Archive for July 2010

Vault Practice Group Rankings

By Elie Mystal

We’re taking a break from our march through the Vault prestige rankings to look at another way of pitting law firms against each other: practice group strength.

It’s an approach that’s favored by groups such as Chambers and Partners. Instead of focusing on overall firm prestige, these rankings focus on which firms are great at their chosen specialties.

Of course, there’s a limitation to ranking firms this way. It’s more helpful for lateral hires and clients than to law students or young lawyers choosing between firms (who are often the consumers of Vault guides). Sure, young 2L, you might want to go to the top capital markets law firm in all the land — if you knew what capital markets practice entailed. Which you don’t. Specialization usually comes after you’ve been working for a couple of years, not before you even graduate from law school.

With that disclaimer, it’s still pretty interesting to see which well-known firms rose to the top in some interesting practice groups…

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Lawyerly Lairs: Luttig in Lap of Luxury (Plus info about his current compensation.)

By David Lat

J. Michael ("Mike") LuttigIn May 2006, then-Judge J. Michael Luttig made major news in the legal world by resigning from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to become senior vice president and general counsel of aerospace giant Boeing. Luttig served as a Fourth Circuit judge for almost 15 years, during which time he reigned as the #1 feeder judge, sending almost all of his clerks into Supreme Court clerkships, and came extremely close to becoming a justice himself.

Luttig’s resignation from his life-tenured Fourth Circuit judgeship came as a shock to many (and was viewed by some as “taking his toys and going home,” after he got passed over for the SCOTUS seats that ultimately went to John Roberts and Samuel Alito). But Luttig, who’s only 56 — he was appointed to the Fourth Circuit at the tender age of 37 — seems to be enjoying the new challenges of serving as GC of a large public company.

During his four years at Boeing, Luttig has given its in-house ranks a major makeover. He has brought in some top talent, including at least four Supreme Court clerks: John Demers (OT 2005/Scalia), Grant Dixton (OT 2000/Kennedy), Brett Gerry (OT 2000/Kennedy), and Jake Phillips (OT 2004/Scalia). Is there any in-house legal department with more former Supreme Court clerks than Boeing? Don’t forget to count Luttig himself, who clerked for Chief Justice Burger (OT 1983), after clerking for then-Judge Scalia on the D.C. Circuit.

UPDATE: Boeing boasts at least eight (8) SCOTUS clerks. Here are three who were inadvertently omitted from the original version of this post: Bertrand-Marc Allen (OT 2003/Kennedy), Lynda Guild Simpson (OT 1984/Powell), and Eric Wolff (OT 2000/Scalia).

And Luttig has given his net worth a makeover, too. At the time of his May 2006 resignation, federal circuit judges earned $175,100 a year. As executive vice president and general counsel of Boeing — the country’s largest aerospace and defense company, #28 on the Fortune 500 — he makes millions.

Luttig no longer has to worry about covering college expenses for his two kids (which he cited in his resignation letter as a reason for leaving the bench). And this past May, he and his wife, Elizabeth Luttig, bought a fabulous second home in beautiful Kiawah Island, South Carolina.

How much did Mike Luttig pay for his new place? And how does the price tag compare to his in-house compensation at Boeing?

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Akin Gump Summers Ice Some Bros

By Elie Mystal

It’s about time a group of summer associates grew a backbone and showed some personality. At Akin Gump, a group of summers decided to “ice” some of the full-time associates at the firm.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, BrosIcingBros is was a website devoted to friends forcing friends to chug a gawd-awful Smirnoff Ice. It’s a pretty simple concept: if someone presents you with a Smirnoff Ice, you have to drink it — unless you happen to be carrying your own Smirnoff Ice, to pull off an Icing Deflection. In my humble opinion, there are few things worse than being forced to drink a Smirnoff Ice, and it is because of the horrible penalty that this phenomenon caught on and went viral.

Sadly, the site that started it all, BrosIcingBros.com, has been stopped. Apparently the people at Smirnoff don’t understand that there is no other reasonable use for their product. From AdAge:

“[Smirnoff Ice parent] Diageo has taken measures to stop this misuse of its Smirnoff Ice brand and marks, and to make it clear that ‘icing’ does not comply with our marketing code, and was not created or promoted by Diageo, Smirnoff Ice, or anyone associated with Diageo,” the company said in a statement.

Whatever. Icing will live on as the most appropriate use for your product no matter how many websites you try to kill.

