Law firms used to do this all the time, to save face when they had to lay off employees due to the firm's financial under-performance. It was really bad during

Law firms used to do this all the time, to save face when they had to lay off employees due to the firm's financial under-performance. It was really bad during the Great Recession. There was a huge stigma attached to it, at first. But too many firms jumped on the bandwagon, and everyone realized that most of the terminated employees weren't low performers. It helped that a bunch of these "low performers" began stealing clients from their old firms and bringing them to their new firms, or working for their former clients and terminating their old firms' engagements. Nowadays in the legal market, when a law firm fires a bunch of employees in a short window of time for "low performance" the default assumption is that the firm is having financial difficulties.