Last January, Glenn Close won a Golden Globe for her compelling performance as Patty Hewes, a fearsome and wildly successful plaintiff’s lawyer, on the addictive TV show Damages. The following month, Tilda Swinton snagged an Oscar for stepping into the pumps of Karen Crowder, a hard-charging in-house litigator, in Michael Clayton.

In March, Julianna Margulies (of ER) returned to television as aggressive defense lawyer Elizabeth Canterbury, the title character of Canterbury’s Law. Even Katey Sagal, who embodied the famously vulgar Peggy Bundy on Married With Children, reincarnated herself this year as Marci Klein, the sleek, powerful, and ruthless founding partner of the law firm on Eli Stone.

All of these actresses play litigators, even though real-life litigation is a male-dominated field (the analog in medicine might be surgery, or even orthopedic surgery). And they’re portrayals of not just any old female litigator, but a specific type: the Litigatrix.

Who is the Litigatrix? On the plus side, she’s supremely confident and competent. The Litigatrix is very good at her job, and she knows it. Above all, she’s strong-willed and tough—a woman making her way in a man’s world. Of course, these are buzzwords that trigger other, more familiar characterizations.

The Fox Web site describes Elizabeth Canterbury, the “rebellious female defense attorney” played by Julianna Margulies, as “a force of nature.” Similarly, the FX Web site touts Glenn Close’s Patty Hewes, “the nation’s most revered and most reviled litigator,” as “hard-hitting” and “Machiavellian.”

Let’s not mince words: the Litigatrix is a bitch. She didn’t excel in litigation’s testosterone-soaked precincts by playing nice. Like that other professional “-ix,” the dominatrix, the Litigatrix knows how to crack a whip. Making men feel pain is part of her job description.

The Litigatrix archetype is not new. She has been with us at least since the late 1980s, when Diana Muldaur played the despised Rosalind Shays on L.A. Law (who met an untimely end by plummeting down an empty elevator shaft, to the perverse pleasure of many viewers). But the Litigatrix does appear to be experiencing something of a renaissance or cultural moment right now.

WHAT DO TODAY'S actual female litigators make of this portrayal?

Anne Vladeck is one of New York’s top labor and employment lawyers; last year, she successfully represented Anucha Browne Sanders in her sexual harassment lawsuit against Isiah Thomas and Madison Square Garden.

Does Ms. Vladeck buy Glenn Close’s portrayal of a prominent female plaintiff’s lawyer? “I don’t know anybody like her,” Ms. Vladeck said. “I’d probably run like hell if I did.”

But most women I spoke with said these characters did get a lot of things right.

Tilda Swinton’s star turn as Karen Crowder, in-house counsel to a Big Evil Corporation defending itself against charges that it essentially poisoned people by selling a toxic weed killer (which, it turns out, it did), got high marks for accuracy.

“I thought it the most realistic representation yet,” said a female civil litigator at a prominent New York law firm. “First you throw up, then you order someone to kill someone. We’re asked to do terrible things, and we get them done. Her character is kind of evil, but being a litigator is kind of evil.

“Tilda Swinton was awesome,” she continued. “They didn’t give her a backstory. She was married to her job, and I thought that was pretty realistic. She wasn’t slayed by [George] Clooney’s good looks, she wasn’t redeemable, she was just a corporate lawyer.”

Others viewed Ms. Swinton’s character as more to be pitied than admired. Karen Crowder is “a depiction of the woman who has lost her mind in pursuing a successful legal career,” said a female white-collar-criminal defense lawyer at a large New York-area firm.

This lawyer distinguished between “real trailblazers”—female lawyers like, say, retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and the first women to go to law school—and lawyers of around Karen Crowder’s age. The trailblazers made sacrifices, to be sure, but “they reaped success in unprecedented ways. They made partner, they achieved success in a day when guys were still patting female attorneys on the rump.”

In contrast, the next generation of female lawyers, the Karen Crowders of the world, come off as less appealing role models. “You give up your personal life, and you pay the price. And you don’t necessarily achieve a level of trailblazing accomplishment,” said the criminal defense lawyer.

“I look at the female partners who on the weekends go power-walking with their hand weights because they can’t torture their associates every second of the day,” she added. “They don’t seem like they have full lives.”

So the Litigatrix isn’t exactly an attractive template for female litigators, at least on the work-life balance front. Take Patty Hewes, Glenn Close’s character on Damages. She has a little more of a personal life than Karen Crowder—a husband, a son—but in reality she’s married to her job. Her relationship with her husband (her second) is anemic, and her relationship with her son is dysfunctional.