Luckily, Smirnoff can’t stop the Akin Gump summer class…

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The 25 Greatest Fictional Lawyers

By Kashmir Hill

The courtroom lends itself to dramatization. A trial has a natural story arc: The adversarial system makes for a clear conflict between characters. There’s a natural end point when both sides rest their cases and the verdict comes down. Plus, lawyers are such loveable characters.

And so there are many great movies and TV shows about lawyers. (Along with some not so great ones.) They can amuse, inspire, terrify, or convince you to go to law school.

The ABA Journal has made a list of the 25 greatest fictional lawyers of all time:

In our survey of this literature of lawyers, however, we feel obliged to recognize a great divide—ante-Atticus and post-Atticus.

From Dick the Butcher’s famous pronouncement to Jack Cade in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2 — “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” — through Dickens’ Mr. Tulkinghorn and Galsworthy’s Soames Forsyte, literature (with a few exceptions) treated lawyers poorly.

That all changed with Harper Lee’s unflappable, unforgettable Atticus Finch. With Atticus, the lawyer — once the criminal mouthpiece, the country club charlatan, the ambulance-chasing buffoon — was now an instrument of truth, an advocate of justice, the epitome of reason.

Since Finch is a literary lawyer on steroids, they have cut him from the competition. The list is the 25 greatest who are not Atticus Finch. Did your favorite make the list?

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ABA Takes on Law Schools… Over Tenure

By Elie Mystal

Is the American Bar Association going to deal with the unmitigated proliferation of law schools? No. Will the ABA deal with overflow of lawyers entering the profession at a time when few well-paying legal jobs seem to be available? No. Will the organization seriously address the rising cost of legal education? Not really.

Instead, the ABA committee on law school accreditation wants to take a look at tenure. The National Law Journal reports:

Should the American Bar Association require law schools to maintain a tenure system?

The committee reviewing the ABA’s accreditation standards doesn’t think so. It has floated a proposal that would eliminate the term “tenure” from the ABA standards covering job security and academic freedom. The committee also wants to kill a requirement that law schools provide clinical faculty members with job protections similar to those enjoyed by full-time professors.

Excuse me, I’m gonna need to throw my coffee cup at something…

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Morning Docket: 07.27.10

By Kashmir Hill

* The Tennessee Titans sue USC and football coach Lane Kiffin over offensive move. [CBS News]

* Congrats to non-AT&T subscribers. The Library of Congress has issued a “Get Out of Jail” card for the iPhone. You may now pass Go and pay $200 at your local Apple store. [San Francisco Chronicle]

* Blago’s defense attorney Sam Adam Jr. may spend some time in prison with his client. [Associated Press]

* Arizona immigration law set to go into effect on Thursday. Jan Brewer wants to see the federal lawsuit thrown out (along with any illegal immigrants in her state). [KVOA]

* McDonald won his Supreme Court case; now he wants his gun permit. [Chicago Tribune]

* Law professors give this ABA proposal on tenure a failing grade. [USA Today]

* Goldman Sachs is feeling secure. [Dealbook/New York Times]

  • 26 Jul 2010 at 5:58 PM
  • Bar Exams

Good Luck to All Bar Takers!

By David Lat

Bar exam: fingers crossed!

The bar exam begins tomorrow for many of you (e.g., those of you in Above the Law’s home jurisdiction of New York). To those of you sitting for the test tomorrow, we wish you the best of luck. To quote the Facebook status update of a lawyer who has been through the ordeal (and survived):

Good luck, bar takers!! If you get nervous, remember that the bar exam is nothing compared to the crippling debt you will be saddled with for the next 20 years and the meager job prospects you will face!

Cheery, right? Many of you still need to find jobs. But first things first; take one day at a time.

We’d reassure you and say, “Don’t worry, you’re not going to fail.” And, statistically, this is true for many of you — e.g., July first-time bar takers in New York.

But we won’t say that, because we know how some bar exam candidates hate it when people tell them they’re going to pass….

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Non-Sequiturs: 07.26.10

By Elie Mystal

* The Feds are still interested in Barry Bonds. Not the Nats, the Feds. [WSJ Law Blog]

* When wrestling with the bimodal salary distribution curve, George Mason law professor Ilya Somin points out that the curve shifts rightward when you take into account yearly pay raises. Fair enough. But wouldn’t the curve shift significantly to the left if we looked at all the J.D.s who had a starting salary of $0? [Volokh Conspiracy]

* Kash threatens Jeff Rosen with a buggy whip. [True/Slant]

* Working from home is occasionally awesome, but it gets distracting if you do it all the time. [Legal Blog Watch]

* Next up in the Robert Wone case: the civil suit. [Who Murdered Robert Wone?]

