The economy must be heating up, because lawyers are leaving their jobs to do all kinds of crazy things. I mean, maybe the legal economy is still crappy, since these people aren’t leaving for other legal jobs. But there must be a general sense of optimism if all of these people have decided to just “walk the Earth,” as it were.
We had the guy who decided to quit Sidley to walk across the country. I’m following him on Twitter. He’s near the Chesapeake and his feet hurt. Then we had the guy who left Skadden to move to Nepal.
Now we’ve got a person who is leaving her Biglaw job to take photos. No, she doesn’t have a job or anything, but she wants one!
Continue reading “Departure Memo of the Day: Take a Picture of Your Bank Account Because It’ll Never Look This Good Again”
The closest English translation for the Wisconsin word "stand" is actually "run away like a little kid."
Effing Wisconsin. First I have to spend 10 minutes with my clicker searching around for something ridiculous called “TruTV” to catch the Michigan tournament game. I can’t find it so I have to stream the game on the radio while I watch Texas coach Rick Barnes continue his brave struggle to become the first developmentally disabled coach to make it to the Final Four. But then I have to kill the sound and change the channel because there’s “breaking” news from Wisconsin regarding its ongoing labor union bukkake session and, technically, I’m “working” today. Freaking cheese eating mofos just trying to hassle brothers.
But whatever, when last we checked in on Wisconsin the state was in a governmental standstill because Democrats fled the state in order to prevent Republicans from passing a bill that would eviscerate the rights of labor unions. Since then, the people of Wisconsin have demanded a recall election to oust the Republican state legislators (apparently being elected and trying to pass horrible bills is more offensive than being elected and refusing to show up for work at all).
Meanwhile, Republicans decided to pass their anti-union bill anyway, without the Democrats or a quorum. Was it legal for Republicans to pass the bill under those circumstances? Not exactly says a Wisconsin judge…
Continue reading “Wisconsin Judge Prevents Republicans From Acting Unilaterally, For Now”
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Every year, in honor of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament (Pervis Ellison is not walking through that door, Louisville fans), Above the Law runs a law-related bracket. Law firms or schools advance based on the outcome of reader polls.
Last year was a particularly fun tournament. We crowned the Douchiest Law School in all the land. Duke won (big surprise), but even now people at UVA are still pissed and effectively demanding that we redo the poll to take into account their recent douchtastic behavior.
But there is a more important bracket that needs a second look. Back in 2008, we asked you to name the Coolest Law Firm. Guess who won.
In 2008, Above the Law readers declared Latham & Watkins to be the “coolest” law firm in the country. Yes, that Latham.
That was three years ago. Lehman was still a respected investment bank back then. Does anybody want to try this again? Let’s get to it…
Continue reading “ATL March Madness: The Coolest Law Firm!”
A couple of points before we start:
- I know who Elie Tahari is because he spells and pronounces his first name just like I do (it’s like “Eliot” without the “it”).
- I once told a toll lady on the New Jersey Turnpike: “You know, you should really have to pay me for having to drive on this thing.” She didn’t laugh though.
Thomas Horodecki, a manager in a design house for Elie Tahari, is suing the company for $2 million because he was forced to work in New Jersey.
Sounds reasonable to me…
Continue reading “Lawsuit of the Day: Doesn’t the 8th Amendment Protect Us From Being Forced To Go To… New Jersey?”
Judge Fullam is a very experienced and hard working jurist and he has devoted decades of service to the federal bench. Nothing we have said in this opinion should detract from that. However, neither this court, nor any other court, can tolerate a situation where a judge decides to follow his/her own custom and concepts of justice rather than the precedent of the applicable appellate court or the United States Supreme Court. Ours is a nation of laws, not judges.
– Chief Judge Theodore McKee (3d Cir.), benchslapping the 89-year-old Judge John Fullam (E.D. Pa.) through issuance of a writ of mandamus, in United States v. Higdon.
