least 40 percent of overhead to maintain profits.”

-posted by brian