Will the mainstream media ever hold law firms accountable for their roles in the global financial crisis? Probably not. Relatively speaking, only a small sector of society understands that Biglaw firms played a significant role making “toxic assets” lucrative and legal. Without attorneys, bankers wouldn’t know their tranches from their enhancements.
Too few people can get their head around what actually happened to cause the market crisis. But the public — the average American citizen — can wrap its mind around the concept of bonuses. I think it goes something like this:
Bonuses, BAD. Wall Street, BAD. Pitchforks and Torches, GOOD.
Can the mainstream media latch onto that?
Do you want to purchase a discount legal education, but you don’t know where to look? A new list from the National Jurist will point you in the right direction. Tax Prof Blog reproduces the list of which law schools give you the most bang for your buck. Here are the top 15:
How do you come up with a list that ranks N. Carolina Central the best at anything? Check out the methodology after the jump.
The atrium on the 25th floor of Hogan’s offices at 875 Third Ave. will be transformed into Mr. Big’s on-screen office, according to an internal memo that found its way to our in-box. (We have no idea what Mr. Big does for a living, but we know he’s played by the dreamy Chris Noth.)
Lowe, we’re flattered you’ve adopted the royal ATL “we.” We’re not sure what Big does for a living either, but we know he’s not a lawyer, which is perhaps why he has an atrium-sized office.
The Sex and the City crew will be at Hogan’s office on Sept. 2, but an internal memo — which we invite tipsters to send for posting — indicates that friends, family, and random Chris Noth-stalkers shouldn’t try to drop in. We wonder if they would make an exception for Justice Scalia, who may or may not be a SATC fan.
The internal memo says that Hogan employees might get to meet the stars and might get autographs, but it’s not guaranteed. And the memo reminds partners that on the day of the filming, their star wattage will be dimmed:
A few partners will also have to clean up their offices “so your boxes are not in the movie!” the memo says.
We talked to Hogan managing partner Warren Gorrell. He says he works on the 24th floor. “I’m not one of the partners with a messy office,” he told us. Gorrell’s take on Hogan’s Sex and the City 2 star turn, after the jump.
Do you remember the class of 2009? You know, the kids who should be gearing up to start work in a couple of weeks but are instead sitting around, waiting to get out of purgatory? Don’t look now, but a couple of firms have decided to extend the deferral period for these people, and that can’t be a good thing. Proskauer Rose’s New York office kicked off the round of deferment extensions last week. A tipster from Proskauer in Los Angeles reported the news:
Proskauer just told incoming L.A. associates that [incoming associates] in New York are getting their start dates pushed back again. It’s all the way back to November now. They told us [in L.A.] before they told New York because they didn’t want us to “hear it on Above the Law first.” [Sheesh.]
The letters have now gone out to all the incoming New York associates informing them of the news. The new start date is November 2, 2010.
Proskauer had already pushed back the class of 2009 to March 2010. But Proskauer has also told the class of 2010 that the earliest they will be able to start is “fall” 2010.
So can we assume that rising 2Ls considering interviewing with Proskauer won’t be able to start until late 2012? For that matter, are incoming Proskauer associates confident that they will ever be able to start at the firm? We reached out to Proskauer, but the firm did not respond to our request for comment.
After the jump, Mintz Levin joins the deferment extension party.
* A disappointing ruling from the 3rd Circuit for sports gamblers in Delaware. [USA Today]
* L.A. City Attorney Carmen Trutanich wants to make hanging out illegal. [Los Angeles Times]
* Judge Jed Rakoff is becoming a media darling. Another article singing the BofA-bench-slapping judge’s praises. [New York Times]
* Foley & Lardner sued for allegedly revealing trade secrets. [National Law Journal]
* Connecticut prosecutor John H. Durham has been chosen to lead the Justice Department’s investigation into CIA torture of detainees. [Talking Points Memo]
* Four more years for Bernanke. [Washington Post]
Even though we are moving out of the Vault top ten, we are still firmly in the land of law firms that everybody recognizes.
To refresh your memory, here is the next batch of firms on the Vault list:
11. Williams & Connolly 12. Debevoise & Plimpton 13. Paul Weiss 14. Gibson Dunn 15. Sidley Austin
Williams & Connolly was crowned the safest firm by Above the Law readers in March. And so far, the firm has worn its crown with grace and style. No layoffs to report at this small dynamo. It’s something to consider during this recruiting season.
