Archive for July 2010

Things Are Looking Up: More Summer Associate Classes Get 100% Offer News

By Kashmir Hill

Pop the Biglaw Bubbly

We feel like we’re taking magic Biglaw pills today and having hallucinatory flashbacks to 2006. The good news has been rolling in. Just today, we covered raises at Sheppard Mullin, and a 100% offer rate for D.C. summer associates at Latham & Watkins.

And over at Am Law Daily, Zach Lowe predicts good things for 2011. There will be more summer associate spots to go around next year, law school kiddies:

On-campus interviewing starts in two weeks at some schools, and early indications are that hiring at premier law firms will jump–in some cases by a lot–after plummeting this summer, according to sources at law schools and firms.

Cravath, Skadden, and Ropes & Gray, among others, plan to hire more warm bodies next summer than this one. This summer was dismal, after all, in terms of summer associate hiring, as demonstrated by these charts from the National Law Journal and Am Law Daily.

The upside of hiring fewer summer associates, though, is an increase in the likelihood of all of them getting hired. We’ve had more reports of 100% offer rates from a few firms today, along with fun ways of spreading the good news. Eyewitness accounts, after the jump.

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Jersey Shore’s Snooki Is Not Above the Law

By David Lat

Some Italian-Americans from New Jersey end up handing down the law. E.g., Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito.

And some Italian-Americans from New Jersey end up getting in trouble with the law. E.g., Snooki, the pint-sized, gallon-breasted breakout star of MTV’s popular Jersey Shore reality TV show.

According to TMZ, Snooki — a.k.a. Nicole Polizzi — was arrested earlier today in Seaside Heights, NJ. What was her alleged offense?

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Non-Sequiturs: 07.30.10

By Elie Mystal

* Do you need an attitude makeover at your job? [Corporette]

* More good news. Firms intend to increase summer hiring this year. [Am Law Daily]

* The natural evolution of the “do not call” list. [Legal Blog Watch]

* I wonder if we should all stop talking about the Arizona immigration law until it (inevitably) ends up before the Supreme Court? Naw… it’s too much fun. [WSJ Law Blog]

* Lobbyists are making some serious bank. [The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times]

* Surely lawyers will find a way to generate fees out of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. Somebody has to tell the banks what they can pay their own people. [Concurring Opinions]

* If you absolutely have to kill somebody, make sure you bet on black. If you kill a white person, you’re three times more likely to get the death penalty. [ABA Journal]

Caption Contest Winner: Stalled

By Kashmir Hill

Happy Friday, Above the Law readers.

Last week, we gave you this photo of a law grad at Georgetown taking a break from bar exam studies. Instead of cracking under the pressure, he was covering the cracks.

We asked for possible captions for the photo. You submitted reams of them, and we chose our ten favorites.

Here’s the caption crowned the winner for this photo of a bar studier on his hidden throne….

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Fall Recruiting Open Threads: Vault 21 – 30 (2011)

By Kashmir Hill

We’re rolling through the Vault 2011 list of the “prestigiest” firms in the land, so that you can comment on what it’s like to actually live, work, and breathe those firms (when you’re not choking on all the prestige in the air).

We’ve covered #1-10 and #11-20. Here’s the next round-up. Now it’s time for the London-based Magic Circle firms to join in the elite fun:

21. Arnold & Porter
22. Shearman & Sterling
23. Boies, Schiller & Flexner
24. O’Melveny & Myers
25. Ropes & Gray
26. Morrison & Foerster
27. Munger, Tolles & Olson
28. Hogan Lovells
29. Clifford Chance
30. Linklaters

What do associates have to say about the ups and downs of life at these firms? Here are some excerpts from their Vault listings…

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Quote of the Day: What Crawled Up His Robe?

By David Lat

I don’t believe you when you say just about anything anymore because I know that you will lie to a court any time it helps you. I know that. I saw you do it. I know you will do that. You have proven that to me beyond a reasonable doubt.

– Chief Judge James Holderman (N.D. Ill.) of Chicago, berating government lawyers — before a unanimous panel of the Seventh Circuit removed him from the case, in the middle of trial. Judge Richard Posner’s opinion cited Judge Holderman’s abuse of discretion and “unreasonable fury toward the prosecutors.”

