Tipsters report that O’Melveny & Myers has announced its bonuses. Tipsters are underwhelmed. Tipsters in California are starting to ask: “What about our spring bonuses?”
As we mentioned last night, spring bonuses are sweeping the nation. We’re actually working on a spring bonus update (pending confirmation of a few things). If you have information and memos about your firm’s spring bonuses, please send them to tips@abovethelaw.com.
We’re starting to worry that California might be left out in the cold. Last week, Morrison & Foerster announced it was still “monitoring” the New York market. Today we have news that O’Melveny is doing the same.
Guys, read Above the Law. The major New York dominoes have fallen. California associates read Above the Law, and they’re waiting for you to get with the program…
Continue reading “Associate Bonus Watch: O’Melveny Highlights Difficulties for West Coast Firms”
Two dates, including one on Valentine's Day, fell flat.
Given the track record of Above the Law’s lawyer-matchmaking series, some may think we should change the name of the series to the Courtship Misconnection.
In one of our first Washington, D.C. couplings, on Superbowl Sunday, a male lawyer fumbled his date with a “disarmingly feisty and unabashedly vivacious” female associate. (Beware the women who self-describe as “feisty,” says Slate.) Undeterred, I’ve continued to set up dates in the nation’s capital.
I sent two Biglaw types to Solly’s on U Street last week — a late 20s female Donkey who wanted a trunk and an early-thirties male Elephant who requested ass. If not a lawyer, she said she’d be a cage fighter, and he said he’d be a writer. I thought I had an excellent “opposites attract” formula. I was wrong.
She described the date as a “pretty lackluster affair” and he said no “love connection was made.” “You are no Patti Stanger,” female Donkey wrote me (a little bitterly). Boring dates may be even worse than disastrous ones.
Luckily, the other two dates recounted here were more entertaining. One, because it was a blind date on Valentine’s Day, and the other because it’s our first occurrence of Courtship Connection leading to a lawyer’s pants being torn off…
Continue reading “Courtship Connection: One Hit, Two Misses”
They had to know. But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.’
— Bernard Madoff, speaking about the banks and hedge funds that invested in his Ponzi scheme, in his first for-publication interview since his December 2008 arrest (via Dealbreaker).
Ed. note: This post is by Will Meyerhofer, a former Sullivan & Cromwell attorney turned psychotherapist. He holds degrees from Harvard, NYU Law, and The Hunter College School of Social Work, and he blogs at The People’s Therapist. His new book, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy, is available on Amazon.
I’ve always been awestruck by tax lawyers. They are the dudes.
As a transactional attorney, you can’t make a move without a tax guy. M&A is based on IRS consequences. It’s the tax guy who hands you a chart with boxes and arrows, holding companies and off-shore limited partnerships buying and selling and re-selling and issuing and repurchasing and spinning off. Everything starts there.
Tax lawyers do stuff no one else would attempt. They swagger out the door at 5 pm.
“Don’t start with me. I’m in tax.”
Way back when, I took an advanced tax course in law school – to see if I could roll with the gangstas. I even took it the wrong semester, so instead of JD students, it was tax LLMs snickering at my desperation. I received my lowest grade ever. I also discovered tax law is like higher mathematics: there is no big picture. Tax is not intuitive or guided by overarching principle; it’s a mess of staggering, intimidating complication.
What I’ve come to realize lately, as a therapist working with tax lawyers, is that these seemingly unapproachable superstars are human. And being “the expert” can exact a toll….
Continue reading “Better Get an Expert”
Gerald Ung (left) and Eddie DiDonato (right)
Judging from the comments section of our last story about Gerald Ung — which is still active, like a volcano — many of you are still interested in talking about the Temple Law student shooter. Even though Ung was quickly acquitted of all charges arising out of the January 2010 shooting of Edward DiDonato Jr., the trial goes on — in the court of public opinion.
