Exclusive - Bird & Bird hides "dozens" of redundancies
27 August 2010
Insiders have told RollOnFriday that Bird & Bird has booted out swathes of staff, despite maintaining that it hasn't had a redundancy programme.

The firm confirmed earlier this month that it had cut its associates' salaries, but claimed that this was against a background of not having had any "mandatory redundancy rounds". However that seems to be an unusual application of the word mandatory, which has upset the firm's staff. One former member of staff says that she came back from maternity leave to be offered a "choice" of resigning immediately with a cash settlement - or reapplying for her job and getting only statutory redundancy if she was unsuccessful. She felt she had no alternative but to do the former, enabling the firm to class her departure as "voluntary". Ingenious!

"Voluntary" redundancy at Bird & Bird

 
Insiders say that more than 20 other staff went through the same thing, but the firm did this in dribs and drabs to avoid the bad publicity that would come from announcing a formal redundancy programme. People at all levels from support staff through to partners were hit - one partner was apparently told that her salary would be cut from £300k to £50k if she didn’t leave.
 
In a carefully worded statement, the firm said "We do not comment on the details of individual employees contractual arrangements with the firm. Our assertion is that Bird & Bird has not made any mandatory large-scale redundancy rounds as a result of the recession. During the normal course of business, certain roles and job functions will become redundant or are restructured. We have made a handful of redundancies mainly due to restructuring in support departments rather than cost cutting."