What's Going on at Shearman & Sterling?

Lately we’ve been hearing various rumors about Shearman & Sterling. Some appear to be true, and some not.
Here are the rumors, followed by the firm’s responses, in blockquotes.
1. Have start dates for incoming first-year associates been pushed back?

Start dates for incoming first-year associates for fall 2008 are October 6, 20, 27 and November 3.

We don’t know what the 2007 start dates were (and the firm didn’t provide them), but we’re guessing they were earlier. But the 2008 start dates are not particularly late. Compare them to these firms’ postponed start dates.
2. Have there been any layoffs at the firm, of lawyers or staff?

There have been no lay-offs at Shearman & Sterling, of either attorneys or administrative staff.

This makes sense to us. Shearman did layoffs back in the early 2000s, which it later came to regret, when memories of the layoffs harmed the firm’s recruiting efforts once the economy came roaring back. So, having learned their lesson, we’d be surprised to see mass layoffs from Shearman now.
(But we wouldn’t be surprised if there have been some performance-related dismissals lately, especially on the corporate side.)
3. Did the firm make offers to all of its summer associates?
(We had previously heard, through the grapevine, that the firm had 135 summer associates and made offers to all of them.)

This summer we had 144 summer associates. There were four summer associates whose academic commitments precluded their joining the firm in fall 2009. We made entry-level offers to all but one of the summer associates available to join the firm.

Based on the high percentage of offers to summers, north of 99 percent, it seems that Shearman is doing just fine these days. But we are curious about that one SA who got no-offered.
Might there be a juicy but undiscovered summer associate scandal? Perhaps a new and improved version of the Shearman & Slur-Man? If you have info, feel free to email us.
(If it’s garden-variety incompetence, that’s of little interest to us. But if there’s an entertaining or salacious tale, we’d like to hear about it. Thanks.)
Earlier: X-Summers: Shearman & Slur-Man

Sponsored