If you’ve always wanted to own a piece of defunct law firm Heller Ehrman, today is your lucky day. A sizable portion of the firm’s art collection is hitting the auction block in about an hour, at Bonhams & Butterfields in San Francisco.
We previously covered a prior Heller art auction, here in New York, but that sale involved just a handful of pieces. The auction taking place today — and starting very soon, at 10 a.m. Pacific time (or 1 p.m. Eastern time) — is much larger in scope.
So what’s up for sale? And how can you get a piece of the action?
Continue reading “Heller Ehrman Art To Be Auctioned Off Today”
At LegalTech, I had a chance to attend a panel with some very interesting speakers on the “future” of law.
During this panel, a question was posed to a person — we’ll call him “David L.” — on whether law students are feeling better about the market now as opposed to six or twelve months ago. His answer: yes, but perhaps not in the way you might imagine. Students are feeling better because they’ve become resigned to their fates, which has actually been quite liberating. After all, “Why stress about your career when you’ll be just lucky to have one?”
Another resignation to fate was taking place right before my eyes, one that went almost completely unnoticed among those in attendance: the end of the current BigLaw Partner-Associate (Cravath) Model.
More after the jump.
Continue reading “The Audacity of Hopelessness: When Resigning to Your Fate May Be A Good Thing”
The ABA is out with a new report that suggests the recession has negatively impacted diversity in the legal profession. The report also confirms reports we’ve heard about layoffs disproportionately affecting minority attorneys: The ABA Journal summarizes the findings:
“While law firms have increasingly come to recognize that diverse corporate clients and international markets often require lawyer diversity, the recession is drying up monies for diversity initiatives and creating downsizing and cutbacks that may disproportionately and negatively affect lawyer diversity–thereby undoing the gains of past decades,” states the report produced for the ABA Presidential Initiative Commission on Diversity.
The report, titled Diversity in the Legal Profession: The Next Steps (PDF), also urges law schools to take financial considerations into account in seeking greater diversity in admissions since diverse populations often are most affected by rising tuition costs and heavy debt loads.
That’s right, the ABA has some suggested solutions to this problem and — quite rightly — it starts with law schools.
Details from the report after the jump.
Continue reading “The Recession’s Impact on Diversity Initiatives”
Our coverage of the London legal market tends to be episodic. We tried offering more regular coverage for a while, with our Letter from London column, but we put the feature on hold to focus on domestic developments. (We might revive the London column if we can find a sponsor for it.)
We will, however, cover major news out of London — such as last week’s massive defections from White & Case to Latham & Watkins.
Continue reading “Musical Chairs: White & Case Loses Lawyers to Latham in London”
[Brett Favre] decided to play the game at his age and all that goes with it, and the effect he had on Minnesota and on that team and a lot of sports fans was enormous. I think the excitement and the challenge is something that is very alluring, and if I can play a small part in paying the taxpayer back…then I will look back at this time and say, for all the knockdowns that I will inevitably have, it would have been worth the experience and the knowledge that I was helpful.
– Thomas Russo, 66, former chief legal officer at Lehman Brothers, discussing his departure from Patton Boggs to become the new general counsel for American International Group Inc.
Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks, which has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.
Regular readers of this column are well aware by now that the overall unemployment rate isn’t a particularly good indicator, but it’s the most-commonly discussed number so we use it. The predictions are always wrong, and the rate grossly undercounts the number of people any reasonable person would define as unemployed. But for all its problems, it’s not entirely useless to show trends.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
The unemployment rate fell from 10.0 to 9.7 percent in January, and nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged (-20,000), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.
That’s what we’ve been harping on all along. Overall unemployment didn’t improve because of a flood of people going back to work; it improved because so many people fell out of the BLS’s definition. We remain frustrated by any definition of unemployment that doesn’t include people who got frustrated and gave up looking or whose unemployment had outlasted their benefits.
Continue reading “This Week in Layoffs: 02.07.10″
We were beset by technical difficulties here at ATL yesterday (as we explained in our Twitter feed). We apologize for the site outages; hopefully the situation will be better next week.
At least we didn’t have to go out in the snow. Our brethren in D.C. were not as fortunate. The Washington Post reports:
The full weight of winter brought life in much of the Washington region to a standstill Saturday as a storm predicted to be one of the most powerful on record dumped 12 to 21 inches of snow overnight. …
[O]fficials pleaded with people to stay off the roads until conditions improve. People were confined to their homes by the mountains of snow, many in the dark as trees brought down power lines.
