But some of them experience far happier endings. Some of them wind up living in 25-foot-wide, 8,000-square-foot, $16 million townhouses.
Okay, a caveat: $16 million is what the owners are asking for their home. It’s not clear they’ll get that price, which would set a record for a single family home in Brooklyn Heights.
No matter which way you slice it, though, this is still an eight-figure home. Who’s the lawyer living in such luxury, and where did she once work?
* Cheerios is claiming that “Liking” them on Facebook constitutes a waiver of the right to sue. Let’s take this moment to encourage everyone to Like Above the Law on Facebook. [NY Times]
* New study determines that the United States is an oligarchy instead of a democracy. You’re telling me that a government explicitly founded on the principle that only a handful of wealthy men should have a voice grew into an oligarchy? Quelle surprise! [UPI]
* In the continuing saga of NYU’s allegedly shady spending, there are now reports that former NYU Law Dean and current NYU President John Sexton used school funds to convert two apartments into a duplex for his son. His son was married to an NYU Law employee and as I’ve said before, a school located in housing-scarce Manhattan should be able to do something to house professors, but as they say, “the optics” aren’t good. [Chronicle of Higher Education]
* Musings on what it’s like to clerk in the midst of “flyover country” (presumably like my early childhood home of Des Moines). It makes a valiant effort to redeem itself at the end, but this article is exactly why most parts of the country think New Yorkers are elitist dicks. Which, we kind of are, but you don’t want to broadcast that. [Ramblings on Appeal]
* The government is profiting handsomely from law students. Is that really a bad thing? [Law & Economics Prof Blog]
* The judge in the New Orleans Affordable Housing case may know the real identity of one of the anonymous commenters in the case. And if one of the anonymous trolls was a federal prosecutor poisoning the well in the case — like everyone suspects — it could aid the defense. [Times-Picayune]
* For those of you across the pond, there’s a one-day event for lawyers on the business case for Corporate Social Responsibility. It’s in England because American companies have already passed on the idea of corporate responsibility. [International Law Society]
Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on lateral partner moves from Lateral Link’s team of expert contributors. Michael Allen is Managing Principal at Lateral Link, focusing exclusively on partner placements with Am Law 200 clients.
It’s that time of year folks: the dust has settled, the remainder of last year’s major moves have been executed, and it is time to vote for the Biglaw All-Stars of 2014.
To save you trouble, I have already assembled two teams, which we divide between a Western and Eastern Conference — brace yourself for a plethora of mixed metaphors.
With a lot of research, personal experiences, and a smidgen of subjectivity, I have compiled two teams of five lawyers with spots for two corporate lawyers, one intellectual property lawyer, one real estate lawyer, and one litigation lawyer. These lawyers lead significant groups at their respective firms.
Each team will represent one fictional company together: a massive mega-conglomerate high-tech real estate company that would make Mr. Heller and Ms. Erhman shiver in their boots. This fictional mega-conglomerate company requires the representation of five “starting” lawyers: two corporate, one IP, one litigation, and one real estate…
Tax Day was earlier this week. Like many Americans, I said some prayers — and a few curses — and hoped that Turbo Tax made sense of my mid-year move from D.C. to Texas, my investment roll-overs, my handful of I-9s and W-2s. I did my damnedest to be “true, correct, and complete,” as the IRS insisted. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted via Twitter that he has “absolutely no idea whether our tax returns and our tax payments are accurate,” though, of course, he didn’t say that he knew that they weren’t accurate.
Campaign for Liberty, Ron Paul’s 501(c)(4) organization, announced this week that it’s actually pretty sure that its tax recent filings are incomplete, even if true and correct. (Two out of three ain’t bad?) According to C4L, the organization refused to divulge the names of its donors when it filed its IRS 990 forms. The IRS fined Campaign for Liberty just shy of $13,000, plus growing interest for each day the fine goes unpaid.
How did Campaign for Liberty respond? Not as you might expect….
I’m not sure you want someone with my hourly rate making coffee.
– A California lawyer’s sassy comeback to a colleague at her firm who asked her to brew a pot of coffee.
