Archive for May 2010

Quote of the Day: Liberals Call You That Too…

By Kashmir Hill

I don’t even know what it is, to tell you the truth. I’ve heard it talked about. My wife calls me Mr. Clueless.

– Justice Antonin Scalia, speaking about Twitter, in response to a question about whether he’s ever considering “tweeting or twitting.”

Dewey & LeBoeuf Has a Backlog of Associates Returning from the Deferral Year

By Elie Mystal

If your firm offered you a “voluntary” deferral option last year, they sure made a lot of promises. Chiefest among them was the understanding that the people who left voluntarily for a year would be able to come back to the firm and resume their Biglaw careers after the deferral.

Well, that bond is about to mature. We’ve already reported on Skadden trying to reabsorb the people who were out on Sidebar Plus. Now we’re fielding reports about Dewey & LeBoeuf trying to find space for all the people who took the DL Pursuits deferral last May. A tipster reports:

The DL Pursuits program will ends on June 1. Just this week, some number of “Pursuers” are being offered another deferral year or four months’ severance. But they are not welcome back to the firm at this time.

Dewey confirmed to Above the Law that some practice groups are slower than others and not everybody has a job waiting for them at this time. But they’re not revoking any offers…

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Job of the Week: Corporate Comeback in D.C.

By Above the Law

Thought you’d never see another corporate opening in Washington? Several firms have resumed corporate hiring, albeit on a very selective basis. So far this month, Lateral Link has placed corporate associates in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, South Florida, and D.C. — home of the latest Job of the Week.

Position: Corporate Associate

Location: Washington D.C.

Description: AmLaw 100 firm seeks corporate associate in D.C. 3-4 years of experience in securities matters and M&A transactions is required.

If you are a Lateral Link member, please see Position #6340 on Lateral Link. If you are not a Lateral Link member, you can sign up for free at www.laterallink.com. If you are interested in D.C. positions, please contact Jordan Abshire at jabshire@laterallink.com for more information on the D.C. market.

Earlier: Prior Jobs of the Week

LSAT: Testing Wealth, Not Logic

By Elie Mystal

In our little world, the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) is a career-defining moment. A few points on the test can mean the difference between going to a law school that can get you a job, or going to a law school where you’ll be locked in gladiatorial combat with every other student in order to finish in the top 10%.

But does this test really tell us anything about a person’s logical reasoning ability? Does it tell us anything about one’s ability to be a lawyer? It’s been well-documented that the LSAT is a great indication of past performance, a solid indicator of law school performance, and a very poor judge of future legal success.

So what is the LSAT really testing anyway? We all know really smart people who didn’t do too well on the LSAT, and we all know incredibly dumb people who got a high score.

On the Huffington Post, Noah Baron argues that the LSAT is really testing one thing: whether or not you are wealthy enough to spend the time it takes to prepare for the exam…

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Lawyer of the Day: Gary Cruciani Collects $8.8 Million Award from His Former Law Firm

By Kashmir Hill

Gary Cruciani

Everything’s bigger in Texas, including awards for lawyers who sue firms for making misleading promises during the wooing period.

Gary Cruciani sued asbestos litigation firm Baron & Budd and its managing partner Russell Budd in 2008, for luring him away from McKool Smith with “negligent and fraudulent misrepresentations,” according to a lengthy Texas Lawyer article:

Cruciani alleges Budd “completely misrepresented the compensation system at Baron & Budd and the upside that allegedly existed there,” and Budd showed his “greed” when he paid himself a $50 million bonus in December 2005, which was 75 percent of the firm’s bonus pool that year.

Note to partners with a wandering eye: If a firm describes its compensation system as “Hully Gully,” be wary. In addition to misrepresenting the firm’s compensation system, Budd also neglected to tell Cruciani that there was bad blood between him and co-founding partner Fred Baron.

After hearing a host of counterclaims during a six-week trial, the jury sided with Cruciani, and decided the lost income and the impact on his future earnings warranted a $8.8 million award.

According to the Dallas Observer, the local legal community was shocked by the size of the award. Why was it so big?