Could Patty Hewes the Litigatrix at least be a model for how women should litigate? Not necessarily. If you’re aggressive as a woman litigator, sometimes you’re dismissed “as shrill, as emotional,” said Ms. Vladeck. “Whereas aggressive men, they’re just seen as good litigators.”

ON THE OTHER end of the spectrum, of course, lies Ally McBeal. She was focused just as much on her personal life as her professional life (cue the dancing baby), and her litigation style was softer, featuring attempts to deploy her femininity in the courtroom as well as the bedroom. Could she represent a viable alternative to the model of the brittle and brutal Litigatrix?

In short, no. Among the group I spoke to, poor Ally has even fewer fans than the Litigatrix, who at least has the virtue of being a badass.

“The famous micro-mini skirts—absurd,” said the civil litigator. “Everyone knows this, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist: You can get people to look at your boobs, or you get them take you seriously as a human being, but not at the same time.”

“[Ally] was always a bundle of nerves over nothing at all. She was in the bathroom an unconscionable amount of time, always freaking out.”

The civil litigator suggested that Ally could learn a lesson or two from Ms. Swinton’s character, who would have a breakdown in a bathroom stall, but then sally forth and triumph: “Wipe your mouth, then get out there and do your business.”

Or, as Bette Davis’s Margo Channing laments near the end of All About Eve: “It’s one career all females have in common—being a woman.”

At the moment, the economy is flailing, if you hadn’t noticed. So why are firms so reluctant to make any significant changes to their summer programs?

When you stop and think about it, the summer associate programs at New York’s largest corporate law firms are a shockingly inefficient way to recruit talent.

The top firms pay their summers over $3,000 a week—a week!—to enjoy three-hour lunches and surf the Web, and do a little bit of work on the side, but just a little, on the firm’s most interesting and sexy matters. Don’t forget the cooking lessons, wine tastings, pool parties, a clambake or a cruise—all of it carefully designed to create in these future lawyers a Pavlovian association between Big Law and Big Pleasure.

Cutting back on these perks would seem to be an easy way for firms to save money without causing too much uproar. In fact, firms might earn brownie points with their clients for showing such restraint.

AS IT HAPPENS, a few firms are making slight adjustments to their programs. But they’re doing it in fairly subtle ways: by shortening the length of summer programs, and by hosting smaller summer associate classes.

Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman and Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, for example, are capping their summer programs at 10 weeks (which falls on the shorter side; most programs run from 10 to 12 weeks). Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner, which laid off 26 associates earlier this year, went farther, cutting its program from 11 weeks down to eight.

That may not seem like a big deal. But then again, two weeks’ salary saved, multiplied by 26 summer associates, equals one first-year associate.

Several firms have also reduced the size of their summer classes. According to data collected by the National Association for Law Placement, New York’s 10 largest law firms are hiring 1,014 summer associates this year, a decline of 9.3 percent from 2007. Smaller summer classes, smaller restaurant and bar tabs.

From the firms’ perspective, the good thing about trimming summer programs in length and size, rather than in lavishness, is that they can be justified by reference to reasons other than a desire to cut costs.

Sonnenschein’s chairman, Elliott Portnoy, explained the firm’s reduction of its summer program in an e-mail: “We believe that the August vacation season for our attorneys is simply not a period that is conducive to a positive Summer Associate experience.”

(That’s a polite way of saying that there are costs even Big Law will not eat.)

A few midsize and regional firms, such as Gibbons Del Deo in Newark, have abandoned summer programs altogether in favor of focusing on poaching experienced attorneys from other firms. But that’s not really an option for the big boys in New York, where the slightest eyebrow twitch at Sullivan & Cromwell, say, leads to an epidemic of twitching across the city. Plus, all those graduating law students have to start somewhere.

THE SHAME IS that firms could be using the weak economy as an opportunity to revamp their summer programs—which they’re going to have to do sooner or later—to make them more efficient. Instead, they’re simply giving law students “less of the same,” making quantitative rather than qualitative changes to their summer programs. It’s a way for them to economize on summer programs but on the sly, without having to own up to it fully.

