Constitutional Law

Counting Their Luck

Earlier this month, the U.S. legal industry eliminated over 700 jobs in one day. With the financial crisis generating a substantial slowdown in legal work, one law office is burdened with the task of “cranking out a higher deal volume than, I would guess, any institution in the entire world,” according to one former employee.

Attorneys at the Treasury Department’s Office of General Counsel have closed 418 deals totaling nearly $306 billion in value under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). TARP is the program through which the U.S. government is eventually purchasing up to $700 billion in troubled assets in order to stabilize world financial markets.

While the department employs 2,000 lawyers in-house, the bulk of the work has been handled by the banking and finance section, which only maintains a staff of eight attorneys, reports Legal Times. “We work easily 12-hour days and pretty much every weekend,” said Laurie Schaffer, the Treasury Department’s assistant general counsel for banking and finance.

Full post as published by ACS Blog on February 23, 2009 (boomark / email).