Jonathan Rhys Meyers: More than just a pretty face; also an alleged tortfeasor.
* Gloria Allred is tired of Lindsay Lohan strutting her stuff into the courtroom like a debutante instead of a defendant. Chill out, Gloria. At least it’s actually LiLo’s stuff, unless that silicone was stolen, too. [New York Times]
* The ABA is thinking up ways for law schools to more creatively rig their nine-months-after-graduation employment rates. Burger flipping is a totally professional job, right? Right? [Morse Code / U.S. News]
* Actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers is getting sued for going to pound town with a United Airlines employee. No, not that pound town. It was actually a little more like ground and pound. [Daily Mail]
* Would you rather your firm waste money on a 10-week psychology experiment or a 10-week cocktail party? My vote is for cocktails – and yours should be, too, if you like our posts about drunk summer associates. [The Snark / Fulton County Daily Report]
* Today in Racebaiting 101, we will learn about the comedic aptitude of white judges who refer to the KKK in plea agreements for young black men. Discuss. [Los Angeles Times]
* Well, the good news is that you’re not going to die from kidney failure. The bad news is that you’re going to die from AIDS. This story is like a bad bar exam question. [Wall Street Journal]
* David J. Stern is doing the dip on 9,000 foreclosure cases in Florida. He just doesn’t have the manpower to file the correct paperwork. How about you just robo-sign all those withdrawals, too? [Palm Beach Post]
If your lover has these products in their bathroom, maybe you should use a condom.
I thought the most sketchy thing I’d see today was this article about people photoshopping the heads of their Facebook friends onto naked bodies and then masturbating. There’s nothing wrong with jerking off, but doing it to friends based on their profiles just seems violative.
Of course, there are things that seem wrong, and then there are things that are wrong. And Thomas Redmond, the creator of Aussie hair-care products, apparently crossed over the line into depraved wrongness.
When Redmond was 77, he banged a woman twenty years his junior, without a condom, and gave her his herpes. Mental note: I need to remember to never use Aussie hair products because the dude that created it has herpes and doesn’t take adequate precautions…
Continue reading “Lawsuit of the Day: It Only Costs $4.3 Million To Give Somebody Herpes”
* Is associate hiring bouncing back? Not so fast. [Young Lawyers Blog]
* Tape-recorded trash talk at the Raj Rajaratnam trial. [Dealbreaker]
* Here’s a good response to Mark Herrmann’s request for examples of crappy behavior by partners: “Miss a deadline, and then throw your secretary and associate under the bus when called out for it.” [South Florida Lawyers]
* Our tipster, a Georgetown Law alum, has the credited response: “[T]his must have been a GULC student mad he/she could have gone to Texas, gotten a 3500 sq foot wife and a Lexis, and graduated with the same presTTTige.” [Law Library Feedback Blog]
The Chicago River goes green on St. Patrick's Day.
* Law firms have been supporting Japan relief efforts (see here and here), but Felix Salmon urges you not to give money to Japan (or if you do donate to a relief organization, make sure your donation is unrestricted). [Reuters]
* Tax time is just a month away. What should be America’s top tax rate — 25 percent or 49 percent? [TaxProf Blog]
* This illustration of Justice Thurgood Marshall isn’t racist, is it? [Zoopreme Court]
* A Happy St. Patrick’s Day, from Elie — after the jump….
Continue reading “Non-Sequiturs: 03.17.11″
Well that didn’t take long, did it? On Tuesday afternoon, we wrote about associates at Winston & Strawn who were upset over the lack of news on seniority-based salary bumps. Since we’re well into a new year, associates at top law firms should be getting raises, with first-years becoming second-years ($160K to $170K), second-years becoming third-years ($170K to $185), etc. But the Winston tipsters hadn’t heard anything — even though historically they’ve received pay raise news in early February, and now it’s mid-March.
Today, however, the Winston associates received some good news — very good news, in fact. “Salary memos went out today,” one Winston source reported. “The bottom line is that those who were not at market rate now are. They’ve abandoned the ‘merits-based’ system and have gone back to lockstep.”