This is not surprising: The incentives are aligned so as to discourage innovation in summer programs, which are governed by the same lockstep mentality that applies to associate salaries, bonuses and so many other aspects of Big Law life. Whence this mentality? Maybe it’s the legal profession’s fundamental conservatism, or its acute sensitivity to status. Regardless, if everyone else’s summer programs feature cooking lessons, a wine tasting, a golf outing and a Broadway show, then your firm’s summer program darn well better feature cooking lessons, a wine tasting, a golf outing and a Broadway show. You may not stand out, but at least you won’t become a laughingstock.

And there’s the perception issue: the sense that plying 25-year-olds with cocktails and canapés is what a firm must do to play in the big leagues. But there may also be a self-perception issue. Think of Big Law as a dowager fallen on hard times, in desperate need of cash, who refuses to sell the family china. Why? She sees it as her birthright, an integral part of who she is.

There is also a certain amount of nostalgia involved. Partners see the summer-associate experience as a sort of law-firm rumspringa: a chance to explore and to indulge before settling down to a life of work and responsibility. Partners look back fondly on their own summer-associate days and can’t bring themselves to deny that experience to today’s lawyers-in-training.

But how long can the forces of nostalgia and inertia stave off the inevitable? At a certain point, the collective expansion of summer associate waistlines will give way to a far more powerful force: Big Law’s bottom line.

But could it really happen here? What if New York’s biggest corporate law firms went public?

At the moment, it’s not allowed: American legal ethics rules prohibit lawyers from sharing fees with nonlawyers. But rules are made to be broken—or, at the very least, amended.

And while the idea may seem far-fetched, it’s already caught on overseas. In Australia, Slater & Gordon, a personal-injury firm, is about to celebrate its one-year anniversary as the world’s first publicly traded firm. Slater listed its shares on the Australian Stock Exchange in May 2007. And the United Kingdom is possibly moving in the direction of permitting external investors to have stakes in law firms, through the new Legal Services Act.

Observers of the U.S. legal world have been breathlessly wondering if (or, perhaps, when) the phenomenon of the publicly traded law firm will spread to the United States.

If this happens, of course, one of the most jarring changes will be that firms here will have to answer to outside investors: their shareholders. They’ll have to provide detailed descriptions of their operations to the Securities and Exchange Commission, including 10Ks and 10Qs, the annual and quarterly reports that publicly traded companies must file with the S.E.C. Is this the way of the future?

Lawyers like hypotheticals, so here is a hypothetical press release to accompany the quarterly report of a publicly traded law firm. Any similarity to any persons or firms, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

NEW YORK, March 17, 2009—Biglaw, Inc. (NYSE: LAW) today reported net revenues of $462.5 million and net earnings of $205 million for its first quarter ended February 28, 2009. Diluted earnings per common share were $0.86, compared with $1.01 for the first quarter of 2008.

“Business conditions remain difficult,” said managing partner George Owens. “The firm is being squeezed on both ends. Clients are tired of paying $300 an hour for a junior associate who knows nothing. Meanwhile, those same junior associates demand $160,000 starting salaries, 18 weeks of paid parental leave, and Swedish massages on Fridays. Something has to give.”

Corporate. Net revenues in the Corporate Department were 12 percent lower than the first quarter of 2008. Ongoing difficulties in the credit market reduced both capital markets and merger and acquisition activity for the firm.

The M&A department spent a significant amount of time on several potential transactions for a client in the energy sector that were never consummated. Unfortunately, the firm was unable to bill for most of this time, because the work was for a long-standing client that the firm “doesn’t want to piss off,” according to Mr. Owens.

The firm cannot provide additional details about this representation, due to client confidentiality rules.

Revenue for the next quarter is projected to be even lower. This is due to the departure of a key senior partner, Ray Rainmaker, who recently left the firm, along with three other partners, eight associates, a gaggle of administrative assistants and a book of business estimated in excess of $20 million.

Litigation. Net revenues in the Litigation Department were 9 percent lower than the first quarter of 2008. Continuing criminal indictments and convictions of top plaintiffs’ lawyers led to a sharp reduction in the number of class-action lawsuits filed, especially in the securities and products-liability areas. “While I’m happy to see those bastards get what they deserve, it has, unfortunately, reduced our revenue,” said Mr. Owens.

The firm’s Criminal Defense group agreed to represent a prominent politician from a very wealthy family in connection with a federal investigation. The firm expected this matter to go to trial, resulting in thousands of billable hours at nondiscounted rates. Unfortunately, the evidence against the firm’s client, including extensive wiretap evidence, turned out to be far stronger than originally anticipated. As a result, the firm counseled the client to enter a guilty plea, which he did.

“When we first took the case, we thought our client might have been innocent,” explained Mr. Owens. “It appears we were wrong.”