After the jump, the Paul Weiss / Gibson Dunn troll fight starts in 3 … 2 … 1 …
[Matt Rittberg]
* Is Bernie Madoff about the try the Lockerbie terrorist defense? Does he have friends in oil rich countries that we don’t know about. [Dealbreaker]
* You can’t get rid of the LSAT until you come up with something better to replace it. I nominate tying up prospective law students and throwing them into a body of water of some kind. If they sink, we’ll know they have what it takes to depress the salaries of lawyers already in the system. [Miller-McCune]
* How long do legal blogs last? [Drug and Device Law]
* Do law firms need more professional salespeople? [The Client Revolution]
* Now I know why the British left their islands to conquer the world. They were just in search of a little bit of sunlight. [Pink Tape via Blawg Review]
Are you a laid-off lawyer who has been spending way too much time on Facebook? Here’s a way to turn that “résumé gap” into job experience:
Director of Social Media
Medium-sized Atlanta law firm seeks candidates interested in a part-time or full-time social media position. The primary responsibility of the Social Media Director will be to actively promote our growing law firm using a variety of social media such as Twitter, Facebook and our existing web-site. Projects include: managing the firm’s Twitter, Facebook and web-site account, research current and relevant legal stories in the news and republish to social networks and firm web-site on a daily basis, communicate through social web-sites about all specific practice groups and their developments, update marketing team on a weekly basis with web-site content.
Managing a professional presence on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites felt like a full-time job to me. But I didn’t know you could draw a salary for it.
So what are the qualifications for this position — and, more importantly, the salary?
Life happens fast. This morning we reported that Thomson Reuters had revoked free printer access to law schools in Puerto Rico.
It seems that the policy has now been reversed. A message from University of Puerto Rico law professor José Julián Álvarez González, after the jump.
When Justice Sonia Sotomayor needs to stock up on her beloved rice, beans and pork, where does she go? One might peg the Supreme Court’s newest member — a liberal, a lawyer, a Greenwich Village resident — as a typical Whole Foods customer.
But perhaps Justice Sotomayor, in a show of support to the president who appointed her to the Supreme Court, is participating in the Whole Foods boycott? Her Honor was spotted shopping for groceries last Thursday at Whole Foods archrival Trader Joe’s, in the Foggy Bottom section of Washington, DC.
The Sotomayor sighting was noted briefly in the Washington Post. But an ATL tipster, who actually met and chatted with Justice Sotomayor at Trader Joe’s, has more details.
Skadden has decided to significantly reduce the size of its summer class for 2010. In a charming move, the firm told the media before informing law schools and prospective summer associates. Am Law Daily reports:
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom is cutting the size of its 2010 summer associate class by half and adjusting its recruitment strategy by making all of its offers on a single day in late September, according to a copy of a letter the firm will send to prospective summers.
Skadden hired 225 summer associates this year and expects to hire a little more than 100 next year, though the precise figure will depend on offer acceptance rates, says Howard Ellin, Skadden’s recruiting partner.
Good news from the letter: the firm plans to make offers to 95 percent of its 2009 summer associates. Of course, as we previously reported, they won’t be starting at the firm until 2011. We’ll let you know when Skadden officially releases the memo to the people who are affected by the decision. Correction: From a Skadden spokesperson:
The letter was sent last week to career services and deans at the law schools where Skadden is interviewing. Some schools already have circulated it to their students. We absolutely did not talk to the media before notifying schools.
Update (4:15): After this post went was published, Thomson Reuters reversed course and reinstated the free printer access to Puerto Rican law schools. Click here for our coverage.
Thomson Reuters owns Westlaw and is one of the two major gatekeepers to legal research in the modern world. Recently, the company made an economic decision that some claim unfairly impacts law students in Puerto Rico. A tipster reports:
It seems Westlaw has decided to cut their free printer service to the four Puerto Rico Law schools for economic reasons, while keeping the service in all US law schools.
Why would Westlaw only discontinue free printer access to Puerto Rican law students? One Westlaw user wrote to Thompson Reuters, asking the company to reconsider its decision. But he also seems to have figured out why Westlaw made this decision.
Is there really blood in the water around the billable hour? Or are we simply hearing an updated version of a familiar refrain? This morning the Wall Street Journal took another look at killing the billable hour (subscription):
People who follow the world of law firms know, among so much else, two things: 1) that billing-by-the-hour has long been the way law firms get paid and 2) companies have over the years had only limited success in getting firms to agree to do it any other way.
That’s changing. In a big way. Companies are starting to ditch the hourly structure — which critics complain offers law firms an incentive to rack up bigger bills — in favor of flat-fee contracts and other types of arrangements.
Of course, we’ve heard all that before. Heralding the death of the billable hour is much like predicting the end of the world: eventually somebody is going to be right.
Has anything fundamentally changed this time around to make the billable hour more susceptible to death? Here’s the best argument.
