Welcome to the top … of the second tier. We are at the point where the value proposition of going to law school is questionable. But the “nailing attractive co-eds” possibilities remain high. Check out some of the schools ranked in this batch. If you are going to spend three years and six figures on something, you’re going to need more than illusory job prospects to keep you warm at night:
52. Pepperdine
52. Cardozo
54. Florida State
54. Yale Law School’s Hartford Campus/University of Connecticut (j/k)
56. Case Western Reserve
56. Loyola (Los Angeles)
56. Cincinnati
56. San Diego
60. Georgia State
60. University of Houston
60. Miami
60. Tennessee
64. Baylor
64. Lewis & Clark College
64. Kentucky
67. Brooklyn
67. Kansas
67. New Mexico
67. Pittsburgh
67. Villanova
72. Penn State
72. Seton Hall
72. St. John’s
72. Temple
72. Hawaii
72. Oklahoma
See what I’m saying. I bet young law students are just cutting a swath through the undergrads at Yeshiva University.
Seriously though, FSU, Miami, Rocky Top, Ha-freaking-Waii. Good times! You know, unless you want to get a job…
* What does Justice Sonia Sotomayor have in common with Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore, and Rush Limbaugh? [The BLT: Blog of the Legal Times]
* Walter Olson is moving from the Manhattan Institute over to the Cato Institute. Good luck, Walter! [Overlawyered]
* A roundup of the past week of legal blogging that contains an interesting story about Harvard Law School — you might have heard something about it. Also, legal malpractice in Texas. [Infamy or Praise]
* Remember, she’ll always be Crimson DNA to us. [Breaking Media]
* The lawsuit filed by a woman against her daughter-in-law’s comedy act has been resolved, in favor of the young comedian. Let this be a lesson to all mothers-in-law out there. [ABA Journal]
* Nashville and the greater Middle Tennessee area were hit hard by flooding over the weekend. If you’d like to help, here’s how. [Young Lawyers Blog]
* Is there an epidemic of child pornography in the military? [Suits & Sentences]
* … If so, I’m sure some medical marijuana could clear that right up. It’s available in the nation’s capital, surely boys healing up at Landstuhl could use it too. [Underdog]
* Happy Cinco de Mayo! And remember, if you want to change Arizona’s mind about something, contact your local sports franchise. The state got its act together on Martin Luther King Day once the NFL threatened to pull the Superbowl. [Fox News]
A local woman is suing the producers of The Real World D.C. over her portrayal in the show. I don’t really care about this woman’s claims or why she thinks she’s owed $5 million, but in case you’re interested, DCist reports:
In the suit, Golzar Amirmotazedi, 22, says that during one episode, cast members Andrew and Josh plied her with alcohol at a bar, brought her home, kicked her out after she refused sex and then proceeded to make fun of her. As a consequence of her brief appearance on one of the episodes (our recap of the episode in question is here; it’s the second of the two), the suit claims that Amirmotazedi was subject to ridicule in online forums, lost her self-esteem and became depressed, left her job and was denied other employment, had trouble sleeping, and suffered from nausea.
Yes, yes, yes. Terrible. Men are pigs, they only buy girls drinks in order to sleep with them and get pissed off when they don’t put out. (Kash here: I felt duty-bound to watch this season as it was set in my old hometown, and if I remember that episode correctly, Andrew was playing wingman to Josh, and thus entertaining Golzar while greasy Josh hooked it with her friend. Golzar was trying her best to get Andrew to dump his gf and hook up with her. He declined, because he surprisingly had a very hot gf.)
But can we get to the waiver this woman signed? That’s what allowed MTV to air her decision to play a drunken cock-tease in front of the cameras…
Now that President Obama has interviewed the four finalists for the U.S. Supreme Court seat he has to fill — Judge Merrick Garland (D.C. Cir.), Solicitor General Elena Kagan, Judge Sidney Thomas (9th Cir.), and Judge Diane Wood (7th Cir) — the nominee could be announced any day now. Who will it be?
We realize that the betting men (and women) favor Solicitor General Elena Kagan. Kagan is also the pick of Tom Goldstein, the veteran Supreme Court litigator and founder of SCOTUSblog, who correctly forecast the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor (a nomination that the White House sought his counsel on).