Legal Eagle Wedding Watch 6.27 – 7.4: Circuit Circus

By Laurie Lin

Legal Eagle Wedding Watch, like the rest of the nuptial media, is in a state of giddy anticipation over Chelsea Clinton’s upcoming wedding, scheduled for tomorrow in Rhinebeck, NY. We’ll be gobbling up all the juicy details as they leak out, just like the lucky guests will be devouring the vegan and gluten-free fare. Yum!

Chelsea’s big day is one of the social events of the season and is estimated to have up to a $2 million pricetag. This week’s featured weddings may not quite reach that stratospheric territory, but they do have lawyers out the wazoo (unfortunately, neither Chelsea nor her fiancé has a JD; her parents, of course, have two).

Our contestant couples:

1. Farah Peterson and Eugene Sokoloff

2. Julia Lipez and Nolan Reichl

3. Lauren Sasser and Scott McCulloch

Read on for details on these fabulous newlyweds.

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Social Media for Legal Types, Part II

By Gabe Acevedo

Last week, Kash mentioned social media guru and attorney Adrian Dayton in a post entitled “Social Media for Legal Types.” As a follow up, I thought I would reach out to Carolyn Elefant and Nicole Black, authors of the recently published book, Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier. I first mentioned these two in March during the ABA Techshow.

The words “The Next Frontier” were added to signal that social media for attorneys is going into its next phase. To Elefant and Black, lawyers can no longer ignore the impact of social media on the law, but rather must embrace it fully. Lawyers will have to deal with this new form of communication in order to be collaborative with one another and responsive to their clients.

So what does this have to do with Biglaw? Social media is more for small firms and solos who need to use these tools to market themselves over the internet, right?

Actually, Elefant and Black believe social media can have a huge impact on Biglaw, especially in regard to its women lawyers. And law professors should read on too — it’s possible that advances in social media will render law review articles irrelevant…

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Sheppard Mullin Comes Back to the Light of $160K

By Elie Mystal

As we’ve been trying to tell people, paying associates less than a $160K starting salary is just not something that Biglaw firms should be doing. Everybody got very excited in 2009 when they thought that there was an opportunity to keep profits high by squeezing entry level associates, but it turns out that pay cuts were a short-sighted move. The vast majority of the Am Law 100 firms never left the $160K scale. The few who did are slowly coming back to the light.

Such is the case with Sheppard Mullin. A couple of weeks ago, we reported that Sheppard was still mucking around in the non-competitive $145K range. Today we’ve received word that Sheppard is doing the right thing by its junior associates and restoring the $160,000 starting salary…

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Job of the Week: The Stars at Night Are Big and Bright…

By Above the Law

The summer steams on in the Lone Star State, and the corporate departments are staying hot. This week’s Job of the Week, brought to you by Lateral Link, is at a top Texas firm that’s open to folks looking to relocate to the Big D.

Lateral Link is co-sponsoring the Summer Associate Survey, and today is the final day to complete it — so if you are a summer at a big firm, please take the survey!

Position: Corporate Associate

Location: Dallas, TX

Bonus: This position qualifies for Lateral Link’s $10,000 placement bonus.

Description: Texas firm is seeking a corporate associate from the classes of 2003 to 2007 with strong M&A experience or banking/finance experience. Ideal candidate will be able to hit the ground running and manage deals. The firm is very open to folks looking to relocate to Dallas (or back to Dallas) with experience from top firms in New York, D.C. or Los Angeles.

For more details, please see position #6662 on the Lateral Link website or you may contact Gary Cohen at gcohen@laterallink.com. If you are not currently a Lateral Link member, you can sign up for free at www.laterallink.com.

Latham & Watkins: 100% Offers to Summers in D.C.

By Elie Mystal

A week ago, we reported that Pepper Hamilton surprised its summer associates with 100% offers at a Friday lunch. Now this is a trend we hope catches on.

And maybe it will. Latham & Watkins surprised its D.C. summers during a rooftop extravaganza, yesterday. A tipster reports:

Last night (Thursday), Latham & Watkins’ D.C. office officially extended offers to 100% of its summer associates during an end-of-summer party on the rooftop of the Donovan House–one of the city’s swankiest spots. The offers came unexpectedly, as summers were under the impression that they would be waiting another week or so, until the conclusion of the programs at Latham’s other national offices, to hear about offers.

Well now, that should lighten the mood.

And Latham D.C. even provided a little extra incentive for summers who accepted their offers on the spot…

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Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch: Into OT 2011 We Go
(Plus information about SCOTUS clerk signing bonuses.)