The Vault survey rankings may have created buzz last week, but we’re going to kick off the buzz this week by unveiling our first annual review of the summer associate experience at the major law firms. With information based on surveys conducted by Lateral Link and tips we’ve gathered at ATL, the summer program snapshots give you an insiders perspective on each firm. So if you are heading into OCI and want the scoop on what 2009 summer associate class felt about their experience, check out the ATL Career Center, powered by Lateral Link.
The Summer Associate Program review is located within each firm snapshot. Surf over there to find out:
Which firm received high marks for being “open and honest” with summer associates “at every juncture of the law firm strategy in this economic climate?” Click here.
Which firm gives summers an $85 dinner budget and does a two day retreat for all summers at Catalina Island? Click here.
Which firm’s summers report that the firm is “fantastic” when it comes to summer salaries and offers “job security” that is hard to find elsewhere? Click here.
Which firm had summer associates go head to head in a “Roc the Guac” guacamole-cooking contest? Click here.
More after the jump.
Yolanda Young is back with a vengeance, and an amended complaint against Covington & Burling.
The brief synopsis on Young is that she was a Covington & Burling staff attorney who sued the firm for racial discrimination. Covington has denied the charges at every point. The firm briefly got the suit tossed, but it was reinstated.
Young’s basic allegations remain the same:
Through its pattern and practice, Defendant, Covington & Burling LLP, systematically relegates its black attorneys to its lowest rung of practicing attorneys — the position of staff attorney. Firm policy bans the promotion of staff attorneys to the position of associate and, ultimately, to partner. This prohibition adversely impacts Defendant’s black attorneys by consigning the majority to earning less money, performing less challenging work, and enjoying less opportunity for professional growth than Defendant’s nonblack attorneys.
This time around, Young argues that black staff attorneys at Covington are more qualified than their white colleagues:
Young points out that while Covington uses a combination of law school grades, journal membership, and clerkship experience to determine the assignment of its attorneys, many of their partners — who decide how an attorney should be assigned — lack such credentials, but presumably are able to perform adequately at partner-level.
Young also asserts that black practicing attorneys, as a group, typically graduated from higher ranked law schools than their white colleagues and that, more often than their white counterparts, black staff attorneys attended law schools from which Covington’s partners, counsel, and associates graduated.
I think I know what is going on here. See, this is a revenge fantasy lawsuit. And Covington has been typecast in the role of Major King Kong.
After the jump, Young brings charts to back up her claims, and announces her full intentions exclusively to Above the Law.
[Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks. Law Shucks has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.]
It seems so good, doesn’t it? According to the lead of a recent AP story, "The unemployment rate fell in 17 states and the District of Columbia last month, a positive sign even as the pain of joblessness remains widespread."
Don’t believe the hype. Even lawyers can subtract when it’s only double-digit numbers. Are we not supposed to notice that that must mean the unemployment rate increased, or at best was flat, in more than 30 states? In fact, it was up in 36 states and territories, more than twice as many as it was down in, but the AP is just drunk on White House Kool-Aid apparently, how else to explain that spin?
Other outlets aren’t so optimistic (or bedazzled, depending on your level of cynicism). Initial jobless claims were actually higher than expected for the week, at 576,000, and the overall unemployment rate was flat at about 9.4% (we touched briefly last week on why that number is particularly misleading right now). That rate is still expected to hit the psychologically-dreadful 10% level by early next year. Still, the S&P 500 had a nice little run for the week, finishing up about 40 points.
Law-firm news wasn’t terrible this week, although the "week without a layoff" streak ended at one. Details after the jump.
* More on the skanks. ‘Skanks in NYC’ blogger plans to sue Google for $15 million for disclosing her identity. [New York Daily News via Gothamist]
* A Michigan attorney has filed an age discrimination lawsuit against the University of Iowa College of Law, claiming that the school wouldn’t put him on faculty because he’s the ripe old age of 56. [Chicago Tribune]
* The Justice Department may prosecute CIA employees for torturing detainees. [New York Times]
* Child molester hatched a bizarre $3 million defamation suit against his victim. And won, but only for one day. [Washington Post]
* Gerber Baby Foods doesn’t like women or minorities. [Courthouse News Service]
* As we’ve noted before, prospective law students tell Kaplan the economy is motivating them to head to law school. Obviously, they haven’t done their due diligence here at Above The Law. [Oregon Daily Emerald]
Ed. note: As previously mentioned, LEWW is on vacation this week. Regular weekly posting will resume with a double issue on Friday, August 28.
Today we ask readers to choose the most impressive lawyer newlyweds of the past two months. Early summer traditionally represents the height of the wedding season, and this year’s June and July couples have not disappointed. Below the fold, you’ll find two SCOTUS clerks, a Harvard JD/MD, the GC of a major corporation, a Google millionaire, and two managing editors of the Harvard Law Review, plus the typical amount of prestigious Biglaw employment.