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Morning Docket: 05.21.10

By Elie Mystal

* Hell yeah! U.S. News will start penalizing schools who don’t report their employment statistics. Paul Caron at TaxProf Blog deserves a mighty big shout out. [ABA Journal]

* Andrew Cuomo is trying to pick his replacement as New York Attorney General. [New York Times]

* I’m a PC and naming Microsoft the best in-house legal counsel of the year was not my idea. [Corporate Counsel]

* Obama nominates a Yale lawyer for a Second Circuit vacancy. [National Law Journal]

* Chevron will have to wait a little longer to get their hands on potentially exculpatory documentary footage. [New York Times]

* Financial reform passes the Senate. The Street is reacting like Obama ambushed them with friends and family for a surprise intervention. [Wall Street Journal]

The Unconfirmable Supreme Court (Part 1): The Liberals

By Elie Mystal

Update: Check out Part 2: The Conservatives.

As we were planning Above the Law’s Elena Kagan confirmation coverage, we got to thinking (always a dangerous thing around these parts): What if Supreme Court nominees didn’t have to defend themselves to the American public? What if the U.S. Senate’s constitutional privilege of “advice and consent” was revoked? What would the Court look like if the nominees didn’t have to even pretend to be moderate?

It’s a thought experiment that we’re sure has been done countless times before. But we’ve never done it, so we’ll plunge ahead.

Here are the rules: (1) The nominee should be unconfirmable. (2) The nominees on the right should make Elie angry; the nominees on the left should make Lat uncomfortable. (3) Mealy-mouthed moderates need not apply.

We decided to keep the five-four ideological balance of the current Court. Sure, we know that some people think that without the Senate, Presidents would nominate apolitical justices who have no discernible political slant. Sadly, apolitical justices = yawn.

In this post, Elie picks four pinko commie scumbags. In a future post, Lat will select five right-wing fascist nutjobs. Should be fun…

So, who are the SCOTUS nominees in the administration of President Elie Mystal?

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Non-Sequiturs: 05.20.10

By Elie Mystal

* Arguably, things like giving a kid a swirly or locking him in the janitor’s closet (or doing other things that happened to me in school) are still okay in Louisiana. But sending a nasty email is now a crime? [Volokh Conspiracy]

* Some advice on how to keep the pounds off while you are a summer associate. If you don’t have a summer associate gig, I’m assuming your problem is trying to figure out how to live off your law school fat reserves for three months. Hibernation is always an option. [Corporette]

* As a New Yorker, I am soooo over Faisal Shahzad’s failed attempt to murder me or some of my 8,000,000 friends. But let’s hope the lesson sinks in with the rest of the country when it comes time to debate who should get the lion’s share of homeland security funding. [What About Clients?]

* Come on, you know you want to hear what Kagan thinks about 2 Live Crew. [Copyrights & Campaigns]

* Is going to journalism school just as wasteful as going to law school? [Law and More]

* … And if it is, then what should you do if you’re considering a job in law or journalism? [WSJ Law Blog]

* Kash will be emceeing the Electronic Privacy Information Center “Champions of Freedom” Awards Dinner in Washington, D.C. on June 2nd. It will be a very public celebration of privacy. [Epic.org]

Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? Elena Kagan — She Already Is!

By David Lat

As I noted this morning on Twitter, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is looking like a million bucks these days. And this should come as no surprise, since she’s worth a million bucks — and then some.

Recently I examined the financial disclosure form filed by Elena Kagan last year, when she was nominated for Solicitor General. It showed the Divine Miss K with a divine net worth — just over $1 million (as of January 2009). That may not put her in Biglaw partner territory, but for someone who has spent most of her career in government service or academia, Kagan has done quite well for herself. (She’s also doing much better than most ATL readers; according to our reader poll, over 40 percent of you have negative net worths.)

And in the past year, despite her taking a pay cut when she left Harvard Law School to become SG, and despite the economic downturn, Kagan’s net worth has jumped — significantly. Just like Lady Gaga, Lady Kaga is beautiful, dirty, rich.

How rich? Let’s take a look at Elena Kagan’s latest financial disclosure form, submitted to the Senate earlier this week….

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Tulane Beats Back Attempted Encroachment on Academic Freedom

By Elie Mystal

In Louisiana, lobbyists for the oil industry tried to push through a bill that would limit the effectiveness of the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic. That’s right, the same people that brought you The Day After We Ruined the Gulf tried to stop a law school clinic from bringing pesky environmental lawsuits.

We’ve seen this before. Perdue Chicken got all up in the grille of the Maryland Environmental Law Clinic a couple of months ago. Did companies who rape the environment just figure out that environmental law clinics spend a lot of time trying to defend the environment?

In any event, it’s not surprising that corporate interests would try to crush the life out of law students doing work that private individuals won’t pay for. It is marginally surprising that state legislators are totally unashamed to appear to be in the back pocket of their corporate handlers.

