Everything is bigger in Texas — even the law student explosions. A tipster gives us the lowdown on some super-sized bitching, spearheaded by three UT Law students:
It seems that three 1Ls took it upon themselves to lambaste our curriculum, our professors, the “Institution” of law school, etc. due to what they perceive as a lack of practical education. That would be pretty un-newsworthy had they not published their cavalcade in The Daily Texan.
I love it when law school communities air their dirty laundry in the press. There’s something so, je ne sais quoi, mais je sais que c’est merde, about it. Here’s the lede for the item from The Daily Texan:
The University of Texas School of Law was recently embarrassed in legal-industry news by a story claiming a law professor delayed releasing his class’s grades by two months — so long that employers had to tell a student they had filled all of their summer internship vacancies while he was waiting for this grade.
The incident is a symptom of a deeper problem at UT Law that has drawn criticism from all corners of the legal industry: Lax institutional standards have marginalized the law school’s role in society of preparing its students to be competent, ethical lawyers.
It looks like the UT 1Ls noticed our little story on grade delays last month.
But that’s just the teaser. Hey, UT – Law students, tell us what you really think …
Lindsay Lohan has slapped E-Trade with a $100 million lawsuit for using her name and likeness without her permission, reports the New York Post.
The offending ad debuted on Super Bowl Sunday, featuring the preternaturally stock-savvy E-Trade baby and his milkaholic mistress “Lindsay”:
Lohan claims that the slurring baby named Lindsay in the video is modeled on her:
Lohan’s lawyer, Stephanie Ovadia, said the actress has the same single-name recognition as Oprah or Madonna. “Many celebrities are known by one name only, and E-Trade is using that knowledge to profit,” Ovadia said…
Ovadia wants an injunction to force the spot off the air, and the Lindsay camp wants every last copy of the commercial.
Lindsay, you’re no Madonna, but the baby does kind of look like you…
Back in December, Sonnenschein announced the outlines of its new merit-based compensation structure. At the time, the firm promised its associates more details in March.
The firm is true to its word: we’re now in March, and we have more details. Above the Law talked with a spokesperson for Sonnenschein. Here’s the top line news:
First year compensation returns to $160,000 for first year associates.
12% – 15% of that compensation will be paid out as a “base bonus” in 2011.
There are no hours or competency requirements to achieve the base bonus in 2011
2010 raises for veteran associates will be in accordance with Sonnenschein’s merit based tier system
According to Sonnenschein, the decision to pay 12% – 15% of 2010 associate compensation as part of a 2011 bonus will help them transition to their new compensation model. The firm wants a greater percentage of total compensation to be paid out as merit-based, end-of-the-year bonus. That new system will be fully operational in 2011, so the firm is viewing 2010 as a transition year. Again, the firm emphasized to us that there would be no hours or merit requirements for associates to receive this 12% – 15% of 2010 money next year.
Sound good? Let’s see what the tipsters have to say.
UPDATE:IP Law. Ever heard of it? Cornell may be considered the Lady Gaga of law schools, but the school is choosing to identify itself with a different celebrity.
Cornell Law School’s website has a rotating series of promotional items, including a video of current students talking about the “geniuses” there, a link to a WSJ Law Blog post entitled “The Dream of Every Recent College Grad: To Go To Cornell Law School,” and a video of students talking about why they chose the school. And then there’s this:
That would be über tool Andy Bernard of The Office. If you click on the link to “Read More,” it takes you to an Entertonement page with some of the fictional character’s greatest Cornell lines, such as:
Creed: It’s pronounced “Colonel,” it’s the highest rank in the military. Andy: It’s pronounced “Cornell,” it’s the highest rank in the Ivy League!
Just because your school attains pop culture status doesn’t mean it’s a good thing…
Arent Fox — recently infamous for telling previously deferred associates to go away, permanently — will be under new management. Here’s the opening of the Arent Fox press release:
Arent Fox LLP today announced that the firm’s Executive Committee has unanimously approved the appointment of Mark M. Katz as chairman of the firm. He succeeds Marc L. Fleischaker, who stepped down after 14 years in that post. Mr. Katz’s appointment was effective March 1.