This is just one of the tidbits that Professor Joan Williams of UC Hastings Law shares in her new book, What Works for Women at Work (affiliate link). Williams notes that professional women are expected to perform office “housework” — like “bring cupcakes for a colleague’s birthday, order sandwiches for office lunches and answer phones in the conference room” — much more often than their male colleagues.
Bitcoin, your anarcho-syndicalist little brother’s favorite cryptocurrency, has created quite the stir of late. Just last month, your dead grandmother’s favorite newsweekly, Newsweek, covered itself in whatever the opposite of glory is when it pinned the blame for bitcoin on an unsuspecting and camera-shy Californian named Dorian Nakamoto. The man, who reacted to the accusation that he had created a massively popular currency as if someone had shot his dog, retreated to the safety of an awful haircut shortly after the “news” broke. But if Nakamoto wasn’t the creator of bitcoin, then who was?
Yesterday, Slate magazine (a digital publication that is only a magazine because we all agree it is one) reported on the latest developments in bitcoin founder speculation. The results of an academic analysis might shock you. They might horrify you.
They might make you wonder whether that class you took at George Washington Law was taught by the inventor of bitcoin…
Over the past year or so, we’ve heard a steady trickle of negative news out of Dickstein Shapiro. The trickle has turned into a stream, so it’s now time to share what we’ve learned.
Let’s start with the numbers — grim numbers. Yesterday the Legal Times reported on what it described as Dickstein’s “worst year in more than a decade.” Revenue fell by 20 percent in 2013, and net income dropped even more sharply, by 35 percent. According to the Legal Times, the firm’s 2013 net income of $36 million is the lowest the firm has seen since before 1998, its first year on the Am Law 200.
Chairman James Kelly tried to spin this performance as “restructuring” and “investment,” as the firm focuses on its core practice areas. According to Kelly, “We made a strategic commitment to be a market-leading specialty firm. We decided we’re not going to be everything to everyone.”
“Everything” would appear to include “employer.” Let’s hear about the firm’s headcount cuts — affecting partners, associates, and staff — and check out the severance agreement that one source leaked to us….
Making your way in the legal world these days is tough. We’ve seen lawyers who’ve had to turn to stripping, prostitution, and even whoring. It’s just hard to make ends meet when jobs are tight and debt’s creeping up on you.
Which is why this woman may have the right idea. She got all her stripping out of the way before law school so she could pay the bills and now she takes nude glamour shots (or at least semi-nude — she covers herself just enough) for 12 hours a week and lives the high life while still in law school. Pretty sweet deal. Her experience can be an inspiration for Belle Knox’s plan to finance law school with porn stardom.
So let’s take a closer look. And by look, I mean here are some (safe for most workplaces) pictures…
Have you ever made a typo? Have you ever misspelled something in a written document? Have you ever made a factual error? Chances are, if you are white and you made a mistake, the person reading it didn’t notice. Or if they noticed, they made an excuse for you. Don’t worry white folks, minor clerical errors won’t detract from your overall appearance of intelligence and competence.
But if you’re black, prepare to feel like an idiot. A new study shows that when law firm partners read identical memos, the partners who believed the author was white were much more forgiving than the partners who thought the author was black.
Hang on, I need to email this study to David Lat, Bryan Garner, my mom, Matt Levine, and Partner Emeritus, from my fake, white-person, @post.harvard.edu account, so they take it seriously….
Yesterday, Alex Rich brought us the story of a job in South Carolina offering a mere 6 bits over the minimum wage.
How can any employer possibly top that? I mean, short of the government or federal judges trying to use unpaid interns, that is. Well, maybe if someone offered a super low-paying job and that job was in New York City. Not to besmirch the good, sweet-tea-loving population of South Carolina, but it’s not quite the same. The $8/hour in South Carolina has about the same buying power as roughly $38,000/year in Manhattan. That’s… bad.
For all my talk about finding a healthy work life balance based on doing stuff, I’m here to report that there is a very real limit to how much you can actually do. This limit is dictated by your need to sleep.