But we’re going to go out on a limb and make a crazy prediction: President Obama is going to nominate Judge Diane Wood, of the Seventh Circuit, to the Supreme Court. He’ll announce the nomination on Monday, May 10 — the Monday after Mother’s Day. (That’s significant, for reasons we’ll get to later.)
Right out of the starting gate, immediately after Justice John Paul Stevens announced his retirement, Solicitor General Elena Kagan emerged as the frontrunner for his seat. And Kagan is still widely regarded as the leading candidate.
But, in the past week and a half or so, we’ve felt a slight, almost imperceptible shift in the wind, in favor of Judge Wood….
No matter when it’s done, job hunting usually sucks balls. When done in the middle of the Great Recession, it feels like the balls are covered in tangled hair and pointy skin-piercing spikes. It’s painful and you have to be careful.
One disgruntled attorney recently emailed us about a company that he suspects is trying to take advantage of desperate job hunters. He calls it “a new type of scam preying on unemployed lawyers.”
He responded via an ad on Craigslist to an “assets management company” seeking IP attorneys for full-time or part-time contract work. We’ll call the company Pay To Work, LLC. In the ad, PTW says it’s looking for “entrepreneurial” attorneys to do intellectual property work. It says its clients include scientists, inventors, writers, artists, celebrities, universities, and multi-national corporations. That sounds pretty sweet!
But there are some big catches. First off, “partners” are supposed to pay $295/month for “administrative fees.” Second off, the company has no clients at the moment. It’s a start-up in the “set-up phase.” So if you sign up and start paying $300 a month, what exactly are you getting for your money?
We’ve received tips, texts, and phone calls about Blank Rome. As spring hurtles towards summer, the firm is letting incoming associates know that they won’t be starting any time soon. A tipster reports the firm is “rescinding” offers, but that’s not technically correct:
I just heard from a friend that Blank Rome has rescinded offers to Blank Rome 2009 associates … It’s pretty awful that a firm waited this long to finally rescind offers to its 2009 associates–and the legal gossip market ought to know about it.
Actually, the firm is not rescinding offers, it’s merely extending the deferral period for a few incoming first year associates. Indefinitely. With no expectation that the job offer will ever result in a job. And no stipend.
Yeah, I think the indefinitely deferred associates will get the point…
With all the salary freezes, thaws and permanent meltdowns over the past year, it’s hard to keep track of what associates at law firms are actually making these days. And associates are learning that an annual lock-step raise is no longer a sure thing under new compensation systems at many firms.
This week our ATL / Lateral Link survey asks about starting salaries and annual salary increases at your firm. We’ll use the information to update the ATL Career Center and bring you the results next week.
If you have information about your firm that you want to share with other career center users, please email us at careercenter@abovethelaw.com.
Ed. note: This post is written by Will Meyerhofer, a Biglaw attorney turned psychotherapist, whom we profiled. A former Sullivan & Cromwell associate, he holds degrees from Harvard, NYU Law, and The Hunter College School of Social Work. He blogs at The People’s Therapist.
When I summered at Shearman & Sterling back in the late ’90s, the partners had just voted on whether to install a gym in the building or create a formal dining room.
Needless to say, they went with the dining room.
It was strictly lawyers-only. At the center stood a buffet fit for a cruise ship, replete with heaping chafing dishes. On certain days, they even had a “prime rib station,” manned by a guy wearing a toque.
This was the golden trough. We fed with complete abandon – at least on days when we weren’t being whisked off to The Four Seasons by a partner pretending to remember our names.
The joke was that all summer associates at Shearman gained 15 pounds.
It wasn’t a joke. We did.
Almost overnight a relatively in-shape pack of law students morphed into a fresh, pudgy litter of big firm attorneys.
It’s no secret law firms ply you with food to address the fact that they’re denying you everything else.
The Village Voice has an explosive exposé today. The publication exclusively obtained hundreds of hours of tape recordings of cops being cops. The Voice explains:
Two years ago, a police officer in a Brooklyn precinct became gravely concerned about how the public was being served. To document his concerns, he began carrying around a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors…
In all, he surreptitiously collected hundreds of hours of cops talking about their jobs.
Made without the knowledge or approval of the NYPD, the tapes—made between June 1, 2008, and October 31, 2009, in the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant and obtained exclusively by the Voice—provide an unprecedented portrait of what it’s like to work as a cop in this city.