* Jones Day will be coming to Northwestern a month later than everybody else. I fail to see the “bold”-ness of this move. [ABA Journal]

* Twenty years of the Americans with Disabilities Act. [LoTempio Law Blog via Blawg Review]

Caption Contest Finalists: Stalling?

By Kashmir Hill

Last week, we gave you a photo from Georgetown Law School of a bar exam studier whose performance anxiety appeared to extend to the bathroom.

We asked for captions for the photo and you showered us with them. We’ve chosen our favorites, after the jump.

Check them out and vote for the best. (We’ll flush the rest.)

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Quote of the Day: More Bad News for Military Recruiters at HLS?

By Kashmir Hill

I went to Harvard. They didn’t teach war there.

– Tom, a trial lawyer “that Fortune 100 companies and hedge funds bring in when billions are at stake.”

Dewey & LeBoeuf ‘Pauses’ 2011 Summer Program at a Few Offices

By Elie Mystal

‘Tis the season of summer program cancellations. Just don’t call them cancellations. Today we’ve learned that Dewey & LeBoeuf has “paused” its 2011 summer program in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston.

You can really see the difficulty of the situation faced by Biglaw firms. Here we are in July of 2010, and firms are supposed to make a decision about what their hiring needs will be like in the fall of 2012. It’s a little bit ridiculous to expect firms to be able to do that. But at least now it seems like firms are trying to be more cautious. While it makes things harder for rising 2Ls, the cautious approach should mean that people who are lucky enough to get jobs should be able to keep them — and avoid the career annihilation of losing a job as a first-year associate.

At Dewey, the scale of the programs in these three offices was never really that big to begin with…

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Grading Shenanigans at Harvard Law School? Spring Evidence Students Confronted ‘Irregularities’

By Elie Mystal

It’s nearly August. But at Harvard Law School, administrators are still trying to sort out what happened with Professor Bruce Hay’s spring Evidence course.

Not that grades matter all that much at HLS. The most important part of an HLS student’s transcript is the part at the top that says “Harvard Law School.” Heck, the school recently reformed its grading procedures, making the actual grades even less important.

But appearances must be maintained. It’s important that students feel their “super, gold-star, yay pass” grades are well-earned and fairly distributed.

Apparently students felt that Professor Hay did not adequately communicate how they would be graded. And now the administration has to step in…

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Pepper Hamilton Surprises Its Philly Summers with a 100% Offer Rate

By Kashmir Hill

pepper hamilton summers no offers.jpgWe’ve had our first report of summer offer rates. The news comes to us from the cheesesteak city. Pepper Hamilton gave out offers in its Philadelphia office on Friday, and it did it with style.

We’re told that the office’s 11 summer associates — 8 2Ls and 3 1Ls — went to lunch together on Friday to celebrate the last day of their eight-week program. Unexpectedly, the firm’s hiring chairs Michael Subak and Solomon Hunter showed up at the downtown Philly restaurant.

They offered to tell the summers how the hiring process would work. Midway through the explanation, Hunter allegedly said, “Why don’t we break the mold here?”

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A Bar Exam Parody / Hypothetical, Courtesy of Elizabeth Wurtzel

By David Lat

For some of you, the bar exam starts tomorrow. Your friends at Above the Law — and our bar-related advertisers, including Kaplan PMBR and BarMax — wish you the best of luck.

If you’re looking for more review questions, check out our post from yesterday, based on Professor Laurence Tribe’s unfortunate incident at a Safeway supermarket. A few of you have already posted impressive responses, suggesting that you’re going to ace the big test.

But the Larry Tribe fact pattern would have been labeled “EASY.” Here’s something far more challenging, from writer-turned-lawyer Elizabeth Wurtzel, who explains:

When I was studying for the bar for the first time in New Haven, in my total frustration, I wrote a parody of a bar exam question, or may be of a Barbri question. I posted it on the Wall at YLS [Yale Law School's list-serv], and I am told that ever since it has been reposted every bar exam season.

I have gotten suggestions that I publish it, and a couple of people have actually attempted to answer it, which is crazy. In any case, do what you want with it.

It is hilarious, and insane, and it will make your head hurt — or explode. Check it out below….

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Partner of the Day: Samuel Logan Allegedly Sent Child Porn From the Office

By Kashmir Hill

Federal agents played a little game of “To Catch a Law Firm Partner” last week. After a few weeks of online chatting with Samuel P. Logan, 45, they lured the Foulston Siefkin partner to a mall to meet the 14-year-old girl named “stazie” to whom he thought he had been sending naked photos.

Instead of his online Lolita, Logan met up with some very-of-age FBI agents. He’s now been charged with enticing a minor to have sex and one count of sending and receiving child pornography, according to the Kansas City Star.