Unfortunately, in the last month I had to learn this lesson the hard way. With work becoming increasingly busy and having taken on one too many outside projects, I was averaging about five hours a night for a full four weeks. Throughout this time, the effects of sleep deprivation slowly began to destroy my life.
To be fair, I was able to get by okay in the first week. By week two, however, coffee stopped having any meaningful effect and my ability to focus diminished greatly. Things continued in slow decline, and, toward the end of the month I had become so sensitive to sensory stimuli that I was unable to work without turning off the lights in my office and donning a pair of earplugs. This, of course, worked wonders for my reputation around the office.
Fortunately, around the time things started getting really bad, my work eased up and I was able to catch up on my sleep. That said, this period of sleep deprivation isn’t one I will soon forget…
* Click here if you’d like to see how Obama evolved to his current position on same-sex marriage. Alternatively, click here to see a terribly Photoshopped picture of Obama catching a basketball bouquet. [New York Times Magazine]
* Should you enroll in law school? Should you do it… TODAY? Please come on over and take a look at the latest parade of law professors trumpeting right now as the best time ever to go to law school. [National Law Journal]
* University of Colorado School of Law just received its largest gift ever, to the sweet tune of $10 million. It’ll fund $400,000 in student scholarships, but mostly, it’ll be used to hire MOAR law professors. [Denver Business Journal]
* Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will be allowed to view victims’ autopsy pictures and visit privately with his sister. Members of his crazy fan club must be so incredibly jealous. [CNN]
* Next time, make TurboTax your “cheap whore”? This guy claims he was “seduced” by an IRS agent who then refused to help him with his tax audit. He sued, and is now appealing to the Ninth Circuit. [ABC News]
Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: [email protected].
Since late last year, things have been booming in Hong Kong / China in cap markets, especially Hong Kong IPOs. M&A deal flow has recently been getting a bit stronger as well. Although one can’t predict such things with any certainty, all signs are pointing to a banner entire 2014 for the top end US corporate and cap markets practices in Hong Kong / China. This is not really new news, as its been the feeling most in the market have had for a few months now and things continue to look good.
The head of our Asia practice, Evan Jowers, has been in Hong Kong for about 10 days a month (with trips every other month to both Shanghai and Bejing) for the past 7 months (Robert Kinney and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong again March 15 to 23), and spending most of his time there meeting with senior US hiring partners at just about all the major US and UK firms there, as well as prospective candidates at all associate levels and partner levels, and when in the US, Evan works Asia hours and is regularly on the phone with such persons, as our the other members of our Asia team. Our Yuliya Vinokurova is in Hong Kong every other month and Robert is there about 5 times a year as well. While we have a solid Asia team of recruiters, Evan Jowers will spend at least some time with all of our candidates for Asia position. We have had long standing relationships, and good friendships in some cases, with hiring partners and other senior US partners in Asia for 8 years now.
Are you challenged by the costs and logistics of maintaining your office, distracting you from the practice of law?
Many small firms are successfully moving part—or even all—of their practice to a virtual setting. This even includes multi-jurisdictional practice spanning several states and practice areas, although solo and small partnerships are still the largest adopters of virtual law.
Can you do the same? The new article Mobile in Practice, Virtual by Design from author Jared Correia, Esq., explores how mobile technology bring real-life benefits to a small law firm. Read this new article—the next in Thomson Reuters’ Independent Thinking series for small firms—to explore how a mobile practice:
Everyone is talking about the importance of Social Media in Corporate America. But it is relatively safe to say that most law firms and lawyers are slightly behind the social curve. Most lawyers, at minimum, use LinkedIn, for networking. Some even use Twitter for pushing out short, pithy content, while many have Blogs, where they write their little hearts out. The adage “it is better to give than to receive” is not always true though in the world of Social. In the Social World – it is best to listen, give back and engage.
Social Media is a communications tool that can deeply educate you about the needs and wants of your clients and prospects when used in conjunction social media monitoring and sharing tools.
Take this quick quiz and see if you know how to use Social to help you engage more with your clients or to better service the ones you have.
