Economic Woes Filter Down To The Professional-Managerial Class (Or At Least The Poor Schlubs Who Are Assigned To CDOs)

And so it begins:

In the days leading up to Thursday, Jan. 10, the offices of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft were wracked with anxiety. Something was about to go down at the white-shoe law firm with a knack for attracting both celebrities and bedbugs. But nobody knew what.

The availability of conference rooms at Cadwalader is visible on the firm’s intranet, and observant associates noticed that Mitch Walsh, Cadwalader’s executive director, had reserved an entire floor of conference rooms on that Thursday. Patti Ellis, the firm’s head of Associate Development and Recruitment, had reserved another half-dozen conference rooms for the day.

Some speculated that associates were going to be called up to conference rooms and notified individually of their year-end bonuses. Others wondered if a merger was afoot. But the biggest fear was that Cadwalader was about to announce layoffs, and the conference rooms would be used to process the victims. It was a widespread theory, and turned out to be correct. Still, not everyone was prepared.

“I thought I was being called in for my year-end review,” one unlucky associate said. “I totally wasn’t expecting it.”

The associate, who asked to remain unnamed, was among 35 lawyers Cadwalader laid off that morning — the firm called them “targeted personnel reductions” — in its U.S. offices. The laid-off lawyers were in the capital markets and global finance departments, two areas of the practice hit especially hard by the credit crunch.