Linklaters ditches 18% of London associates and enrages the rest
30 January 2009
Linklaters has finally confirmed that it will make 100-120 out of its 640 London associates redundant, along with a massive 130-150 support staff. The confirmation came nearly a week after it was splashed all over the press.

The news first leaked out last week, and was plastered all over the press last Friday. Nervous Linklaters staff spent the whole day wondering what was going on before managing partner Simon Davies finally sent a message out at 5:40pm. Which simply repeated the same statement the firm had given the press. There's a man earning his £2million a year.

Then Robert Elliott, the firm's head of banking, emailed his department on Saturday night to stress that they were still expected to knuckle down and do a good job regardless of the news. Outraged at the tone of the email, one associate sent a furious reaction to RollOnFriday - which is, sadly, unrepeatable on a family website.

Robert Elliott. What a banker.

The firm finally 'fessed up about the detail of the redundancies yesterday, with Davies saying that the move was in response to the slowdown and had been made "reluctantly and after a great deal of careful thought". But Linklaters has been doing this on the sly for months: it has already booted out swathes of staff for "performance" reasons.

A spokesman for the firm said "our intention is to communicate to our people first and to be as transparent as possible. Following the coverage in the press on Friday, we decided to accelerate an announcement in order to limit unnecessary uncertainty. We communicated with our people as soon as this decision had been taken".