Biting Billables

Above the Law reports that O'Melveny & Myers is cutting staff in both the New York and Los Angeles offices. In the Los Angeles office:

Five associates are gone, a number of staffers have been let go, and there are rumors about more to come. Performance related or not, "job security" is surely a thing of the past.

The premise for the terminations apparently has to do with "performance". The tipsters seem to indicate that this means that people simply having been billing enough.

Many law students take it for granted that billable hours are a standard to surpass, but that first year associates are not required to meet those numbers. This may still be true, but certainly with these sorts of dismissals, especially during a time when most first year associates would be watching their backs and making sure they do not provide large firms with excuses for dismissal, one wonders whether the allegedly inadequate numbers are much higher than usual, or the O'Melveny Class of '07 simply wasn't up to scratch, or some combination thereof.