When you step into the killing lockstep zone, your bonus disappears into a black box. A while back, we reported that Bingham McCutchen adopted a lockstep-merit hybrid approach to associate compensation. Base salary would still be lockstep, but the bonus would be merit-based.
When we reported on the Bingham bonus, we noted that the firm intended to pay bonuses generally on the Cravath scale to its associates, based on a number of merit-based factors instead of hours.
But now our tipsters are telling us that some Bingham associates received much less than a Cravath-level payout:
A peek inside the black box, bonuses are generally well below the Cravath scale. The only associates receiving bonuses in the vicinity of the Cravath scale are those that exceeded the 2,100 hour minimum by a few hundred hours. Even bonuses in those instances were barely above the Cravath scale. Amazing considering JayZ just told the Boston Globe that the firm “had our best year ever.” Guess we know where all that money went. Morale is definitely at an all-time low. I would be shocked to see any associates making much of an effort to bill above the 2,100 hour minimum in 2010. I think “why bother” has become the most uttered phrase around the halls of Bingham over the last week.
“JayZ” refers to Bingham Chairman Jay S. Zimmerman, not the talented Mr. Shawn Carter.
But I suppose you could put Zimmerman’s positive outlook about the firm into a rap song …
Continue reading “Inside the Bingham McCutchen Bonus”
I went to a private high school (mainly because I needed a break from the constant beatings delivered to me at my public junior high school). Once I got to private school, I developed an intense, almost blinding hatred for the spoiled little rich girls that populated my new school. There is nothing more odious than a princess who is given everything yet has the gall to bitch about wanting more.
Later, I got into Harvard, twice. Little did I know that my educational opportunities put me into the very same position as the rich girls I used to despise. You can’t go to Harvard and then bitch about anything that befalls you. Well, you can, but you’re going to piss off a lot of people off in the process.
I think that’s fair. If you are a wealthy dauphin or a Harvard graduate, many forces beyond your control have conspired to your benefit. You have amazing opportunities, and those less fortunate get to hate you; thus, balance is maintained in the universe.
Just know that if you fail to capitalize on the opportunities gifted to you, nobody is going to feel sorry for you. Third-year students at Harvard Law School who didn’t receive job offers are wrestling with that stark reality. One such 3L wrote a letter in the Harvard Law Record:
Joined to this knowledge is the understanding that it is, to be fair, rather difficult as a Harvard Law Student to abandon all self-awareness and immerse oneself in self-pity. We remain conscious of the privileges we enjoy and the opportunities that exist for us even in our darkest moments. That isn’t to say we who were no-offered have no room at all for despair. But it feels impolite. Those of us who had been hoping to become Biglaw associates have been dealt a real financial blow. Must we admit what we were told to leave out of admissions essays and job interviews — that we did come to law school with the hope of making money?
Yeah, see, I’m a fellow graduate, and even I puked in my mouth when I read that….
Continue reading “Poor Little Harvard Law 3L”
South Carolina-based Nexsen Pruet is currently recruiting summer associates. In better economic times, we would not find its legal recruiter’s name very noteworthy. But given the way the summer associate experience has changed — from a summer of pampered luxury to a running of the gauntlet for an offer — it caught our eye and made us laugh and/or grimace.
From the Nexsen Pruet Law Student Contacts page:
Please submit all resumés to our recruiting coordinator, Summer Slaughter.
Summer Slaughter
Nexsen Pruet, LLC
Post Office Drawer 2426
Columbia, South Carolina 29202-2426
Ms. Slaughter has been with the firm for 10 years. Her MySpace photo seems to be in on the joke.
Have you had the privilege of voluntarily leaving your Biglaw job? I have, and let me tell you, the last day is a special kind of awesome. You kind of walk around, taking a survey of things you no longer have to deal with. Many of your friends and colleagues look at you with envy in their eyes. Friends of mine outside of the law have told me that leaving a job is bittersweet; but most associates who have left Biglaw on their own terms describe the sensation as “delicious.”
Now, when I left, I said all the right things, said goodbye to all the appropriate people, and wrote a standard, passionless departure memo. No gloating from me, I just wanted to get out of there as quickly as I could. But looking back on it, I wish I had done something notable. Nothing outrageous: boiling the managing partner’s pet rabbit sounds appropriate but is ultimately unsatisfying. I just wish I had taken advantage of my last day in some mildly humorous way.
