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Negotiating Law Firm Layoffs: Good Fortune and Bad

By Victoria Pynchon

Here's a Sunday morning homily to get this tale through fifteen years of sobriety and the career; love, marriage; and family that came with it.  It's also meant to give a little hope to the recently laid off.

There was an old farmer who lived in a shtetl in Poland.  This was before the First World War.  One day, the farmer's only horse broke through the fence and ran away. Without the horse, the farmer couldn't plow his fields.  The loss was an unfathomable catastrophe.  The farmer's neighbors came and did what they could but no one had an "extra" horse. "Such bad luck!" they exclaimed. 

"We'll see," said the farmer sagely.  "We'll see."  And the neighbors went away beginning to doubt the man's sanity.

The very next day the horse came back followed by two new wild horses that the farmer "broke."  He was able to triple his output and became one of the leading men in town.  His neighbors were amazed. 

"What good luck you have," they said, with a mixture of genuine happiness for their neighbor's good fortune and envy that it seemed to come to him so easily. 

"We'll see," the farmer responded, "but thank you very much for your good wishes."

The following year, one of the wild horses bucked while the farmer's son was riding it, breaking his leg so badly that he would never walk without a cane.

The neighbors brought food and flowers and bemoaned their neighbor's ill fortune.  A disabled son was a worse fate than a lost horse.  Once again, the farmer's fortunes diminished and the neighbors greeted him with expressions of the greatest sympathy.  "What terrible luck," they'd say and the farmer would once again respond,

"We'll see." 

A few months later, a military brigade marched through the village on the way to war, drafting all the young men for the army.  The farmer's son greeted them walking with a cane and they spat at his father.

"This young man is worthless!" they exclaimed.  "Not even good to be a foot soldier" and went their way.

"Such good luck!" said the neighbors.

"We'll see."  

A Career in the Law

Here's the problem with a small firm handling big cases.   Sometimes you win them.  And that's what happened with the case I worked on from '94 to '96.  A few months after our victory and happy celebrations, my employer walked into my office and said "I can only make payroll for two more weeks."

Fortunately, I still had friends handling the environmental insurance coverage cases I'd worked on before my misfortune landed me in Westwood.  A "catastrophe" akin to the farmer's loss of his horse.  So I returned to a BigLaw practice in a mid-size law firm where I spent the remainder of my legal career; where I met my husband; and, where I hired a brilliant young attorney who also happened to be mediating cases in the Los Angeles Superior Court.  The '92 recession also gave me literature and poetry back in the form of a writers' group of - yup - fifteen years; my literary journal; and, probably, this blog and my other writing.  Finally, it delivered me to me my genuine bliss:  a career in mediation.

Before I leave the topic of good fortune and bad, let me add only this:  I practiced law for fourteen years in various states of insobriety and have worked as a lawyer and then a mediator and arbitrator for fifteen years sober.  Whatever "the fates" had in store for me, my ability to maximize good fortune and ride out the bad, was both easier and better, when I was awake. 

The calamity of the 1992 recession was the greatest gift life had ever presented to me. 

Tomorrow, what I promised yesterday:  what any of this has to do with negotiation and mediation.

Full post as published by Settle It Now Negotiation Blog on February 22, 2009 (boomark / email).