I’m making my coffee extra strong this morning (from the WSJ):

Garry Mathiason is 37-year veteran of Littler Mendelson, a leading employment-law specialist with 800 attorneys and 30,000 clients. Mr. Mathiason estimates that the firm is consulted on roughly half the layoffs in the U.S.

When Littler’s layoff-related business surged last fall, Mr. Mathiason conducted an informal survey of his colleagues and found the firm was handling around a million prospective job cuts. That suggested two million for the nation as a whole, though Mr. Mathiason knew some of the prospective layoffs might not materialize during the quarter. When the government released its official numbers in January, U.S. employers had eliminated 1.5 million jobs in the fourth quarter – close to what Mr. Mathiason had expected.

Now the bad news. Mr. Mathiason says Littler is working on roughly two million additional prospective layoffs this quarter. Applying his admittedly unscientific methodology, Mr. Mathiason estimates the U.S. could lose around three million jobs from January through March, or one million a month. That’s equivalent to all the job losses in 2008. The government estimates that 600,000 jobs were lost in January.

blogs.wsj.com