Anyone else in Restructuring being very busy right now, but also received pay cuts? Morale could not be worse with me. Maybe I'm just a dick for not feeling supportive to the rest of the firm.. Idk.

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Remember, it's a firm. Think about firm morale if they had cuts across the board and not for your group. Or if, when things are back to normal and your group is not the hottest thing anymore, they cut your salary or lay you off because you're no longer as necessary.

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Definitely not discounting your perspective, but based on my experience and from what I know of my friends at other large, full service firms, you’re more of an exception rather than the rule and restructuring groups tend to be down in bull markets and carried by other groups and up in a down market carrying groups that are currently down (I’m M&A and was slammed until last month but am now experiencing a major dip in work as are many of my similarly situated friends in transactional/corporate) but our restructuring group is super busy now after being super slow.

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This is always an issue with Restructuring in that bonuses will be worst firmwide in the years you work most. You are going to get v good experience. I sympathize that this is hard!

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Curious...are you typically slower than your peers in other practice groups when times are good (assuming you’re not at a boutique)?

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Ive worked here for 3 years now and have always performed way above average firm utilisation.

In the same vein as A2's comment, restructuring is one of the areas (at least in my office) where in non-downturn years they get a fair amount of work by being brought in to consult on existing client matters, which is just to say that it exists as both a supportive specialty group and a standalone practice. Part of being a firm is getting the benefit of saying "yes, in fact we do have someone that does that area of law". It's an ecosystem. So I think it would be very difficulty for them to make a practice area by practice area cut. Can you imagine? Your employment people would leave en masse and then where would the firm be at the end of this? I hope that your firm appreciates practice areas that stay or get very busy in a downturn and compensates you via bonuses to get you back closer to what you would have made. I am not sure they can do much better than that, but would be curious to hear folks thoughts.

At the end of the day, the groups that are profit centers (e.g., M&A) are always subsidizing the groups that are not (e.g., tax). Just seems particularly unfair now that the difference isn’t a couple hundred hours annually but 70 vs. 5 hours a week.

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