We’ve selected a handful of stories from the avalanche of news and blogosphere coverage that we believe merit your attention. You can check them out — one of them reveals what Gerald Ung’s future plans are, while another has the reaction to the verdict of Eddie DiDonato’s father, a prominent partner at Fox Rothschild — after the jump.
Continue reading “Commonwealth v. Ung: A Morning-After Linkwrap”
* Criminals and foreclosure victims subject to criminal mortgage rates now have something in common in New York: guaranteed legal representation. [New York Times]
* Not getting your fill of Broadway injuries from Spider-Man? Then Billy Elliot’s got a deal for you — tickets now come with a complimentary face smash worth $4M. [New York Post]
* Dumb kids are going to continue to eat Play-Doh, no matter how it’s spelled. And trust me, “play dough,” edible or not, doesn’t taste good. [Boston Globe]
* You’d think that the government could do better than just saying “this stuff happens” when it comes to rape and gangbangs in the military. [MSNBC]
* Facebook: connecting you with the people around you. It’s just too bad that they sometimes bleed to death in the process. [Chicago Tribune]
* If libeling the police was a crime in the United States, a lot of more rappers would probably be in jail — or out of business. [CNN]
* Stephen Baldwin and Kevin Costner are fighting about water clean-up technology for oil spills. Um, hello, dude was in Waterworld, I think he knows his sh*t about water. [The Hill]
* I’m just a girl, but don’t speak, I know just what you’re saying. There is no doubt that this video game lawsuit is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S. [Company Town / Los Angeles Times]
One of my favorite law firm names is Freshfields — Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, to be precise, but I prefer Freshfields. It makes me think of rolling green hills, crisp laundered linens, or a dairy, producing the creamiest milk in all the land.
As it turns out, Freshfields is a law firm — a top international law firm, a member of the elite Magic Circle. And this Freshfields is rolling out the green, doling out crisp bills, and ladling out the cream — to its associates. As reported earlier today by Am Law Daily, yesterday Freshfields announced spring bonuses, on the top-of-the-market Cravath scale.
Freshfields isn’t alone. This afternoon, Cadwalader, which was publicly toying with the idea of spring bonuses, announced that it too would pay them, again on the Cravath scale.
These two moves are significant — far more significant than the earlier spring bonus announcements….
Continue reading “Spring Bonus Mania: Freshfields, Cadwalader…. Where Will It End? Could Your Firm Be Next?”
* A “barroom brawl” between law firm partners results in one partner leaving the firm. WEAK. Men should be able to beat the crap out of each other, shake hands when they’re finished, and still be able to do business together. [ABA Journal]
* A public defender got a TRO against a judge who allegedly slammed her to the ground. WEAK. Women should be able to get body slammed by enraged judges, receive treatment for their injuries, and go back to work without needing a TRO. (Dude, that’s the last time I try this “intellectual consistency” BS; it just makes me sound stupid.) [Penn Live]
* Why should I even try to be intellectually consistent when South Dakotans are so addled that they can’t see the flaw with caring about the sanctity of human life so much that they’re willing to kill innocent people to protect it? [Mother Jones]
* Thankfully we did not deport one member of a loving couple on Valentine’s Day. [Metro Weekly via Stop the Deportations]
* According to a recent survey, way too many of you are hooking up with people you work with. When two of you end up plastered all over ATL, go on and cry in your coffee, but don’t come bitching to me. [Vault]
* Protip for law profs: creating hypotheticals that involve killing your dean is probably not a good idea (even if it might be protected academic freedom). [Althouse]
* For those playing along at home, putting cocaine extract in your soft drink is okay. But putting alcohol in your soft drinks constitutes a grave danger to young people all across the country. [Gizmodo]
* A Turkish company wins the public vote to make the new yellow cab for New York City. They’re the only ones where every cab will be handicap accessible. You like free markets? Then don’t complain when young Turks are just better. [Alt Transport]
* Between the adventures of the City of Austin’s solid waste department and what’s going on in Fort Wayne now, you wonder how long it will take old people to figure out that letting “the internet” name things is not a very good idea. [Feedback Fort Wayne]
We received an overwhelming number of responses – 3,700 – to last week’s Career Center survey on debt and how it contributes to your decision on where to work. We will introduce an overview of the results today, and present a more detailed analysis later in the week.