The firm cannot provide additional details about this representation due to client confidentiality rules.

Expenses. Operating expenses were 5 percent higher than the first quarter of 2008.

Partner compensation expenses remain high. “Project Deadweight,” the firm’s program to remove non-business-generating partners from the firm, has not yet reached maximum effectiveness. “Some partners are simply refusing to leave, saying that they won’t leave the premises except in an ambulance or a hearse,” said Mr. Owens. “Unfortunately, many of these partners are members of groups that may be protected by laws against racial, gender or age discrimination. With respect to these partners, the firm is evaluating all its options.”

Associate compensation expenses continue to climb. In the first quarter, the firm had to pay out year-end and “special” bonuses to its associates, to remain competitive with its peer firms. “The bonus payments hit our bottom line hard,” said Mr. Owens.

Recruiting expenses, including expenses related to the summer associate program, are projected to remain high throughout 2009. The firm has discontinued its practice of sending costly bonsai trees to prospective recruits, as well as gourmet cookies at exam time.

In another cost containment measure, the firm has capped the length of its summer associate program at 10 weeks. The firm concluded that paying summer associates over $3,000 a week to do nothing but surf the Web and take three-hour lunches was not a wise allocation of corporate resources.

“Although we owe duties to the courts, our clients and our colleagues, ultimately we report to our shareholders,” said Mr. Owens. “Big Law is a big business, and we intend to run it like one.”

Mr. Spinelli-Noseda, a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, was a young and well-regarded partner in Sullivan & Cromwell’s Latin American practice, as well as the firm’s hiring partner. At some point in the past few weeks—it’s not clear exactly when—his staff bio was removed from the firm’s external and internal Web sites. A cached version of his bio was available for a time through Google, but now it, too, has vanished.

The legal profession tends to be transparent with respect to the comings and goings of its members. And unlike their cousins in business, risk-averse lawyers, with their 5- and 10-year career plans, tend not to leave one position until they’ve set up the next. When they do move, their transitions are trumpeted in press releases.

So this unexplained disappearance—part of a spate of mystery departures and downsizings in recent weeks—is especially intriguing.

AT LEAST ONE thing is clear in Mr. Spinelli-Noseda’s case. Removal from a law firm’s external Web site—which is subject to the ethical rules governing lawyer advertising, and must be kept scrupulously accurate—is traditionally a sign that a lawyer no longer works for a firm. For example, immediately after Sullivan & Cromwell fired associate Aaron Charney, who sued the firm alleging antigay discrimination, it yanked his happy head shot from sullcrom.com.

But neither Mr. Spinelli-Noseda nor a firm spokesperson returned multiple telephone calls and e-mails. During my most recent attempt, a receptionist asked me to hold for “one moment,” then placed me on hold for very many moments. Finally she returned and informed me that Mr. Spinelli-Noseda was “no longer with the company.” She said she did not have forwarding information. (Paging Darby Shaw!)

Partner departures, more common at other firms, are rare at a place like Sullivan & Cromwell. After all, S&C is one of New York’s—and the world’s—most prestigious and profitable shops, with profits per partner of $3.1 million in 2007, according to The Lawyer, a British legal newspaper.

If Mr. Spinelli-Noseda is no longer with Sullivan & Cromwell, where might he be? The firm made no announcement, nor did any rival firm come forward to proclaim a poaching. One rumor was that Mr. Spinelli-Noseda—who is of Argentine origin, and who has been involved with policy organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Council of the Americas—left to take a position in the government of Argentina’s new president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. But no announcement or news coverage of such a move has surfaced.

OTHER MYSTERY DEPARTURES have involved less high-profile individuals, but are no less opaque. Over at Thacher Proffitt & Wood—which, as a major player in the securitization field, has been hit especially hard by the credit crisis—additional associates were either laid off or strongly encouraged to leave, sometime in the past few weeks. (In addition, incoming first-year associates outside of litigation have had their start dates moved back to October 20, from a more traditional start date in early fall.)

It’s not clear how many lawyers were affected by the rumored reductions, what groups they were in or under what terms they’ll be departing (e.g., how much severance they received, if they were laid off). In response to an inquiry, the firm issued this cryptic response, through a spokesperson: “As always, we continue to talk to associates in the areas most affected by the market conditions.”