But maybe all of the bad press the oil industry is getting just at the moment saved the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic…

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Many In-House Counsel Are Social Media Savvy. But Biglaw Firms? Not So Much.

By Kashmir Hill

There are a number of firms that aren’t up to speed with this whole “social media thing.” But they should be, because their clients are.

American Lawyer Media, Zeughauser Group and communications firm Greentarget surveyed 164 in-house counsel about their social media habits. Lo and behold, they are making use of blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to get their legal information… and, perhaps more interestingly, to judge law firms.

In-house counsel still primarily rely on “referrals from trusted sources and credentialing activity (i.e., demonstrations of thought leadership)” to choose outside lawyers, but they are increasingly taking brilliant tweets and blog posts into consideration…

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Quote of the Day: Lady Kaga Drops Her Poker Face

By David Lat

She came steaming into my office and said, ‘Why have you done that? It’s a confusing situation and you’ve made it worse.’ She screamed and shouted at me and slammed the door and stormed out.

Two minutes later, she came back and said, ‘I’m sorry I shouted.’ I said, ‘Elena, don’t apologize, you were right.’

– Charles Fried, the Harvard Law School professor and former Solicitor General, describing an interaction he had with then-Dean Elena Kagan.

New NALP Numbers Are Out — and as Bad as Ever

By Elie Mystal

This isn’t going to come as a galloping shock to anybody here, but the new NALP numbers confirm that the job market is terrible for young lawyers (aka the “lost generation”) :

Analyses of the NALP Employment Report and Salary Survey for the Class of 2009 reveal an overall employment rate of 88.3% of graduates for whom employment status was known, a rate that has decreased for two years in a row, decreasing 3.6 percentage points from the recent historical high of 91.9% for the Class of 2007. The employment figure for the Class of 2009 also marks the lowest employment rate since the mid-1990s.

“There are dozens of reasons why the employment report for the Class of 2009 will be different than those that preceded it, and dozens of reasons why the data that has been gathered will require special explanation and analysis to make sense of it,” said NALP Executive Director James Leipold in commentary accompanying the Selected Findings. He noted that while the employment rate of 88.3% may seem stronger than expected, when the statistic is teased apart, it begins to reveal some of the fundamental weaknesses in the job market faced by this class.

Please, prospective law students, do not look at the 88% figure and start wetting yourself. There are a number of reasons to explain why employment statistics look as basically decent as they do…

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Will the DC Bar Soon Be Adding You as a Friend?

By Gabe Acevedo

Earlier this week, I interviewed Darrell Mottley and Laura Possesky, the two candidates for president-elect of the DC Bar. Motley is a shareholder at Banner Witcoff, LTD, and Possesky is a partner at Gura & Possesky, PLLC.

Running for president-elect of the DC Bar means they are running for president as well, because the president-elect automatically ascends to the presidency after a year. This leadership structure is very common in most bar associations, including the ABA.

I thought this would be valuable for ATL, since many attorneys who read this blog are DC-licensed, regardless of whether they reside in the DC area. Many others are eligible to waive into DC, if they are already licensed in another state or jurisdiction. The process is pretty simple. In order to waive into the DC Bar, one has to do the following:

  • Score at least a 133 on the multistate portion of the of the bar exam;
  • Fill out a lengthy bar application, which you can do online;
  • Not kill anyone; and, most importantly,
  • Pay all applicable fees.

By all indications, this race is anything but a knock-down, drag-out fight. Bush v. Gore this is not. However, it’s what they agree on that’s very telling about the direction the DC Bar will go. It seems the Bar is well on its way to embracing the ways of the World Wide Web…

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Notre Dame Law School Klepto Follows Class to London

By Elie Mystal

When you think of Notre Dame Law School (ranked #22 in the latest U.S. News rankings), you generally don’t think of lies and deceit. But there have been some troubling campus security issues at the school. We previously reported on a creepy, fake 1L that was posing as a Notre Dame law student.

And we’ve heard rumors of the mysterious Notre Dame kleptomaniac. Some kid who has been stealing books around campus. Apparently this person has made the trip to London along with a number of Notre Dame students studying abroad.

The change of time zone hasn’t changed this person’s desire to steal. A tipster reports on “Petty Theft Law School: London”…

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Unbillable Hours: A True Story

By David Lat

Ian Graham is the author of Unbillable Hours: A True Story, which was published earlier this month. The book is a memoir of Graham’s time at Latham & Watkins, where he spent about five years as a litigation associate.

