Buchanan Ingersoll buck trend in associate hiring
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Not even Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney would suggest its decision to hire 13 associates is a trend or something the firm plans on repeating, but the hires are noteworthy, nonetheless.
Noteworthy because the Downtown-based firm's hiring of 13 associates across class levels over three months is not something most big firms have been doing since the economy turned south two years ago.
Most firms have scaled back first-year associate hiring, bringing in much smaller classes, if any, in the fall -- just three of Buchanan Ingersoll's new crop are first-year associates -- and the lateral market for associates at other levels has been pretty much nonexistent.
Buchanan Ingersoll CEO John A. "Jack" Barbour said the trend of minimizing associate hiring still applies at his firm as well. The firm is having a strong year when it comes to hours, and went looking for associates in very specific practice areas to fill a perceived need.
"We went into the market looking for them," Mr. Barbour said. "Each one was a fairly targeted hire because of the workload."
The bulk of the hires came to the Pittsburgh office -- two were in Philadelphia, one in Harrisburg and another in Alexandria, Va. Two of the Pittsburgh associates were part of a recent three-person group to join the firm in an effort to further grow its Marcellus Shale practice.
That group included shareholder Carl F. Staiger from Dinsmore & Shohl and associates Shawn Gallagher and Terry Roberts.
The practice areas the new crop of associates have joined run the gamut and include intellectual property, corporate finance and technology, litigation, health care, labor and employment, financial services, real estate, the Marcellus Shale oil and gas group and the bankruptcy and creditors' rights section.
Buchanan Ingersoll never conducted mass associate layoffs, focusing its cuts on support staff. But the firm did say it was giving tougher performance evaluations last year that would result in a lower head count.
Mr. Barbour said Thursday, "there was a lot of concern" internally about making associate hires in an era when clients don't want to pay for younger attorneys and law firms are hiring fewer and fewer.
"We really made sure that we felt that not only would we have work today, but we'd have it for the foreseeable future," he said.
First Published October 18, 2010 12:00 am