Many of the firms that have laid off associates or otherwise reduced associate ranks significantly—e.g., Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft; McKee Nelson; Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner—have provided more information and details about the cuts. But as the economy worsens, more firms may decide to shroud such moves in mystery, to avoid telegraphing weakness to the outside world. Such news can frighten current (and potential) clients, and it can also act like chum in the water, encouraging predatory raids on talent by rival firms.

In normal times, so-called “stealth layoffs”—economically driven firings disguised as normal turnover or as the result of bad performance reviews—can be dangerous for firms. If word of what they’re really doing gets out, the firm gets tagged as both flailing and dishonest, which can impair recruiting efforts when the economy improves. But in times like these, in which so many firms are experiencing slowness and discreetly trimming their ranks, stealth layoffs may be easier to get away with.

YET ANOTHER RECENT and mysterious disappearance—one might call it metropolitan downsizing—happened when Dewey & LeBoeuf announced the closing of its Hartford office. On its Web site, Dewey touts the office as “strategically located between New York City and New England,” as well as host to “one of our firm’s premier litigation teams” and the center of the firm’s environmental practice. The office was said to be quite profitable, and its shuttering left some folks scratching their heads. In a statement, the firm attributed the move to “its global strategy to expand the firm’s resources in major capital markets throughout the world.”

What exactly does that mean? Here’s one rumor making the rounds: Dewey closed Hartford at the behest of a consultant, who told the firm that small-market offices would hamper them from truly competing with the Skaddens of the world.

This may make the closing a little less mysterious. (Although the mystery of why law firms so slavishly follow the advice of consultants remains unsolved.)

So are all these disappearances on the DL just a side effect of the instability currently coursing through the financial and legal markets? When times are bad, it seems that lawyers—who generally loathe ambiguity—take the discretion they deploy for their clients and apply it to themselves. Unclear times call for unclear measures.

Why does the Spitzer implosion rankle Big Law lawyers? Of course, there’s the hoary (sorry!) comparison of the learned profession and the oldest profession, but given the particular confluence of these threads in this story, it’s worth a closer look.

Consider the billable hour: The Spitzer scandal, with its frequent, voyeuristic mentions of how much Emperors Club prostitutes charged for their services, was a stark reminder of a life measured by the hour—or the six-minute increment thereof.

It’s not simply the method of payment, either. As former sex worker Melissa Gira Grant told the San Francisco Chronicle, “A mid-range online escort who books her own clients makes $200 to $300 an hour. … If you look at what a lawyer makes [in a particular city], that’s what an escort makes.” Another good reason to drop the billable hour!

Also, both professions reflect the unequal station of women in society. If Silda Wall Spitzer, also a Harvard Law graduate and highly accomplished lawyer, had remained at Skadden Arps and made partner, she would probably bill out somewhere between $700 and $900 an hour today. Meanwhile, high-school dropout “Kristen” charges clients like Ms. Spitzer’s husband a cool $1,000 an hour, and that’s the low end of high-class hookers.

While at Skadden, Silda—whose name, she claims, means “Teutonic war maiden”—billed over 3,000 hours a year. But whether a female lawyer as hardworking and talented as she would have made partner at Skadden or a similar large firm is open to question, and perhaps belied by the statistical data.

“It is unfortunately true that plenty of women, Silda Spitzer included, probably have a better chance of making five diamonds at the Emperors Club than they do of becoming an equity partner at Dechert, Mayer Brown, Blank Rome, Kramer Levin, or Cravath,” wrote Michele Landis Dauber, a Stanford law professor and director and officer of Building a Better Legal Profession, which works to increase gender diversity at large law firms.

“But you don’t have to go to the extreme ‘hooker scenario’ to see that women still in 2008 have crappy odds of success in high-status professions and receive way more attention for their sexual availability and attractiveness than for their intellectual abilities,” continued Ms. Dauber in an e-mail. “Just go to Toys R Us and spend five minutes in the highly sexist ‘girl’ section perusing the unbelievably offensive array of pre-prostitute presents parents are buying their daughters. Two words: Paris. Hilton.”

Finally, law and prostitution are service professions characterized by a principle of nonjudgmentalism. Both generally take all comers, making themselves available to anyone willing to pay their hourly rates. Just as a lawyer doesn’t castigate clients for, say, committing securities fraud or polluting, a prostitute doesn’t chide a john for being married or making an unorthodox sexual request.

But along with the absence of judgment comes a stack of rules—rules rooted not necessarily in ethics, but in self-interest. For example, prostitutes will generally not have unprotected sex with clients. Kristen had a way of dealing with such requests: “Listen, dude, do you really want the sex?” Similarly, lawyers may fight to avoid having to produce certain documents in discovery—but they will produce if ordered to do so. Listen, dude, do you really want the discovery?