Overall, 93% of respondents report being in some kind of debt. And for the vast majority of them, that debt plays a role in their decision on where to work:
- 38% of respondents said they considered debt about as much as other factors.
- 37% said they considered debt more than any other factor.
- 24% said debt contributed very little or did not contribute at all.
Exactly how much debt are we talking about here?
Continue reading “Career Center Survey Results: A Generation of Debtors (Part 1)”
Gerald Ung (left) and Edward DiDonato Jr. (right)
Well that didn’t take long, did it? The jury in the case of Commonwealth v. Ung began deliberations at 11:32 a.m., and it just returned a verdict of “not guilty,” around 4 p.m. Eastern time. Gerald Ung, the Temple Law student who was charged with attempted murder in connection with a January 2010 shooting in the Old City section of Philadelphia, has been acquitted.
This news might not come as a huge shock. In our reader poll, over 90 percent of you said you’d vote “not guilty” if you were jurors.
Congratulations to Ung — who testified on his own behalf yesterday, arguing that he acted in self-defense — and to Ung’s very fine defense lawyer, the renowned Jack McMahon.
Does this mean that Gerald Ung, 29, gets his life back? Can things go back to normal for him and for the Ung family?
Continue reading “Breaking: Temple Law Student Gerald Ung Found Not Guilty in Shooting”
In the comments to Elie’s Sugar Mama post from yesterday, which chronicles the woes of a female Biglaw associate who is being harassed by coworkers for affiancing (KABLAM: Princeton Review Hit Parade) a Starbucks barista “peasant,” Bonobo_Bro wrote:
Not bad big guy (other than the usual typo issues which must be intentional); however, I really think you should’ve handled this pls handle thx style because I’d love to see Marin’s opinion of women with lower income life partners.
Rex and either thirty-six other anonymous internet trolls or one troll logging on from 36 different computers liked this comment. My mandate was clear. The people thirsted for my response…
Continue reading “In Defense of Tommy, Who Used to Work on the Docks”
Jaime Laskis
I’m not trying to compare the claims of Jaime Laskis, a former associate at the prominent Canadian law firm of Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt, with those of Charlene Morisseau (a legendary Lawyer of the Day honoree, from 2007). But we’ve got two stories vaguely related to alleged employee harassment and discrimination in the legal profession, and I wanted to click them both off so I have something to change the subject with when Sweet Hot Justice asks me if she’s a cougar when we meet for drinks tonight.
Let’s start with Jaime Laskis’s story, which is a bit more newsy. Laskis was an associate in the New York office of Toronto-based Osler, who claims she suffered various forms of sexual harassment while she worked there. One partner allegedly said that Harvard University was full of “pretty women pretending to get an education.”
I know, I know, that’s sounds like a man who has never been to a Harvard party. But Laskis makes other allegations….
Continue reading “Aggrieved Women Potpourri: Sexual Harassment Canada-Style, and the Return of Charlene Morisseau”
Ed. note: This is the latest installment of Size Matters, one of Above the Law’s new columns for small-firm lawyers.
Valentine’s Day was yesterday, and everywhere you turned, someone was trying to spread the message of love. Rachel Ray was on Good Morning America, showing us how to cook breakfast in bed. Every grocery store was hawking roses. There was a marathon of Millionaire Matchmaker on Bravo all weekend.