By David Lat

Apologies for the tardiness. We’re a little late on this; we promised you a Supreme Court clerk hiring update last week. But we suspect that Above the Law readers, unlike the Clerk of Court at One First Street, are willing to accept a late filing.

In an earlier post, we also asked for information about what Supreme Court clerk bonuses are at these days. We now have news to pass along to you.

Check out the list of SCOTUS clerks hired thus far for October Term 2011, and ogle the signing bonuses for outgoing clerks heading to private law firms, after the jump….

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(Plus information about SCOTUS clerk signing bonuses.)”

Morning Docket: 07.30.10

By Elie Mystal

Anthony Weiner, pre-implosion

* Health care bill for 9/11 first responders fails to pass the House. The bill failed to garner a 2/3rds majority. [Politico]

* …And as the 9/11 bill went down in flames, Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY) spontaneously combusted. You must watch the video. [Huffington Post]

* No plea deal for Congressman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) on ethics charges. [Good Morning America]

* Here’s an important ethics tips for lawyers: you can’t give female clients a discount in exchange for freaky favors. [Law.com]

* Hey, you can get into medical school without a pre-med undergraduate degree. Something for aimless college graduates to think about instead of blindly flooding the legal profession. [New York Times]

* Could somebody please explain to me why I’m supposed to care about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. [CBS]

Christopher Stone Is Not Actually a Trojan Man

By Kashmir Hill

Gawker posed a very inflammatory question yesterday: How Did the Owner of a Barely-Legal Teen Gossip Blog Get Into a Prestigious Law School?

The law school in question is USC Gould School of Law, currently ranked #18. Gawker commenters wondered whether this was a misuse of the term “prestigious.”

The gossip blog owner in question is Christopher Stone, 31, who runs Sticky Drama and Sticky Noodz, dedicated to teenage gossip and teens’ nude photos, respectively. It’s a successful blog business model, as you can well imagine. The Sticky Drama site is currently down, but you can check out its tumblr. We sacrificed a few IQ points by looking it over: It’s a mish-mash of cute boys, half-naked girls, and screenshots of Facebook conversations about rape. The site most recently gained notoriety for launching 11-year-old Jessi Slaughter into the public eye, resulting in a cyberbullying frenzy.

Gawker describes it like this:

StickyDrama and its sister porn site, Sticky-n00dz, are two of the worst sites on the Internet, built on exploiting teens and tweens’ insecurities and then publicly humiliating them. Stickydrama is a crowd-sourced gossip blog that chronicles the lives of “E-celebs.” Sticky-n00dz is similar, but focused on nude pictures. E-celebs are kind of like regular, “In Real Life” celebrities, except their fame exists solely on social-networking sites like Myspace, Twitter, and the live webcam community Stickam.com, from which StickyDrama gets its name.

When Gawker is saying you’re a cesspool….

After seeing Stone tweet about law school — “lol @ all the Efagz pissed that I got into law school–ALL that I applied to. And my entire application was based on StickyDrama. So, nyah!” — Adrian Chen at Gawker asked his Twitter followers where Stone was going. Chen then wrote:

Attention, USC law! This man spends his free time harassing teenagers and videotaping live rapes… Admissions officers at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law just admitted him to their 18th-ranked program earlier this week.

We reached out to USC. They say Gawker got it wrong…

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Non-Sequiturs: 07.29.10

By David Lat

A portrait of Judge Kozinski as a young man.

* Hans Bader of CEI is fine with the bar exam — congrats to everyone who just finished, by the way — but wants to ditch the requirement of graduating from law school. After all, “[e]ven students who seldom studied, and reputedly were on drugs, managed to graduate from my alma mater, Harvard Law School.” [DC SCOTUS Examiner]

* For people who profess to hate law school, they sometimes act like they’re still in it: anti-law-school bloggers get caught up in a catfight. [Confessions of a Laid-Off Lawyer]

* A collection of entertaining legal opinions. Chief Judge Alex Kozinski appears multiple times, of course. [Google Scholar Blog]

* Chipotle is delicious — but does it violate the ADA? [Cato @ Liberty]

* Can Wall Street wipe out street language? [Law and More]

* Attention litigators: McKool Smith is hiring for its New York office. [ATL (sponsored content)]

Shirley Sherrod Is Coming After Andrew Breitbart

By Elie Mystal

If you thought this whole Shirley Sherrod thing was just going to blow over, well, you’re not thinking like a lawyer interested in generating fees. Burned by Andrew Breitbart’s editing skills, Sherrod says she intends to sue. The New York Daily News reports:

“I will definitely do it,” Sherrod said at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in San Diego.