Stay off the roads? But we’ve got an LSAT to take, damn it.
Continue reading “Snowpocalypse LSAT at Georgetown”
Perhaps to avoid the snowpocalypse in D.C., Justice Clarence Thomas went down to the Sunshine State this week, where he spent time speaking with law students at Stetson University and the University of Florida.
Though he’s the sphinx of the High Court, Justice Thomas is loquacious when not in oral arguments. He’s an engaging speaker: personable, genuine, funny.
Though we cringed watching video from his Thursday talk at the University of Florida. He talked about the elitism in SCOTUS clerk hiring and complained about “smart bloggers” — or “self-proclaimed smart bloggers” — labeling his clerks “TTT” last year. “That’s the attitude that you’re up against,” he told the UF law students.
We hope that comment was not inspired by these pages. In 2008, CT’s law clerks came from George Mason, Rutgers, George Washington, and Creighton law schools. If there were any “TTT” references to them here, they were in the comments section and did not come from our “smart” mouths, er, fingers. (Reader comments should not be confused with ATL editorial comment; this is why we hide the comments, for your protection.)
We worship The Elect, regardless of alma mater. Lat has been heaping slavish adoration at the feet of SCOTUS clerks since 2004.
More thoughts from Justice Thomas on clerk hiring, paying off his student loan debt, and law firm layoffs, after the jump.
Continue reading “Clarence Thomas Clarifies: His Clerks Aren’t ‘TTT’”
Men, women, transgender, heterosexuals, gays, bisexuals. Every ethnicity. White-collar and blue-collar. It’s really very, very diverse — though we do have an unusually high percentage of lawyers. I don’t know why.
– Susan Wright, founder of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, discussing the people who attend erotic BDSM — bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism — parties.
Ed. note: ATL has teamed up with the 10th Justice to predict how the Supreme Court may decide upcoming cases. CNN has called FantasySCOTUS the “hottest new fantasy-league game.”
How large of a crowd do we need before the crowd becomes “wise”? In this week’s 10th Justice, we will be check how accurate our members predicted five cases recently handed down: Smith v. Spisak, Power Marketing, LLC v. Maine Pub. Util. Comm’n, Kucana v. Holder, South Carolina v. North Carolina, and Wood v. Allen. While these cases are not among the most important cases of the term, they still contribute important data points to test the predictive capabilities of FantasySCOTUS.net, and enables us to further understand the wisdom (and limitations) of our crowd of users. For a refresher on confidence intervals and margins of error in FantasySCOTUS.net predictions, check out last week’s column.
Continue reading “FantasySCOTUS: Testing the Wisdom of the Crowds”
This is not a typical lede for a post on the Wall Street Journal Law Blog. Ashby Jones writes:
Cornell is the Lady Gaga of the law-school world. Both are white hot, but the explanations behind each’s popularity don’t fully add up.
Dem’s fighting words, Ashby. You’re not a bad guy, but Lady Gaga has more fabulosity in a single fake eyelash than you will ever possess. Her popularity is entirely explicable — due to her delightfully danceable music, and her genius as a performer — and richly deserved.
(Just watch the video for Poker Face. Res ipsa loquitur.)
Now, what about Cornell Law School? And other leading law schools — which celebrities do they most closely resemble?
Continue reading “Is Cornell the Lady Gaga of Law Schools?
Plus: celebrity comparisons for other law schools.“
More 2009 profit numbers are in, this time for law firms based in Boston. And, as we’ve seen elsewhere, partners in Boston are enjoying record-breaking profits. The Boston Globe reports:
Senior lawyers at three of Boston’s biggest law firms had their most profitable year ever in 2009, despite widespread job losses in the city’s legal industry.
Bingham McCutchen, Fish & Richardson, and WilmerHale all said they recorded the highest average profits per partner ever in 2009. Meanwhile, some other firms reported better-than-expected financial results.
For the associates laid off by Bingham, the associates laid off by Fish, and for the staff laid off by WilmerHale, I don’t know what to tell you. Biglaw partners in Boston didn’t just find a way to make money during the recession, they were able to make more money than ever before.
I guess all of the laid off associates and staff can feel good about helping them rake in the dough?
All the gory details after the jump.