An associate who left Akin Gump last week will have no such longstanding regrets. Here’s the “seeking contacts” email that was sent to the entire firm once the associate had both feet out of the door:
Sent: Friday, February 26, 2010 11:59 AM
To: FW ALL
Subject: Seeking contacts
Pardon the interruption. Please respond to sender only if you can recommend a reasonably priced plaintiffs’ attorney in Costa Rica. A friend of the firm has a handful of potential plaintiffs who believe there is a connection between their testicle cancer and a chemical used to make tea bags. They are looking for an attorney in Costa Rica to advise and represent them in this matter.
Thanks,
[Redacted]
You know, the lives of Biglaw attorneys are such that on first blush one might think that this message was intended seriously.
But we spoke with the associate who sent out the message. Thankfully, the message was a product of a last day dare.
Continue reading “Departing with Flair”
* One secret to happiness is to make your bed each morning, says Gretchen Rubin, author of the Happiness Project and one of The Elect. (She got Lat to reveal his secrets last year.) [New York Times]
* Hogan & Hartson’s 38-lawyer Warsaw office is defecting to K&L Gates. [Blog of the Legal Times]
* Maybe this guy should have realized she was a dud when she told him “no one flies coach to Australia.” [Gothamist]
* Only net losers can recover money from Bernie Madoff, rules bankruptcy judge Burton Lifland. [Wall Street Journal and Business Week]
* The Supreme Court won’t rule on the Uighurs at Guantanamo. [New York Times]
* Brazil beckons Biglaw. [BusinessWeek]
In January, a former Bush Administration lawyer was charged with attempted murder after allegedly strangling and beating his wife, a counsel at Skadden Arps. John Michael Farren, 57, served as deputy counsel to the president under President George W. Bush, as general counsel at Xerox Corp., and as Under Secretary of Commerce under President George H.W. Bush.
But if the allegations against him are true, this impressive résumé — and the wealth that came with it (more on that later) — didn’t stop J. Michael Farren from brutally attacking his wife, Mary Margaret Farren, an energy lawyer at Skadden. Mary Farren filed a $30 million lawsuit against her husband shortly after the alleged attack.
Last week, the Washington Post published a detailed profile of Mike Farren. It painted a picture of a man with some serious rage issues.
Highlights from the profile — plus additional tidbits we’ve gathered, including photos of the Farrens’ multimillion-dollar home in Connecticut, records of Michael Farren’s sales of Xerox stock, and his salary as a White House staffer — after the jump.
Continue reading “All You Ever Wanted to Know About John Michael Farren, the Ex-Bush Lawyer Charged With Attempted Murder of His Skadden Counsel Wife”
* Two law students will go on Judge Pirro to accuse each other of rampant cocaine and prescription drug use. To put it another way, two law students haven’t figured that everybody abuses something to get through law school. [Judge Pirro]
* If David Caruso were a constitutional scholar. [Monorail]
* It’s funny how people at the SoHo House just learned the meaning of gentrification. Maybe if Manhattan wasn’t so ridiculously expensive, the cool people would come back all on their own. [Gawker]
* Do boomers need to adjust to Gen-Y, or is it the other way around? Hard to say, but since Gen-Y kids didn’t, you know, almost completely destroy the American economy, it might be just about time for the older people to start taking some advice from the Google generation. [What About Clients?]
* Today is the last day to make relief donations and have the count on your 2009 taxes. [Tax Prof Blog]
* Inmate Idol. Loser has to toss salads for a week. [BL1Y]
* South Florida is heating up. It’s spring break time, paternity lawsuits soon to follow.
[South Florida Lawyers via Blawg Review]
For one glorious moment, prospective law students thinking of going to Wake Forest Law School learned that they had received the Melanie Nutt Scholarship from the school. Then, in an instant, the scholarship was recalled. Apparently the offer of free money was a technical error:
About ten minutes ago I received an e-mail from them telling me I had been offered a $30k/year scholarship. Obviously I was thrilled, as Wake was (keyword: was) at the top of my list. Before I could gloat to my friends, I received a follow-up e-mail …
That follow up email had “ERROR” in the headline, so students knew it couldn’t be good. Apparently there was a technical glitch and a number of students were accidently promised scholarship money.
And the mistake wasn’t limited to just one poor soul.
Continue reading “Wake Forest Gives Law Students Money, Takes it Back Immediately”
On Friday, we told you about the San Francisco lawyer trying to sell his degree for “$59,250 or best offer.” Sick of practicing law and being “surrounded by hobby-less a**holes whose entire life is dictated by billing by the hour and being anal dickheads,” he hoped to get rid of the piece of paper with “the amazing ability to keep you from doing what you really want to do in life, all in the name of purported prestige and financial success.” He posted his degree in Craigslist’s “For Sale” section last week. He also put it up on eBay yesterday for 99 cents.