That’s all pretty outrageous, but the story gets much more scandalous…

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Mentoring: Just Another Thing the Baby Boomers Don’t Do Well

By Elie Mystal

As the Baby Boomers continue to age, we’ve been documenting their reluctance to gracefully leave the Biglaw stage. One would think that all these lingering old people would at least be a good mentoring resource for the younger generation. Kash suggested as much when we debated the topic earlier this year.

But an article up on American Lawyer this morning suggests that aging Americans don’t view “mentoring” the young as part of their job description. A former Kirkland & Ellis partner, Steven Harper, writes about the mentoring gap in Biglaw. His starting point is an interesting article from former Reagan speechwriter, Peggy Noonan:

Commemorating the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird,” Peggy Noonan, writing recently in The Wall Street Journal, hit on an important truth that law firm leaders should heed. In lamenting what she called the national need for “adult supervision,” Noonan wrote, “there’s kind of an emerging mentoring gap going on in America right now … a generalized absence of the wise old politician/lawyer/leader/editor who helps the young along, who teaches them the ropes and ways and traditions of a craft.”

Dear Baby Boomers, please look to your own house before you criticize Gen Y for its Twitter-aided navel gazing…

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Morning Docket: 07.26.10

By Kashmir Hill

* A lawyer with an interesting business model in Florida: When a client didn’t pay his fees, he burglarized his home. [Orlando Sentinel]

* Can you sue me now? Mobile phone industry association files a lawsuit against San Francisco over its requirement that cell phones have radiation warnings. [San Francisco Chronicle; Ars Technica]

* Pentagon Papers of our time? [New York Times]

* Facebook lawsuit status update: Facebook says the contract is forged. [CNet]

* Was the prosecutor who investigated the politicized U.S. attorney firings too political herself? [Nieman Watchdog]

* How women get screwed at law firms. [Cleveland Plain Dealer]

* Taking another look at the bimodal salary curve. [Instapundit]

* The financial reform bill is also a legal job stimulus package. [Washington Post]

* How is your firm at entertainment? The top 100 power lawyers to the stars. [Hollywood Reporter]

This Week in Biglaw: 07.25.10

By Law Shucks

Ed. note: Law Shucks focuses on life in, and after, BigLaw, including by tracking layoffs, bonuses, and laterals. Above the Law is pleased to bring you this weekly column, which analyzes news at the world’s top law firms.

As August approaches, the recruiting process shifts from the summer programs, which are in full (relatively speaking) swing, to on-campus interviewing.

Summer-program sizes were down 44% this year, compared to the classes of 2009. That goes to show just how awkward the law-firm hiring process is. Last year’s summers were given offers in fall 2008 as the markets were already cratering, but firms didn’t know how bad things would get or how long it would last, so hiring was pretty close to the previous year’s levels.

Skip over all the layoffs, deferrals, and rescinded offers since then, and a full year later, in fall 2009, the firms were finally able to slash their pipeline by almost half.

Last year, almost 20 firms had summer programs with more than 100 participants. This year there were only two: the much-vilified Latham, and Gibson Dunn, both of which hosted 110. Summer legal employment is now at its lowest levels since 1991.

And that includes the two laid-off lawyers who are appearing on The Apprentice.

After the jump, more of what’s going on in BigLaw – including firm failings, layoffs, malpractice, and a few good things, too.

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Potential Lawsuit / Bar Exam Review Question of the Day: Laurence Tribe v. Safeway?

By David Lat

Prof. Tribe is almost 70; please don't stick him in elevators for long periods of time.

Last Sunday, the eminent constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Westling, got stuck in an elevator at the Safeway supermarket in Georgetown. (Professor Tribe is currently in D.C. to serve in the administration of his former student from Harvard Law School, Barack Obama.)

Read the (rather humorous) write-up of Tribe’s elevator incident in the Washington Post’s Reliable Source column. According to a Safeway spokesman, the company “is trying to figure out what kind of resolution is appropriate.” Options on the table include “some steaks or a gift card.”

For those of you preparing for the bar exam this week, tackle these study questions….

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Anatomy of a Trademark Lawsuit: Valentino v. Florence Fashions

By David Lat

After a 16-year-long fight, Valentino has prevailed in litigation with Florence Fashions over the use of the Valentino trademark. Read an interesting interview with Valentino’s lawyer, Anne Sterba, and comment — over at our sister site, Fashionista.

Valentino Wins 16-Year Trademark Case; Valentino’s Lawyer Explains the Ruling [Fashionista]