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be a police officer (or have never watched The Wire) you’ve got to listen to the tapes…
* UVA lacrosse player George Huguely (pictured — Chace Crawford?), charged in the death of fellow student Yeardley Love (also pictured), allegedly slammed his ex-girlfriend’s head into the wall repeatedly. [Washington Post] [FN1]
* We were right — Judge Diane Wood canceled class yesterday at the University of Chicago because she was busy being interviewed by President Obama. [CBS News]
* So a SCOTUS nomination could come any day now. Fantasy SCOTUS players still predict that Elena Kagan will get the nod. [Josh Blackman]
* The Times Square Terror suspect has confessed to his role in the plot, according to law enforcement authorities. [New York Times]
* The Goldman Sachs “dream team” — which already includes lawyers from Sullivan & Cromwell, Skadden, O’Melveny, and Gibson Dunn — may soon be supplemented by Paul Weiss. [Am Law Daily]
* Better late than never: George Vashon, an African-American lawyer who was denied admission to the Pennsylvania bar on account of his race (back in 1847), has been posthumously admitted. [Associated Press via How Appealing]
[FN1] One of the tipsters who alerted us to this story editorialized: “Gerald Ung could have been this poor chick, if he hadn’t defended himself. Lacrosse players are beyond the pale.”
Incoming associates get really angry when firms rescind offers for full-time employment. As Lat said this afternoon here in the office, law students react “as if rescinding offers is like eating babies.” Incoming associates understand that the market remains tough, but these recruits still have harsh words for firms that pull offers.
We can understand the concern. Remember, during the NALP conference, Executive Director James Leipold said that he didn’t think Biglaw would be able to reabsorb all the people who have been displaced. It’s a bit like musical chairs — only if you aren’t in a seat when the music stops, you have to go into the back room and perform sexual favors for a debt-collector named Rocco.
And that’s how students feel when you rescind their offers in a timely manner. When you rescind offers at a late date … let’s just say we can incorporate all of the graphic imagery above, then add inappropriate scenes involving the mothers of rescinded offerees and goats. Recent graduates become unhinged when firms pull offers late in the season.
Well, in case some firms haven’t noticed, it’s getting pretty late in the season. Finals are upon 3Ls in some places; graduation is here in other places. People are preparing to study for the bar. This is no time for firms to get cold feet about offers relied upon in good faith.
So, we offer you this open thread. Let us know which firms are pulling offers as we head towards Memorial Day. We already know that there is some bad news for a few would-be incoming associates at Sonnenschein…
* I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that Latino Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to get racially profiled in Arizona — unless they use this. [The Deprofiler]
* Speaking of race issues, if you thought Elie was done with Steph … well, you don’t have the pleasure of sitting next to Elie all freaking day. [True / Slant]
* The current issue of Washingtonian has an excellent article, by Harry Jaffe, about the still-unsolved murder of D.C. attorney (and former Covington associate) Robert Wone. [Washingtonian]
* Congratulations to University of Hawaii law professor James Pietsch, recently awarded the Secretary of the Army Public Service Award for his work in Iraq. [University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa]
There’s a crisis at Duke Law School. No, it’s not that the school fell out of the Top Ten in the U.S. News rankings. It’s that the law library is being invaded by filthy little pests: Duke undergrads.
Duke law students don’t appear to think highly of their young classmates. They seem to blame the undergrads for their supposedly undeserved douchiest law school victory.
The icky BA/BS infestation was a problem last semester as well, leading one Blue Devil to leave a sloppy handwritten sign near the printers: “Print double-sided, a**hole. Also, please use your own library.” Much to law students’ frustration, the policy at the university is that all students are granted access to all libraries.
This semester, the war on trespassing undergrads is better organized. Each morning, Duke J.D. wannabes flyer the library with the sign at right (unredacted version after the jump), and one infuriated 2L created a Facebook protest group — It’s still the LAW library (even during finals). The Duke Law School administration has taken note of the problem, and responded — appropriately, via posting to the wall of the Facebook group.
But the war does not look good for Duke Law School. The troops are in retreat, and they appear to be fleeing to the Duke business school library…
Results from the February 2010 administration of the Texas bar exam are out today. They’re available on the website of the Texas Board of Law Examiners.
Speaking of the Texas BOLE website, it looks très 1990s — one step above a GeoCities page. The Board is based in Austin, a top tech city. Can’t they find someone to redesign their website? Maybe an unemployed or underemployed lawyer who knows a little html?
