There will be leadership announcements and some layoffs in legal over the next 2 weeks.
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You are all fake lawyers.
I thought they already cleaned house in August when some of the AGCs “retired”. What are layoffs going to look like now? Will the worthless admins and office managers be released? Will Ellen finally lay-off these overpaid DGC dinosaurs who bring no added value to the company? It’s clear the lower rank counsels and paralegals do the majority of the heavy lifting and who provide the company the highest return compared to their salary.
I can guarantee any layoffs in legal will not come near to touching those who knew about sale practice and other issues. I was hoping Patterson would jettison some of the ineffectual DGCs but instead she got rid of 2 wonderfully smart, hard working, ethical women who stood up to their clients and were great leaders. Parker kept saying raise your hand, step out of your lane, but that message skipped over a layer or two and those who raised their hands have experienced retaliation. If lawyers don't feel safe speaking up, how can we expect tellers, front line bankers or anyone else to do so?
who cares if they go from manager to individual contributors? sounds like a good deal to me and like there wont be lots of layoffs there.
@1vaf clearly you do not know what you are talking about. first, you are generalizing and second not all legal has anything to do with retail/branches. Some that support lines of business have been told they can advise but it is ultimately up to the business. Ever heard of “run it like you own it?” Ever heard of “it’s a business decision?” On top of that, I have literally had to argue with risk partners about how they are interpreting something incorrectly or explained the legal risk to teams to have them go as high as possible to skirt the guidance given. Maybe operations should be more receptive to guidance. Maybe risk shouldnt be given authority to over rule legal just because there is no law prohibiting a bad practice or a practice that is not in our customers’ best interest. I have even found an instance where risk pushed for a policy change legal was unaware of which lead to legal being taken out of the loop. The company is working against legal in some cases so stop assuming we are the cause of the problems. The majority of legal has zero oversight into bonus structures, sales practices and branch activities because the bulk of our time goes into litigation, bk, fc, Reg matters, LRAs, lob support and remediations.
Legal should not be immune from down sizing at the company because in large part it is a contributor to the problems. The same leaders and senior lawyers have let the company down for years. The only evidence you need to see why the legal department needs a clean sweep is sales practices settlements, OCC charges and 5 consent orders. It's not enough to get rid of a handful of people – the culture needs to change and that won't happen until all the DGCs are replaced and the bonus structure is greatly reduced. Lawyers need a culture which actually supports them giving advice that the company's leadership may not like – but need to hear and act upon. These same lawyers need to be insulated from suffering adverse consequences to their bonus or performance rating when doing the hard but needed work. Pay people to do their jobs rather than paying people to make the leadership in the firm happy.
This is a department that should be rated "needs improvement."
No doubt there will be down sizing in legal but unfortunately it will not be the people making the big money. It will be the people promoted to management with 1 or 3 direct reports to start. Why did the leadership create all these manager positions when spans and layers has been in place for years? It was “5” for many years — now we hear it’s 7. Did they not think of the consequences of their decisions? Why did they continue to add more titles like Associate General Counsel and Senior Managing Counsel? Were people not paid enough? Hardly. Was there an actual threat of loss of talent? Nope. The lawyers in legal department are paid very very well – AGCs have an 80% bonus target and it does up from there!
Legal team members start paying attention to the announcements. They have already started moving the “protected ones” back from their manager positions to individual contributor roles. If you are one of these managers with less than 7 and have not been moved yet I would be worried based on other "protected ones" getting moved. It is really is sad the wrong people suffer at the hands of these DGCs and their short sighted positions.
@rar you are saying it will just be leaders where we have overlaps? We have lots of managers with 1-6 team members. We knew theyd want to combine teams due to spans and layers but never knew if left over managers would become individual contributors or be let go since we are so understaffed.
Leadership, yes. Layoffs, extremely minimal.
Even a broke clock is correct 2 times per day...
What leadership changes?
My team hasn’t heard anything. It’d be nice to know dates, real dates. Wells Fargo could save a lot of anxiety by giving a date to know for each area of the company.
We hear that every week. Getting a little cynical about some of these leaks I'm afraid.