Let’s hope that Mr. Katz leads Arent Fox to better results in 2010 than the firm enjoyed in 2009.
In the Washington Post, Katz immediately sets about the hard, managing partner work of massaging the past.
The spate of associate deferrals that rippled throughout Biglaw last year was truly unique. There was no historical template for what would happen when firms decided to essentially skip a recruiting class by sending their would-be first years out on paid vacations to public interest organizations.
The experiment — which for a lot of associates and firms is still ongoing — has already taught us a few things. Deferring associates clogs up the recruiting pipeline. Deferring associates is more expensive than making smart hiring decisions. New recruits, shocking as it may be to some, would rather start work than be given money take a vacation.
But there are other questions that still need to be answered. We don’t know if deferred associates taking public interest work have gained any useful experience. We obviously don’t know if all of these deferred associates will actually be able to start when their year is up.
And we don’t know if having a one-year, paid mercenary force of deferred recent law grads is a good thing for public interest organizations.
The ABA Journal and the New York Law Journal report on some stats today that start to answer some of these questions. The statistics point to a significant culture gap between deferred associates and public interest attorneys.
* Harvard Law Professor Jeannie Suk proves that one can be a feminist and a fashionista. [Boston Globe via ABA Journal]
* Dissenting from the bench is on the rise, “hinting” that the Supreme Court may be growing more polarized… [New York Times]
* … and the American public wants to see it. [National Law Journal]
* Laptops in the classroom create a “cone of distraction.” [Washington Post]
* Liberals are not fans of the nominee to head the Legal Services Corporation. [Huffington Post]
* A union pension fund sues Goldman Sachs for overpaying its executives. [Reuters]
* The Superbowl is long over, but the deification of the New Orleans Saints continues to spawn litigation. Who dat that owns “Who Dat?” [Courthouse News Service]
* Was Greenberg Traurig justified in firing alleged village bilker Mark McCombs so quickly? [Chicago Tribune]
In most entertainment industries, the distributors of content reap a much larger share of the profit than the creators of said content. There are some very good reasons for this (see generally the galactically stupid writers strike) and some bad reasons for this (as evidenced by Geoffrey Fletcher’s clear inability to afford the public speaking coach he desperately needs).
In the video game industry, distributors get bank, while creators … well, they get to play with video games all day. Do they even need money?
But a lawsuit pits the creators of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare franchise against Activision, and the results could well have serious fallout across the entire gaming industry. The Guardian puts the issue plainly:
[W]hen studio heads Jason West and Vince Zampella filed that astoundingly vitriolic 16-page lawsuit against their former publisher, they slammed a question mark down over the nature of IP ownership in the modern videogame era. If, as West and Zampella allege, Activision granted them ‘contractual rights’ over the Modern Warfare brand, could they really defect and take a Modern Warfare-like title to another publisher, as news sources are indicating? And step back a little; would a multinational corporation really sign off a massively profitable franchise extension merely to appease its workers?
West and Zampella truly went nuclear on Activision. Let’s check their mission parameters …
* The “judge as umpire” analogy is kind of weak. [Yale Law Journal via Concurring Opinions]
* Fellas, if your lady says she can’t tell the difference between having sex with you and having sex with your twin brother, she’s lying. [Law is Cool]
* You know what is good about electing judges instead of appointing them? Seriously. That wasn’t a rhetorical question. Americans really don’t know how to choose people for the first two branches of government; how can we expect them to come to any reasonable decision about the most arcane branch? [Choose Judges on Merit]
* Did everybody notice “Lady Kanye” at the Oscars last night? The director’s mother allegedly tried to stop the interloper with a cane. [Salon]
* It is International Women’s Day. Luckily, De Beers doesn’t require me to offer a material profession of love on this day, so if it’s all the same to you I’m going to let Blawg Review explain it all while I go watch college basketball. [Sui Generis via Blawg Review]
* David Lat and other media moguls will discuss the future of media. I’m told that more than 140 characters will be used. [Facebook]
[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 two years. You can reach them by email: asia at kinneyrecruiting dot com.]