There are other similarities between Big Law and Big Pimpin’, including intense status stratification and status anxiety, and arguable exploitation of a young workforce by an older, largely male management.

In the end, though, perhaps the most basic commonality is that both prostitution and lawyering arise out of human imperfection (and particularly ugly or unpleasant imperfection). If we could resolve all our disputes on our own, we wouldn’t need lawyers; if we could fulfill all our sexual needs on our own, or at least with people who wouldn’t charge us for the privilege, we wouldn’t need prostitutes.

This may explain our ambivalent relationship with the unloved practitioners of law and prostitution. We need them both badly, and hate the fact that we do.

The trouble started on a Tuesday night. Shortly before I entered a bar to meet a friend for drinks, I updated my Facebook status on my BlackBerry, with an opinion about the upcoming Clinton-Obama debate.

As soon as my friend and I parted ways, I immediately whipped out my BlackBerry to check Facebook again. (Yes, I’m one of those people.)

My BlackBerry informed me that my account had been “disabled.” Disabled? I had never heard of such a thing. Perhaps it was a problem with my BlackBerry? I rushed home in a panic.

Alas, when I tried to log in on my computer, I was denied once again. This time I received a slightly more detailed message: “Your account has been disabled by an administrator.” I was referred to an FAQ informing me that accounts can be disabled for violations of Facebook’s Terms and Conditions, which prohibit such things as spamming or harassing other users.

I shot off a message to Facebook: “I do not believe I did anything in violation of Facebook’s terms of use. I am a loyal user with over 1,200 friends. I spend literally hours each day on the site. How can I appeal the disabling of my account?”

Then, I waited. And waited. To devotees of Facebook like myself—the type of people who use “Facebook” as a verb—life without the popular social networking site is unimaginable. If it’s not on Facebook, it didn’t happen.

With each passing day, I sank deeper and deeper into my Facebook-deprivation-induced depression. What to do? First, overeat! I inhaled massive quantities of saag paneer and gained about five pounds. I slept constantly, racking up a disturbing total of 16 hours of sleep on Saturday. It was only when I was asleep that my troubles vanished. I still had access to Facebook—in my dreams.

I COULD NOT figure out what I had done to deserve banishment. At the very least, my expulsion violated my due process rights. I was not given any advance warning before my account was suspended, I did not know the nature of the allegations made against me and I was never given the chance to confront my accusers. Okay, so the Bill of Rights has not been held applicable to Facebook, yet. But I still felt I was the victim of fundamental unfairness.

Also, being kicked off Facebook has all sorts of unfortunate consequences. Most were personal: Friends thought I had de-friended them. One wrote, “Was it something I said?” But the site is also essential to my job as a legal blogger. Readers of my blog, Above The Law, regularly submit tips to me via Facebook, which is often safer than e-mailing, since e-mail can be tracked. When I need sources for a story, I can post a note on Facebook and have a dozen sources within a matter of hours.

Losing Facebook was a significant professional blow, especially since I had spent so much time building up a network of contacts there. I even stopped updating my Microsoft Outlook contacts, since I figured Facebook would always be there for me.

On top of it all, I had to endure the shame of being an online outcast. When I would explain my predicament, friends would express their sympathy. But I couldn’t help wondering: Are they secretly judging me? I felt like the Hester Prynne of the virtual world, with “FB” branded across my chest.

FINALLY, ON MONDAY—almost a week after my Tuesday-night expulsion, and without hearing anything from Facebook’s Kafkaesque justice system in the intervening period—I received an e-mail message from “Jerry,” in Facebook’s User Operations department.

Apparently, I’d been deleted because I had posted parts of another user’s Facebook profile to my blog. This was true: I had written about the profile of an Arizona beauty queen-turned-law student, who was indicted on charges of kidnapping her ex-boyfriend. She allegedly tied the guy up with plastic cables and duct tape, bit him and threatened him with a butcher knife. Not a good person to have as an enemy.

Thankfully, though, my punishment was reversed, with the stern warning that I “remove these reproduced sections and refrain from doing this again in the future.”

I did not view my infraction as a grave offense. But after enduring the hell of five days without Facebook, I will not stray again. The sanction has served its purpose.

The irony, of course, is that, as The New York Times reported last month, users who actually do want to leave Facebook were finding it nearly impossible to erase themselves completely from the site. So what’s the greater punishment? A prison you can’t break out of, or one you can’t break back into?