Click on the link below to review our prior write-ups of the Couple of the Week winners and vote for your favorites. (And remember: The two lucky couples who are selected will be eligible for Couple of the Year consideration.)
Last week, Above the Law was dominated by the Vault rankings. But we still had time to expose scandal and poke a little fun. This week’s top three stories:
Vault Rankings:
The list which all prestige-based conversations will have to reckon with was released this week. Vault is so exciting that we even published an incomplete list earlier in the week to whet people’s appetite.
The big news from the rankings has been that Weil Gotshal surged to #6, while Latham & Watkins fell ten sports to #17.
We’ve also started our open threads to allows attorneys and law students to discuss the firms on the list. Click here and here for our first two open threads.
Trial Lawyers for Justice: Not every lawyer is obsessed with prestige of course. Some are just concerned about family. Really concerned. Check here for a law firm’s strange request that new applicants submit a family photo with their application. Here, the firm’s managing partner defends the request.
Moritz College of Law Scandal This week, Above the Law was able to expose a scandal at the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University. It appears that the school’s Student Bar Association President embezzled student funds for private use. Now, he might not be able to get his diploma. Check out our full coverage here.
Comment of the Week:
One young attorney had some choice words for baby-boomers partners who question the work ethic of today’s “Generation Y” lawyers.
Ok Partner, I will bust my butt for you, I will sacrifice my physical and mental well-being, and I will not complain. And in return, you will mentor me, show me the ropes, introduce me to clients, help develop my business, and reward me with a partnership down the road if I do all you ask of me. You know, the same deal that YOU had when you were an associate. Wait, you won’t do that? You have no interest in mentoring, teaching, or grooming me as a future partner?
Well then, you can suck it. I will continue to care about my “work-life balance,” collect a paycheck for a few years, and then get out of here while I’m still young and marketable.
In 2009, a small group of Harvard Law School students noticed an absurd monopoly in the bar prep space, held by an unchallenged leader with a non-evolving product. In response, these students teamed up with Harvard Law alumni to launch BarMax on January 14, 2010.
The mission: democratize bar prep by embracing new technologies to provide the very best bar exam review courses at a fraction of the cost normally associated with these courses.
Since then, with the encouragement of thousands of students and an unwavering commitment to their success, BarMax has established itself as a comprehensive alternative to the stagnant, over-priced status quo.
As we continue to expand, we do not want to lose sight of the basic premises that led us to create BarMax in the first place. If you are a law student who believes that there is something fundamentally wrong with being forced to take out yet another loan to pay for a $4,000 bar exam prep course, you are not alone.
Ed. note: This post is authored by Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney of Kinney Recruiting, sponsor of the Asia Chronicles. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates and partners in Asia than any other firm in the past five years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com
Happy Chinese New Year! We were extremely busy the past few months, including most of our US based team working from our Hong Kong offices during November and December.
As a follow up from our recent post, which listed our 62 US associate and counsel placements in Asia last year (vast majority in HK / China), please note that thus far in January ’12, we have already made seven US associate and counsel placements in Asia. This is an especially impressive number, considering the biglaw lateral hiring market in Asia is down right now (see state of the market brief overview below). These new placements are of new hires in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai, who were interviewing with their new firm for a month or more and they are spread out among different practice areas, including project finance, litigation, fund formation, M&A and cap markets. We are close on four additional new associate placements, in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai, that we expect to close soon. We do not discuss partner placements in these articles, but the pace of partner recruitment in Asia (a large part of our business) has continued.
Hedge Fund In-House Openings in Hong Kong
We are seeing a small run of new in-house openings in Hong Kong at hedge funds. We are currently filling three different in-house positions at three different hedge funds in Hong Kong, two of these searches we are handling on an exclusive basis. All three will most likely be filled by a US associate, with about 4 to 6 years of experience. Mandarin not required. Candidates from NYC and London will be considered, but at one of these funds the new hire will likely come from Hong Kong / China or Singapore (with HK being the strong preference).
Please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com if you are interested in these hedge fund openings. As you probably would expect, the competition for these spots will be fierce and the funds will be very selective when choosing which candidates to interview.
Will the mainstream media ever hold law firms accountable for their roles in the global financial crisis? Probably not. Relatively speaking, only a small sector of society understands that Biglaw firms played a significant role making “toxic assets” lucrative and legal. Without attorneys, bankers wouldn’t know their tranches from their enhancements.
Continue reading “The Mainstream Media Is Aware That Law Firms Exist, Right?”
When 
Yolanda Young is back with a vengeance, and an amended complaint against 