Continue reading “Boston Legal Enjoys Record Profits Per Partner”
I’m not a meteorologist, or a groundhog, but it looks like D.C. and Philadelphia are totally screwed today. A D.C. tipster called it a “snowpocalypse.” (Judge for yourself – the image above links to Weather.com’s live radar map.)
Our own Kashmir Hill — who has lived in D.C. and, inexplicably, liked it — claims that the blizzard will shut the city down.
So, which firms are closing, and how are people planning to spend their day?
Continue reading “Winter Storm Warning: D.C. and Philly Firm Closings?”
* Unemployment falls to a five-month low of 9.7 percent. [Reuters]
* Ten Americans have been charged with child abduction and criminal conspiracy after trying to take 33 Haitian kids out of Haiti without government permission. [New York Times]
* The legal battle over a John Edwards sex tape, which allegedly shows the disgraced politician and trial lawyer having sex with a pregnant Rielle Hunter (ick), arrives in a North Carolina courtroom today. [CNN]
Continue reading “Morning Docket: 02.05.10″
Internet message boards tend to be rough-and-tumble places. Enter at your own risk. (This includes Above the Law comments — if you don’t like them, don’t read them.)
There may be employment risks for posters at Top Law Schools (“TLS”), a message board for gunners planning to apply to law school. This is one of those places online where people talk about what to bring to the LSAT and trumpet their acceptances by various law schools. In other words, it’s the place where future law school list-serv psychos cut their teeth.
Yesterday, Top Law Schools claimed that test prep company TestMasters is discriminating against its readers. A TLS moderator wrote a post alleging that a reader’s application to work as an LSAT instructor for TestMasters was rejected based on his being a frequent TLS poster. The moderator posted the rejection email the reader received (we’ve replaced the name of the TestMasters director with a pseudonym):
Dear “John”,
We have decided to cancel your interview and reject your application to work for us as an LSAT instructor. Applications are currently at an all-time high, and we do not have the time or resources to interview TTT candidates whose social lives consist of making thousands of posts on internet discussion boards. TestMasters only hires people who are cool, and unfortunately you do not meet that requirement.
Best regards,
“I-Wish-I-Worked-For-Kaplan”
Programs Director
TestMasters
When we got the first of many emails about this, we thought, “A programs director who actually uses the term ‘TTT’? ‘People who are cool’? C’mon. This is fake.”
But TestMasters is not disowning the email, and it appears that “I-Wish-I-Worked-For-Kaplan” actually waded into the cesspool to defend herself.
Continue reading “Flame War: Testmasters v. Top Law Schools”
* Oh, sure, now Carlos the Jackal wants to avail himself of legal remedies. Funny how life in jail limits a person’s vigilante terrorism. [Guardian]
* What type of greeting should you use in a cover letter? I used to go with “If you ever want to see your kids again, please read,” but that was before the recession. Now I might try “I will not eat unless you read my cover letter.” It worked for Gandhi. [Legal Writing Blog]
* Big Four overtime lawsuit, now with briefs. [Going Concern]
* A friend of mine from law school lost a lot of weight, so I don’t have to. Good lookin’ out Mike. [The Stranger]
* Failed Presidential candidate John Kerry’s fight against the Constitution. [Blackbook Legal]
* Is Pre-Law worth it? I don’t think so. Take some economics courses and you might be able to avoid the whole thing. [Ms. J.D.]
* Congressional report card from the NAACP. [The NAACP]
Times are difficult for 3Ls. The legal economy is in shambles. Their debts are about to come due, and they have no reasonable opportunities for legal employment. Many third years have resorted to cold, unsolicited résumé dumps, hoping against hope that they’ll get lucky.
There is a lot of pressure on 3Ls. But handling enormous pressure is an important skill for would-be attorneys. One 3L who faced this employment pressure totally collapsed. Unfortunately for the 3L, that collapse is preserved over email.
The situation started innocently enough. The unidentified 3L sent in a résumé and cover letter to Webster & Associates LLC, looking for legal work. The letter was inartfully addressed to “Esteemed Mr. Webster, Partner:”
I know, you’re thinking that this 3L thought he was addressing Partner Emeritus instead of a regular person. But that’s not really the problem here.
The problem is that Webster & Associates is not a law firm; it’s a company run by a man named Bruce Webster that specializes in IT consulting. Two seconds on the Webster & Associates website would have revealed this fact.
Webster sent the job seeker back an — admittedly curt — response. And then things got out of hand.
Continue reading “3L Achieves Networking Failure: Disaster Preserved via Email”