Hillary Clinton: Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison

Everyone talks about the former first lady and junior senator from New York, but nobody wants to be her. When asked which firm best embodies Mrs. Clinton, the most common response was, “Not mine.” So whose is she?

A future summer associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore fingered Cravath’s perennial rival in profits and prestige: Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. “She definitely seems to have the most thorough command of the issues, and seems to be the most prepared on all facets of the campaign.”

Sounds like a compliment, but a former Wachtell associate was quick to shoot down the comparison: “Can you picture Wachtell crying?”

A second ex-Wachtellian, when presented with the suggestion that Wachtell might be Hillary, pointed the finger back at Worldwide Plaza: “Hillary is Cravath: establishment, experienced, well financed and generally the favorite.”

Enough, gentlemen. I’m bestowing the Hillary Clinton mantle upon a firm that actually wants it: Paul Weiss.

“Like Hillary, Paul Weiss has a reputation for being a bit of a hard-ass,” said one lawyer at the firm. “But those who know her—and us—know we are ‘good people.’ Both a bit neurotic, but in a healthy way.”

“Also, like Hillary, we’re ambitious,” he added. “And gay-friendly!”

Barack Obama: Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges

Just as nobody wanted their firm to be Mrs. Clinton, nearly everyone tried to lay claim to the senator from Illinois.

One strikingly elaborate analysis came from an associate at Latham & Watkins: “Clearly, Barack Obama would be Latham & Watkins. Born outside the establishment and reared far away from the locus of power, the firm grew to become a major player in [top legal markets], all the while showing that a law firm can be both unpretentious and professional, touchy-feely and effective—dare I say, the future of legal practice?”

Dare I say, a shameless plug? But there’s competition. “Skadden would be Obama,” boasted an associate at 4 Times Square. “New to the field, relatively speaking; spry and flexible; and having a solid vision for the future.”

But neutral observers linked Obama with Quinn Emanuel: the highly driven, super-profitable, rather young litigation powerhouse.

Said a future Cravath summer associate: “Barack Obama seems like he would be Quinn Emanuel, since both seem to be the young, upstart contenders, trying to do things a new way.” A Wachtell lawyer agreed: “Obama is definitely a California firm. Quinn is good. Or maybe Boies Schiller—some place that has a lot of rhetoric, but where things mostly stay the same if you get right down to it.”

John McCain: Cravath, Swaine & Moore

Perhaps due to the Arizona senator’s “maverick” status, opinions about John McCain were all over the map.

A former associate at two large law firms suggested: “McCain might be Skadden: looks kind of fun, but underneath it all, you wonder if he’s not just a total dick.” A future Latham summer associate offered up Dewey & LeBoeuf: “Dewey is super-ass old, McCain is super-ass old.”

Mr. McCain should be worried if voters are as fixated on his advanced age as lawyers apparently are. Said a Cravath associate: “[Cravath] would have to be McCain. Older than all get-out, set in its ways, more aggressive than most and not unrelated to torture.”

I’m giving it to Cravath. In refuting the accusation of Hillary-ness, one Cravath associate made a fair point: “Cravath is more like McCain, because just like him, Cravath is less conservative than it seems. Unlike Hillary, who is more.”

Mitt Romney: Sullivan & Cromwell

This was a cakewalk. Said one former S&C associate of similarities between candidate and firm: “Very picture-perfect. Always willing to go with the highest bidder. Smart. Successful. Kind of apolitical to a certain point, driven much more by ambition, power and money.”

A second ex-Sullivan lawyer agreed: “Polished, always saying the right thing—but coming off as a bit shallow.”

The Romney runner-up: Wachtell Lipton. From a former Wachtell lawyer: “Fabulously wealthy, envied and disliked by some competitors, and on both sides of an issue” (alluding to bank mergers in which the firm represented both parties). Another echoed that sentiment: “Mitt Romney, since they have traditionally regarded themselves as outsiders—Jews [in Wachtell’s case], Mormons [in Romney’s case]—who are richer than everyone else.”

Mike Huckabee: Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison

Is he still in the race? Nobody seems to heart Huckabee these days: Most of the lawyers I spoke to forgot to even mention him, and those who did weren’t optimistic.

“Huckabee would be Kirkland & Ellis,” opined one future Big Law associate. “Lots of crazy conservatives in both these parties, and Kirkland’s free market system [of assigning work] seems close to the Fair Tax in some ways.”