Unbillable Hours is not, however, a Latham exposé (which I’d eagerly read, by the way). Rather, the book centers on Graham’s work on a major pro bono case. The book’s publisher describes it as follows:

Landing a job at a prestigious L.A. law firm, complete with a six figure income, signaled the beginning of the good life for Ian Graham. But the harsh reality of life as an associate quickly became evident. The work was grueling and boring, the days were impossibly long, and Graham’s main goal was to rack up billable hours.

But when he took an unpaid pro bono case to escape the drudgery, Graham found the meaning in his work that he’d been looking for. As he worked to free Mario Rocha, a gifted young Latino who had been wrongly convicted at 16 and sentenced to life without parole, the shocking contrast between the quest for money and power and Mario’s desperate struggle for freedom led Graham to look long and hard at his future as a corporate lawyer.

Yesterday I chatted with Ian Graham about his book, his time at Latham, and how he made the transition from a legal career to a writing career.

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Morning Docket: 05.20.10

By Kashmir Hill

Jerry O'Connell Jeremiah O'Connell law school law student small.jpg* Legal troubles mount for Google after its disclosure that its Street View cars sucked up wireless information from people who stupidly neglected to password-protect their networks. [Media Post; Courthouse News Service]

*Apparently, 1L year did Jerry O’Connell in. [Associated Press]

* Will Michelle Obama deport this over-sharing little girl’s mom? [Washington Post]

* If you think you can parlay your J.D. into teaching high school, think again. [New York Times]

* Elena Kagan will be in the hot seat in June. [Washington Post]

* Pennsylvania AG goes after critical tweeps. [Threat Level/Wired via ABA Journal]

* NYCLU wants to put a stop to the NYPD stop-and-frisk database. [New York Times]

Which Bar Exam Prep Course is the Best?

By Kashmir Hill

Graduation marks the end of grueling law school exams… and the beginning of preparing for the worst exam of your life.

Most recent grads are heading straight from law school classes into bar exam prep classes, and so 3Ls have been bombarded for the last nine months with spam informational emails from bar prep companies touting their costs, features and success rates.

A new entrant into the bar prep field this year is BarMax, an iPhone-based course that’s significantly cheaper than BAR/BRI and Kaplan. In better times, when graduates could count on new employers to foot the bill for prep courses, they likely wouldn’t have considered a tele-course, but the high numbers of grads without firm jobs may bode well for the app.

How will having a cheap choice affect the market? And how does one decide between the options?

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Non-Sequiturs: 05.19.10

By Elie Mystal

* Thank God they didn’t ask Sandra Day O’Connor to actually throw the first pitch at Wrigley yesterday; she is a bit on the older side. Then again, I bet she could approximate a strike better than Obama. [Cubs.com]

* Yesterday, we started talking about commencement speakers. Today, Paul Caron gives us a very big list. [Tax Prof Blog]

* Remember George Reckers, the anti-gay clinical psychologist who got caught with a “rentboy”? The noted legal ethicist, Stephen Gillers of NYU, argues that lawyers who relied on his gay-bashing testimony have an affirmative duty to update the court. [New York Times]

* Supreme Court justices are like common jurors? I don’t know about that. Justices want to be there for the rest of their lives, while jurors just feel like it’s taking that long. [The Jury Expert]

* Counterfeiting Louis Vuitton bags = the latest form of helping terrorists. [Fashionista]

* A trinity of links documenting WASPs kvetching. (Yes, I just worked Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish imagery into the same sentence. Yes, I am self-satisfied.) [Ivy Style]

* People have been predicting the death of the yellow legal pad at least since I was in college. Probably longer. At this point, I think we’ll see a paperless bathroom (a la Demolition Man) before we see a paperless office. [Adjunct Law Prof Blog]

* Too bad New York State doesn’t really have the money to fund indigent criminal defense attorneys. But I guess you can just add “eviscerating a fundamental constitutional right” to David Paterson’s legacy. [New York County Lawyers' Association]

* Larry Ribstein is changing his web address — and maybe expanding his reach. Goodbye, Ideoblog. [Ideoblog]

Quote of the Day

By Kashmir Hill

The bottom line here is that Judge Posner is one of the few appellate judges that writes his own opinions. Otherwise it would be like getting quotations from law clerks.

– Robert Blomquist, editor of the new book The Quotable Judge Posner.