In any event, congrats to all the happy Texans, who can now look forward to bright futures filled with 3500-sq.-ft. wives — and Lexis.
And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.
When I was living in a spider hole on an uninhabitable island, God revealed to me the story of Sarah Allen. The ABA Journal reports:
Would-be law student Sarah Allen believes in a debt-free life, but it’s hard to square that vision with her desire to attend law school at the University of North Carolina, where the three-year education will cost about $105,000.
So Allen has set up a PayPal account and is appealing to the public to make donations there to help pay her tuition, McClatchy Newspapers reports.
This woman is asking people to donate money so that she can go and get an overpriced education? Am I dead? Is this Hell? What in the world is going on when people are so desperate to go to law school that they are asking for donations on the (virtual) street? Will educate myself for money? WTF?
Good news for general counsel who dream of one day sitting in the king’s seat: the ABA Magazine says there is a new trend of corporations tapping lawyers to become top executives:
Nine of the Fortune 50 companies now have a lawyer as chief executive, up from three just a decade ago. In December, Bank of America and Continental Airlines became the two most recent publicly traded corporations to do so. Also in 2009, Citigroup named Richard Parsons, another lawyer, as its chairman, which is separate from the CEO.
Business leaders and corporate headhunters agree that the JD is once again an alternative to the MBA as the degree of choice for CEO candidates, and that the trend is very likely to increase over the next decade.
Woo-hoo. Maybe law school grads will start kicking biz school grads to the curb. Vanderbilt’s management school dean goes so far as to call the J.D. a “renaissance degree.”
According to the ABA Magazine, one law school is particularly successful in sending its grads off to lead a company instead of doing bet-the-company work….
For Article III groupies, the InterContinental Hotel in Chicago was the place to be last night. The annual meeting of the Seventh Circuit Bar Association and Judicial Conference of the Seventh Circuit attracted a bevy of judicial superstars, who mixed and mingled at the conference’s grand banquet.
The most notable luminary was Justice John Paul Stevens, the Circuit Justice for the Seventh Circuit (and a former judge of the Seventh Circuit himself). The 90-year-old Justice Stevens, who is stepping down from the Supreme Court at the end of this Term, was joined at the dinner by several of his possible successors.
Justice Stevens actually had the job of introducing one of them, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, who delivered the keynote address. In the audience were several other short-listers, including Judges Diane Wood and Ann Claire Williams, of the Seventh Circuit, and Judge Ruben Castillo, of the Northern District of Illinois (Chicago).
The Supreme Court routinely relies on such express instructions. And some of our nation’s hottest jurists have called for their more frequent use. See, e.g., Alex Kozinski, Should Reading Legislative History Be an Impeachable Offense?, 31 Suffolk U. L. Rev. 807, 819 (1998).
One merger is an accident. Two mergers … well, that could be a trend.
The merger of Hogan & Hartson and Lovells is in the books. The new firm is up and running, and it’s already saying goodbye to people. The Blog of the Legal Times reports that Hogan Lovells had some departures over the weekend:
A six-lawyer insurance litigation group left Hogan to launch a D.C. office for Hartford, Conn.-based Shipman & Goodwin. James Ruggeri, who leads the group, said that the move was made because of conflicts created by the merger for his group’s chief client, The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. Ruggeri serves as The Hartford’s national counsel for complex insurance coverage matters. He had been at Hogan since 1991.
Hogan Lovells has gotten a lot of attention in part because it is the highest-profile law firm merger to take place after the recession fully took hold.
* Criminal enterprise lawsuit against the producers of Jersey Shore for capitalizing on Ronnie’s street fights will be allowed to proceed. [Associated Press]
* Virginia AG decides not to pull an Ashcroft with the state seal. [Los Angeles 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.
Welcome to the top … of the second tier. We are at the point where the value proposition of going to law school is questionable. But the “nailing attractive co-eds” possibilities remain high. Check out some of the schools ranked in this batch. If you are going to spend three years and six figures on something, you’re going to need more than illusory job prospects to keep you warm at night:
Continue reading “Open Thread: 2011 U.S. News Law School Rankings (52 – 72)”
No matter when it’s done, job hunting usually sucks balls. When done in the middle of the Great Recession, it feels like the balls are covered in tangled hair and pointy skin-piercing spikes. It’s painful and you have to be careful.