Evan here, writing from back home in Miami after returning from recent trips to Russia (that market is about six to 9 months away from US associate lateral hiring surge in our estimation) and Asia. I am looking forward to being home for a few weeks before heading back to Hong Kong and Shanghai. Moscow, with its biggest snowfall in its history happening while Robert Kinney, Daniel O’Rourke and I were visiting Yuliya Vinokurova (our resident Russia recruiter) there, was fun but exhausting.
We have had a very impressive run of placements so far this year in HK / China. I personally have made 13 US associate placements in HK / China during the first 9 weeks of ’10. Further, Alexis Lamb (our resident HK recruiter) has made 2 US associate placements thus far in ’10. Here is a very basic, non-specific of course, breakdown of these 15 US associates placed, so our readers can get an idea of who is landing in HK / China at present (it is likely 80% or more of the total number of US associate lateral moves in HK / China thus far in ’10 at top US or UK firms, so a great sample to consider):
’05 fund formation associate (native Mandarin), placed in HK, coming from top 5 US firm in NYC
’05 fund formation associate (native Mandarin), placed in HK, coming from top 30 US firm on East Coast
’07 cap markets associate (fluent Mandarin), placed in HK, coming from top 5 US firm in HK
But the firm is losing some talent on the domestic side too. Says a source:
I know you’ve covered White & Case Palo Alto before. You mentioned the parking lot fiasco and, more recently, covered the defection of three partners from White & Case to Cooley Godward.
More recently, Bill Coats left to join Kaye Scholer. This makes five partners who’ve left within the past few months. The office only has three partners left.
(The link to the Palo Alto office lists a few partners with two offices. But the only ones who actually use Palo Alto as their main office are Warren Heit, Bijal Vakil, and Jennifer Yokoyama.)
A second tipster’s take on the Palo Alto situation, plus comment from the firm, after the jump.
“The winners never thank their lawyers,” said AmLaw Daily recently in an interview with James Cameron’s attorneys. But some lawyers did get love at the Oscars this year, as noted by Business Insider:
If you paid close attention to last night’s Oscar ceremony, amid the tears and triumphs, a couple of lawyers got their thanks.
If you paid close attention, we’re sorry — because you probably noticed Kristen Stewart hawking up something during her speech, and how scary Judd Nelson looked during the John Hughes montage. Overall, the show was painful to watch.
We stuck around long enough to see Best Supporting Actress Mo’Nique give her lawyer, Ricky Anderson, a nod. But when dancers came out on the stage to “interpret” Sherlock Holmes, we turned off the TV in disgust. Thus, we missed out on Jeff Bridges thanking his power lawyer, Bob Wallerstein.
Let’s take a closer look at these two celebrated attorneys.
Pop Quiz, hotshot: You’re a law school dean with a graduating class of 3Ls who aren’t able to find jobs upon completion of the expensive education you’ve provided. U.S. News is breathing down your neck, asking for “employed upon graduation” statistics. You’re terrified of plummeting in the rankings and losing your job, and you know better than anybody how difficult it is to find a job with a J.D. on your resume right now.
What do you do? What do you do?
Well, if you’re an actor that now isn’t even as accomplished as Sandra freaking Bullock, you probably start popping caps at your unemployed 3Ls. Anything to reduce that denominator.
But if you’re Rebecca H. White, dean of the University of Georgia Law School, a smart move is to start openly begging your alumni to help you out.
That’s precisely what Dean White did …
On Friday afternoon, Chancellor William Chandler of Delaware Chancery Court clearedthe way for Cravath, Swaine & Moore to represent Air Products, an industrial gas supplier, in its $5.1 billion hostile bid for rival Airgas. Cravath had previously done some work for Airgas, so Airgas objected to the firm’s working on behalf of Air Products. We previously wrote about Airgas’s attempt to block Cravath from repping Air Products over here.
On a quick and cursory read, the Airgas case seemed airtight: How can a law firm take a position adverse to a client it did work for just a few monts earlier? Upon a second sniff, however, the Airgas position started to stink. So we aren’t entirely surprised by Chancellor Chandler’s ruling.
I love it when America takes popular beliefs about the liberal and conservative agenda, throws those platforms on their heads, and then leaves it up to the Supreme Court to makes sense of the resulting mess.
