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WHAT WE'RE WATCHING

TOO MUCH, TOO FAST  - Despite impressive gains at the top of the Am Law 200 charts and a mindset geared more toward growth, layoffs and cuts continue to rattle the industry. Productivity and utilization remain a problem, observers and analysts have told Law.com's Andrew Maloney , as some firms expect deal work to improve only "incrementally" and the tech sector in particular just hasn't shown enough resilience. Those assessments come as Fenwick & West told employees on Tuesday that it was laying off "just under" 10% of its professionals, including attorneys and staff. The firm cited a surge in demand from 2020 through early 2022 that caused Fenwick & West to hire "quite aggressively," said Richard Dickson, the firm's chair, in a memo viewed by Law.com. "It felt necessary at the time. But, with the benefit of hindsight, it represented a deviation from our core principle of managing for the long-term," Dickson said.

LEGAL ORGANIZATION - From the casinos on the Las Vegas Strip to Hollywood's writing rooms, workers are turning to their unions to seek protections against the risks that emerging technologies like genAI may pose to their jobs. Could a growing movement by employees to prepare for the impact of generative AI spread to an industry that hasn't traditionally been prone to unionization, like legal? As Law.com's Cassandre Coyer reports , in many ways, the legal industry is now at an inflection point. Stuck between the prospect of roles being transformed, if not entirely threatened, by the technology, an ongoing push toward business-oriented structural changes, and questions around the longevity of the billable hour,  some believe this could be the industry's first real opportunity to meaningfully consider collective bargaining.

ON THE RADAR - Attorneys from Latham & Watkins and Morrison & Foerster have stepped in to represent OpenAI Inc., developer of the ChatGpt AI language generator and Dall-E AI image generator, and other defendants in a pending copyright class action. The suit, filed Dec. 27 in New York Southern District Court by Susman Godfrey and Rothwell Figg Ernst & Manbeck on behalf of the New York Times, accuses the defendants of using copyrighted news articles to train OpenAI's large language and generative artificial intelligence models. The case, assigned to U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein, is 1:23-cv-11195, The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corporation et al. Stay up on the latest state and federal litigation, as well as the latest corporate deals, with Law.com Radar.  

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