The West Coaster did not identify the university from whence the degree came, writing instead that “it’s from one of those elitist BS institutions that accept people like George W. Bush cause their daddy donated $20 million.” Our readers quickly identified it as a JD from Georgetown University Law Center.
We reached out to this hapless Hoya to see what offers he has gotten. He’s received over 300 e-mails. He told us:
So far I’ve received an offer for $200 and at least two dozens offers to buy me drinks. Another guy offered to give me an Ipod Nano. One girl told me I’m her soul mate and that she wants to go on a date…. I got an offer from a women lawyer with “marry me” in the subject line and a comment that my post saved her from stabbing herself with a pencil in the eye. I know, wtf?
Apparently, misery attracts company.
The bidding is up to $222.50 on eBay. What could beat that?
Continue reading “The Resale Value of a Georgetown Law Degree”
On Friday we reported that, after months of discussion, NALP would be changing to the 45-day open offer period to a 28-day open offer period, and otherwise leaving fall recruiting to proceed much as it has been. Today, we’re learning why NALP decided to abandon more ambitious plans to actually make recruiting better for students, law schools, and law firms. Apparently, fundamental change is just too damn hard. The National Law Journal reports:
NALP Executive Director Jim Leipold said that the organization received 800 responses to the proposal since it was unveiled in early January.
“It became clear that there was no easy consensus or even a trend around one particular idea,” he said. “Law firms and law schools are both conservative and risk-averse institutions. The scope of change was very large and it doesn’t surprise me that there was resistance.”
I feel bad for Jim Leipold. It seems like a large part of his job involves running around explaining why his organization can’t actually do anything useful.
NALP stakeholders may be happy, but students are just as screwed as ever.
Continue reading “More Fall-Out From NALP’s Minor Recruiting Change”
On its face, this looks like a rather straightforward business card for one James A.W. Mahon, a Canadian divorce lawyer up in the Yukon:
But perhaps there’s a catch, eh?
Continue reading “A Very Clever Business Card”
As we mentioned in Morning Docket, American Lawyer today released diversity numbers that confirm what many expected; minority associates bore a disproportionate brunt of law firm layoffs. Am Law Daily reports:
The drop in law firm diversity may be small, but it’s important. Overall, big firms shed 6 percent of their attorneys between 2008 and 2009–and, amid the bloodletting, lost 9 percent of their minority lawyers. (Here and elsewhere in this story, we’ve calculated such percentages only for the 191 firms that provided numbers in both years, in order to have a consistent basis for comparison.) Diversity advocates call the drop a warning sign that shouldn’t be ignored. “I think [that] when you’re looking at any numbers of a population you’re trying to increase, and you see a decrease, that’s significant,” says Venu Gupta, executive director of the Chicago Committee on Minorities in Large Law Firms. “I guess I hoped we wouldn’t be going backward,” echoes Fred Alvarez, chair of the American Bar Association Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Profession and a Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati partner.
We’ve heard many reports about layoffs, especially stealth layoffs, disproportionately affecting minority associates. Now we’ve got additional numbers.
But going inside the numbers, the recession helps us clarify the Biglaw firms that really care about diversity and the firms that were willing to sacrifice those goals when times got tough.
Continue reading “Diversity Sacrificed in the Recession”
* Alec Baldwin can’t act tactfully. He tells Fordham Law students that he once wanted to be a lawyer, but “didn’t know if [he] wanted to join a field that was becoming as crowded and choked as law was.” [New York Daily News]
* Minorities are even more in the minority at law firms. [American Lawyer]
* A journalist friend of William Rehnquist pens a remembrance about the “Bill Rehnquist You Didn’t Know.” We didn’t know he was the type who would go see a Gwyneth Paltrow-Ben Affleck flick. [ABA Journal]
* A Michigan lawyer is going to jail for six months for offering a 21-year-old female defendant a cop-a-feel plea deal. [Holland Sentinel via ABA Journal]
* After the Google trial in Italy, being sued in a European court is much scarier, no matter how ridiculous the claims. [Opinio Juris]
* Enron’s Jeff Skilling is hoping SCOTUS will grant him a new trial, because he messed with Texas. [Houston Chronicle]
* If the lawyer is a nitwit, you must grant a writ (of cert)? [New York Times]