This fall, SCOTUS will try to restore a sense of order to our national infighting when it tackles Snyder v. Phelps. The case revolves around anti-gay protesters who have been showing up at military funerals to cheer the deaths of American soldiers who “defend homosexuality.”
That’s right, because when I think of a flamboyant institution that is the tool of the gay agenda, I naturally think of the Marines. The Huffington Post explains:
The funeral for Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder in Westminster, Md., was among many that have been picketed by members of the fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas. Westboro pastor Fred Phelps and other members have used the funeral protests to spread their belief that U.S. deaths in the Iraq war are punishment for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality. One of the signs at Snyder’s funeral combined the U.S. Marine Corps motto with a slur against gay men.
Other signs carred by members of the Topeka, Kan.-based church said, “America is Doomed,” “God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11,” “Priests Rape Boys” and “Thank God for IEDs,” a reference to the roadside bombs that have killed many U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So, if I’m a liberal that loves the First amendment and gays, what am I supposed to do? If I’m a conservative who loves the military but thinks that the missionary position is God’s will, whom do I punish? Oh dear, it’s so confusing.
Thankfully, we have a body of nine people who are not swayed by such base political leanings, right?
The Sunday New York Times had great news for students who want to work with the financial services industry. Not a lot of love for the lawyers, but the market for young i-bankers is picking up:
With banks climbing out of the recession, more business students across the country are finding banking jobs and internships, enrolling in finance clubs and going on class trips to Wall Street, universities say.
Unemployment is plaguing millions of families, and the public may still be seething about bank bailouts and eight-figure bonuses. But business students and career advisers see a job market that is quickly stabilizing.
Well, that’s nice. Not only did business school kids choose a professional school that nets them significantly more money when the economy is good, apparently they also chose a career that recovers more quickly after a recession.
Is it too early for law students to begin drinking on a Monday?
Mark McCombs is a partner at Greenberg Traurig no more. The firm cut ties with him last week when he was accused of bilking the village of Calumet Park of more than one million dollars.
A “seasoned government relations attorney focusing on state and local government issues” in the firm’s Chicago office, McCombs was Calumet Park’s economic development counsel, special village attorney (investigations), and administrative hearing officer. Not only did McCombs grow up in Calumet Park, the Village loved the guy. It even named a street after him. From the Awards & Recognitions section of his firm bio (now cached):
Honored by the Village of Calumet Park, Illinois, with the designation of “Mark McCombs Drive” in recognition of the leadership role played in the commercial redevelopment of Calumet Park’s Ashland Avenue-Vermont Street corridors.
But McCombs may have loved something more than Calumet Park: being a partner at Greenberg Traurig. He apparently wanted to impress the firm with his book of business, and so he took advantage of his devoted client, allegedly billing the tiny village more than $1 million for work he never performed. From the Chicago Tribune:
McCombs did not pocket the money, Assistant State’s Attorney John Mahoney alleged in court, but it enhanced his prestige, billable hours and opportunities for more pay at Greenberg Traurig, the downtown law firm where McCombs worked.
* Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II tells the state’s public colleges and universities that it’s okay to discriminate against LGBT people? [Washington Post]
* New York doesn’t know what to do with its bad kids… [New York Times]
* … While a Georgia judge has to step down for throwing a party for them. [WSB Radio]
* Switzerland wrote the “dignity” of plant life into its constitution and made a law last year to protect the rights of goldfish and canaries, but Swiss voters stopped short at the idea of appointing lawyers for animals at taxpayers’ expense. [Telegraph]
* Is patent law on the rise? [San Francisco Chronicle]
* Presidential impersonators from SNLs past visit Barack Obama in a dream to give him advice on financial reform, thanks to a collaboration between Ron Howard and Harvard Law professor and Congressional Oversight Panel chair Elizabeth Warren. The Funny or Die video is embedded after the jump. Dana Carvey is amazing. [New York Times]
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.
Everything is bigger in Texas — even the law student explosions. A tipster gives us the lowdown on some super-sized bitching, spearheaded by three UT Law students:
Continue reading “University of Texas Law Students Warn Employers to Stay Away from UT”
Law firm partners come and go, but lately it seems that an unusually high number of them have been going away from 
On Friday afternoon, Chancellor William Chandler of Delaware Chancery Court 