But the most interesting way to say “I love you” is the Pajamagram. While watching Patti Stanger yell at some wealthy old man trying to date a woman who is way too young for him, I saw the Pajamagram commercial. The commercial featured an attractive woman emerging from her bathroom in a “sexy” pair of pajama pants and a tank top covered in hearts. And, according to the Pajamagram people, if you really want to show her you care, then get her a Hoodie-Footie. Apparently, nothing says you are in for a romantic evening like a giant pink-velour onesie. If watching multiple episodes of Millionaire Matchmaker was not enough, seeing these commercials has convinced me that no one is feeling the love this year.
The ABA Journal disagrees. The February 2011 edition is devoted to discussing how lawyers can find happiness — even love — in their legal careers. In Why I Love Being A Lawyer (Seriously), several practitioners share the reasons that they love being a lawyer. Most of the quotes refer to the lawyer’s ability to make the world better or the freedom that comes with practicing law (for those who own their own firms). Unfortunately, I could not relate to any of those happy lawyers.
There was another article in the Journal that struck a little closer to home. In Hunting Happy, Becky Beaupre Gillespie and Hollee Schwartz Temple chronicle the happiness movement in law — specifically, how lawyers can be happier. The article discusses The Happy Lawyer, a book by Professors Douglas O. Linder and Nancy Levit of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, in which they conclude that the path to happiness comes from working at a small firm.
Or, at least, the path to being happier than people at big law firms….
Continue reading “Size Matters: Love and the Small Law Firm”
Hunton & Williams is having an uncomfortable week, and will get its very own page in the WikiLeaks saga. Thanks to a feud between hacktivist group Anonymous and a security firm, emails that Hunton lawyers exchanged with that security firm were leaked in a major document dump last week.
Journalist (and lawyer) Glenn Greenwald of Salon is now calling the firm’s lawyers the “central cogs” in a devious plot to take down WikiLeaks and its supporters (he’s especially miffed as he was named in a secret PowerPoint as one of those supporters). The New York Times named Hunton as the intermediary between security firms offering up unseemly sabotage tactics and clients like Bank of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
So how unseemly were these alleged tactics, and which Hunton partners are getting blasted by the press?
Continue reading “Hunton & Williams Gets WikiLeaked”
A little over half an hour ago — shortly before noon, after receiving instructions from Judge Glynnis Hill — a jury of six men and six women began its deliberations in Commonwealth v. Ung, the criminal trial of Temple Law student Gerald Ung. Ung has been charged with attempted murder, aggravated assault, and other offenses, arising out of a January 2010 shooting incident. Ung shot Eddie DiDonato, a former Villanova lacrosse captain and the son of a partner at Fox Rothschild, in what Ung claims was self-defense.
Above the Law readers seem sympathetic to Ung. At the current time, in our reader poll, over 90 percent of you would vote “not guilty” on the main charge of attempted murder. (The poll is still open; you can vote over here.)
How long will the jury deliberate? Will we end up with a hung jury, or an Ung jury, or some convictions?
Stay tuned. We’ll bring you the verdict as soon as we learn of it. (Of course, please feel free to email us or text us (646-820-8477) if you happen to get the news before we do.)
UPDATE: Read about the jury verdict over here.
Jury gets case of student charged in Old City shooting [Philadelphia Inquirer]
Earlier: Commonwealth v. Ung: The Defendant Takes the Stand
Prior ATL coverage of Gerald Ung
If President Obama thinks education is so important, then why is he hell bent on financially crippling those who seek education? Seriously, why can’t he understand that making education affordable for everybody is not achieved simply by giving everybody the opportunity to take out loans that they cannot pay back?
I’ve mentioned before that Obama himself did not pay off his student loans until he became a best selling author. Does he expect everybody to write a great American novel? Does he think loans are free? Does ensuring that members of the “educated elite” are financially hobbled for the rest of their lives part of some sick political philosophy experiment?
I want answers, goddamnit! I want somebody to explain to me why this president — one who has enjoyed overwhelming support from the young and college-educated — has a blind spot when it comes to the cost of student loans.
