The firm has canceled its traditional May partners’ retreat and shortened its summer associate program to eight weeks. Chapman has been paying $160,000 to first-year associates, but may reduce the pay to $145,000.

It has also eliminated its public relations budget, which may be why it thinks stealth layoffs are a good idea.

The firm may shed more employees by early summer. The firm is hiring in New York, where it opened an office with one partner in February. Chapman’s other two offices are in San Francisco and Salt Lake City.

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• Winstead Lays Off 20 Employees

The numbers include lawyers, paralegals, public relations specialists, secretaries and other positions; and reflect layoffs by firms nationwide over the last few months, and the dissolutions of Am Law 100 firms Heller Ehrman, Thelen, and Thacher Proffitt & Wood.

In all, 2.6 million US jobs were lost in 2008, the biggest fall in more than six decades.

But the number of legal services jobs actually increased in December by 1,300.

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