At least Kirkland still exists. A former Skadden lawyer was less charitable: “Huckabee is Brobeck, that S.F. firm that blew up after the dot-com crash: makes a big splash, then goes quietly into the night.”

Ron Paul: Greenberg Traurig

“Ron Paul is Greenberg Traurig,” said a current law student and future Big Law summer associate. “Both are completely crazy.”

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.

Cadwalader wasn’t the first firm to announce associate layoffs since last year’s credit market meltdown. In November, the New York office of U.K.-based Clifford Chance laid off six structured-finance lawyers. And given the rapidly deteriorating economy, Cadwalader probably won’t be the last. Thacher Proffitt & Wood and McKee Nelson, two other firms that are active in the securitization field, have offered buyouts to associates to encourage them to leave.

“IT’S TOUGH. PEOPLE are scared,” the jettisoned Cadwalader associate said. “It’s so rare that this happens. The first-years are freaked out. People are wondering: Is this continuing on a rolling basis, or did they take one big hit? People worry about [the impact on] recruiting efforts, both on a lateral basis and for incoming law students.”

The associate, like the others laid off that day, was given barely more than a week’s notice: His last day of work would be the following Friday, Jan. 18.

He’s getting three months of severance, paid out every two weeks, just as when he was employed. But he’s no longer able to tell prospective employers he’s still at the firm, which he predicts will make his job search harder.

“It’s like dating,” he said. “When you’re with someone, everyone wants you; when you’re on your own, it’s that much harder.”

Aside from the issue of notice, the associate was also upset about the firm’s perceived overexpansion, back when structured finance and securitization—the legal work associated with putting together mega-loans, then converting them into securities for investment and trading—were red-hot.

“I thought it was a little bit insulting that these law firms come out with these announcements about increasing salaries and paying special bonuses,” he said. “I didn’t expect the layoffs to happen because I thought to myself, ‘They wouldn’t play with the big boys if they couldn’t do it.’”

On the whole, though, he said he understands that the firm did what it had to do. “They argue that taking a hit on PPP [profits per partner] would make it more difficult to attract lateral partners. So they would rather make that decision than [save] the associates.

“Considering how supremely profitable the firm has been, the fact that they didn’t take more of a hit is disappointing,” he said. “But that’s always been CWT—a bottom-line firm.”

Still, the associate said he is not bitter, and added that Cadwalader gets more than its fair share of criticism from other firms. “The firm is a new player on the scene, in terms of prestige and partner profits, and nobody likes the nouveau riche mentality. So I think that explains the animus you sometimes see from Cravath or Simpson lawyers—they don’t want to see Cadwalader as equals.”

For the moment, though, they are not equals. Firms such as Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, less affected by the credit crunch, have not announced any associate layoffs.

IF YOU ARE tempted to shed a tear or two for the homeless lawyers, think twice: I spoke with a former associate at Thacher Proffitt who has actually profited from the firm’s distress.

In an effort to reduce its payroll and avert layoffs, Thacher started paying lawyers to go away. The firm offered first-year associates a four-month severance package if they left by the end of January. Some associates decided to stay put, hoping to weather the storm, but others started pounding the pavement.

The job search was not particularly difficult: “The firm basically said to us, ‘When you’re out there interviewing, blame it on Thacher.’ I really didn’t have to explain myself.”

Nor have the past few weeks been particularly demanding for Thacher Proffitt lawyers. “I would come in at 10 and leave at 4,” said the former associate. “I didn’t bill an hour in my last month—and it hasn’t been an issue. I’d enter my time under the firm administration code, with a description like ‘looking for work.’”

Finally, Thacher Proffitt is paying severance to its lawyers regardless of whether they land new jobs. Thus, ex-Thacher associates who find new employment quickly will effectively get twice the normal pay for one-third of a year. In other words, they will wind up better off than their law school classmates who went directly to more stable firms.

It’s an ironic twist, making out like a bandit because your firm is in trouble. But considering how unfamiliar layoffs are to the world of large law firms, ironies are inevitable.

“It’s been very strange, very different around the office,” said one Cadwalader lawyer who survived the layoffs. “Certainly, Thursday [the 10th] was very strange. There were lots of closed doors, avoidance of eye contact, strained conversations. A lot of vacant stares.”

Vacant stares? That sounds like par for the course in the land of Big Law. But those stares are typically caused by having too much (mind-numbing) work, not too little. Where’s Cameron Diaz when you really need her?