Sherrod said Andrew Breitbart knew what he was doing when he posted a doctored video that made it appear she was boasting about mistreating a white farmer.

“I knew it was racism, and no one had to tell me that,” she said. “Right will win the end.”

Oh Jesus Christ, please don’t tell me I’m going to have to defend Andrew Breitbart…

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A Lasting Impression from the California Bar

By Elie Mystal

Mirrors on the ceiling, The pink champagne on ice
And she said ‘We are all just prisoners here, of our own device’
And in the master’s chambers, They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives, But they just can’t kill the beast

For many takers of the bar exam, the ordeal is over. Yay! Congratulations. It’s time to get your dragon drink on.

But before you put this experience behind you, we wanted to give you one last picture of bar exam trauma. A tipster reports:

I’m taking the CA bar exam at the Ontario location and staying at the adjacent Airport Marriott. I found the following on my pillow last night.

Yeah, the Marriott’s heart was in the right place, but they really need to think more critically about what kind of gifts they leave on the pillows of people taking the bar…

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Former DLA Piper Attorney Faces Lawsuit for Failure to Pay His Debts

By Elie Mystal

Well, this is pretty much my worst nightmare. Legal Profession Blog reports on the horrible story of Olufemi Nicol:

The Illinois Administrator has filed a complaint alleging that an attorney failed in bad faith to repay his student loans for a graduate business degree obtained after he graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1994. From 2006-2006, the attorney held several positions in business including a stint as president of Gear 7 in Los Angeles. The complaint alleges that the attorney received over $78,000 in loans in 2006 and signed two promissory notes. He allegedly has not made any payments on either note.

Okay, phew. I never took out additional loans for further education while I still owed money on my J.D. And I restarted payments — minimum payments — after I got a new job outside of Biglaw. I’m golden. AVOIDING DEBTOR’S PRISON SECURE!

But this Nicol guy? Yeah, sounds like he’s screwed. Law Shucks picks up the story….

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Pls Hndle Thx: No Service in the Club

By Marin

Ed. note: Have a question for next week? Send it in to advice@abovethelaw.com.

ATL,

Can you please offer your insight into proper etiquette for ring tones in the workplace?  I understand someone may have an affinity for The Jitterbug in their personal life, but when did it become acceptable to leave your cell phone on full volume while in the office knowing that it will go off at least three times each day? I work next to a law clerk whose phone sounds like it’s Mario eating a magic mushroom whenever he receives a message. I’ve asked him to put his phone on vibrate or silent when he comes to work, but it hasn’t sunk in — do I need to pull a Bluto from Animal House and smash his phone to stop the madness?

Gallagher

Dear Gallagher, this question is disturbing on many levels….

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Career Alternatives for Lawyers: Open a Museum

By Kashmir Hill

Barry Levenson

Are you a foodie? Are you committed enough to the gustatory world to leave the awful taste of the law behind and start a museum about your favorite food? Wisconsin lawyer Barry Levenson was that devoted. Sadly, his favorite food is mustard.

Levenson got a shout-out on NPR this morning for his National Mustard Museum. Levenson is a Wisconsin law grad who had quite a distinguished legal career. According to On Wisconsin, he practiced for 15 years and headed the Criminal Appeals Unit of the Wisconsin DOJ, arguing lots of cases before the state Supreme Court. In 1986, after a disappointing World Series — another sad note: Levenson is a Boston Red Sox fan — he consoled himself by buying lots of his favorite food: mustard. While healthier than ice cream, it turned into an obsession.

He began manically collecting jars of mustard. In 1987, one of his cases made it to One First Street; before oral argument in Griffin v. Wisconsin, he spotted a jar he didn’t have yet on a room service tray at his hotel and stuck it in his suit pocket, where it remained while he addressed the Nine. It was good luck perhaps. He won the Fourth Amendment case, 5-4. Levenson tells us he got some inspiration thinking back on “Justice Felix FRANKFURTER and Chief Justice Warren BURGER.”

Eventually, Levenson decided he wanted to flavor his whole life with mustard. He gave up his law job in 1992 and opened his museum. It gets 30,000 visitors per year. How do you make mustard that sexy?

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