Do I have to become a rabid, Tea Party Republican to get this Democrat to pay attention to me? Just look at what he’s about to do to graduate students. With one hand he’s trying to funnel more money to lawyers who help low-income clients, but with the other he’s going to make it even harder for lawyers to pay off their loans without working for people who have the ability to pay high fees.
He doesn’t want people who have a commitment to public service, he wants saints willing to martyr their futures on a pyre stoked by Sallie Mae….
Continue reading “Obama Just Doesn’t Understand How to Help Public Interest Lawyers”
After all, there are fewer partners for Howrey to lose with each passing day, as the Howrey lawyer diaspora continues to grow. Let’s review the recent activity — and discuss some possible future defections.
On Friday we reported that IP litigator Mark Whitaker would be joining Baker Botts. That news has now been publicly announced.
Back on February 4, we mentioned that government contracts lawyer Barbara Werther was leaving Howrey, most likely for Ober|Kaler. She’s now on the Ober|Kaler website (although the firm apparently didn’t issue a press release touting her arrival, as it did for two first-year associates).
UPDATE: Just this morning, Ober|Kaler issued a press release on Werther and insurance coverage litigator Stephen Palley (who also joined from Howrey).
UPDATE (4/5/11): All in all, five Howrey construction lawyers joined Ober|Kaler.
Other outlets have noted additional partner departures. K.T. “Sunny” Cherian, described by The Recorder as a “top IP litigation rainmaker” with a book of business worth more than $10 million, joined the San Francisco office of Hogan Lovells this past weekend. Four other partners will join him in soaking up the Ho-Love: John Hamann, Sarah Jalali, Constance Ramos, and Scott Wales (who had been the hiring partner for Howrey’s S.F. office).
Also in S.F., Pillsbury Winthrop picked up IP partner Duane Mathiowetz. The news was reported by the Daily Journal (subscription), which noted that Mathiowetz, who worked as a mechanical engineer for a decade before going into law, has taken five patent cases to trial in the past five years (winning four).
Who might be the next to leave Howrey? Here’s some speculation….
Continue reading “Howrey Losing More Partners? Construction Lawyers Might Be Next to Leave”
Testimony is now over in the trial of Gerald Ung, the Temple Law student facing charges of attempted murder and aggravated assault stemming from a shooting in January 2010. Ung shot Eddie DiDonato, a former Villanova lacrosse captain and the son of a politically connected partner at the Fox Rothschild law firm.
Throughout the trial, Ung’s counsel, renowned Philadelphia defense lawyer Jack McMahon, has argued that his client acted in self-defense. As he said in his opening statement, “This case is about privileged, drunken bullies, four guys, tough guys, big-muscle guys. It’s unfortunate what happened to this young man [DiDonato], but it was their own fault.”
Today Gerald Ung got to drive this point home, in his own words. In a rare move for a criminal defendant, Ung took the stand, testifying for almost two hours.
How did Ung do? Let’s find out — and play the role of jurors, by voting in a reader poll….
Continue reading “Commonwealth v. Ung: The Defendant Takes the Stand”
I think we’ve all been waiting for this. Last Wednesday, we picked up a report from the Stanford Daily announcing that students at Stanford Law School would be looking at a 5.75% tuition hike for the 2011 – 2012 academic year. That’s significantly larger than the 3.5% tuition hike for the rest of the university.
Given that most Stanford Law students found out the school was jacking up tuition from the Stanford Daily or Above the Law, I’m not surprised to see a school-wide apology from Stanford Law Dean Larry Kramer. And given the fact that the best reason thus far given for Stanford’s tuition hike reduces to “because we can,” I’m also not surprised to see Dean Kramer working hard to spin the story differently.
Do you find him convincing? Read his email and tell us what you think…
Continue reading “Stanford Law Dean Explains Why Stanford Law Deserves a Bigger Tuition Hike Than the Rest of the University”