Wow. Is merit-based compensation becoming a casualty of the economic recovery? Back when merit-based systems were all the rage, we created a category on ATL called Killing Lockstep. Perhaps now it’s time to create ones called Killing Killing Lockstep, or Lockstep Resurrected?
Regardless of whether or not this becomes a trend throughout Biglaw, Winston associates are happy — and grateful….
Continue reading “Associate Salary Watch: Big (and Good) News from Winston & Strawn”
Big deans don't cry?
Yesterday we talked about a couple of schools that fell in this year’s U.S. News law school rankings, whose deans promptly devoted school-wide emails making excuses for their programs dropping. Predictably, they criticized U.S. News’s latest methodology, even though this year’s formula did a better job of focusing on factors law students actually care about (like jobs, not donuts).
We asked you to send us other responses from law school administrations regarding this year’s rankings. And, ye Gods, foot soldiers with no clear mission or exit strategy in Afghanistan aren’t bitching and moaning as much as law school deans are just because U.S. News prefers schools that get their students jobs. If these crybaby deans could care about the employment outcomes of their students half as much as they care about the U.S. News rankings, then going to law school wouldn’t be such a financially dangerous option and their schools would do better in the rankings.
We were overwhelmed by the responses. Keep ‘em coming! But we’ll have to deal with many of them when we get to the appropriate point in our series of open threads on law schools.
Today I just want to focus on a few schools that did better in the rankings this year, yet still found the time to bitch about U.S. News. You expect schools that drop to be dismissive of the rankings, but when schools that are bathed in rankings glory are unsatisfied, that’s a little bit more interesting….
Continue reading “Start Your Whining (Part 2): U.S. News Makes Law Schools Squirm All Across the Land”
It’s not everyday you get porn, file sharing lawsuits, amateur motions to quash subpoenas, and a federal judge quoting Shakespeare’s King John, all wrapped up in a nice legal bundle of joy.
Here we go, from the beginning:
Chicago attorney John Steele, whose firm website is located at www.WeFightPiracy.com, represents CP Productions, the filmmakers behind — wait for it — Cowgirl Creampie. The movie was part of their website, www.chicasplace.com (obviously NSFW; I can’t believe I just looked that up in Starbucks).
On behalf of his client, Steele sued 300 people who allegedly downloaded and shared the movie via BitTorrent. No one actually knew, however, who these supposed downloaders were. The plaintiffs only had IP addresses — not names, phone numbers or mailing addresses.
Steele subpoenaed various Internet service providers to get the personal data. He spent months unsuccessfully trying to contact all of the defendants, who lived conveniently in a single Chicago apartment building all over the damn country….
Continue reading “Suing Hundreds of Anonymous People Will Not Make You Popular”
Ed. note: This is the latest installment of Size Matters, one of Above the Law’s new columns for small-firm lawyers.
As discussed previously, Steven Harper threw down the gauntlet when it comes to top law schools focusing all their recruiting efforts on Biglaw placements. And the woman who reads my tea leaves said that small law firms are becoming the new black. But you do not need to take their word for it. I have it from on high (i.e., from someone at Harvard Law School) that small law firms might merit the attention of the top of the U.S. News law school hierarchy.
I decided to test my working hypothesis — that graduates from top schools are considering small firms for their post-graduate employment — on the head of the Office of Career Services at HLS, Assistant Dean Mark Weber….
Continue reading “Size Matters: Advice From A Real Expert on Choosing a Small Firm”
On Tuesday we told you that McGuireWoods, Dewey & LeBoeuf, and Weil Gosthal were all contributing to the relief efforts under way in Japan. The response has been pretty great.
While some people seem to think Japan’s status as a rich nation means it doesn’t need any international aid, I don’t see how the country’s long-term ability to recover has anything to do with the immediate humanitarian crisis. Japan will undoubtedly be able to rebuild in the future, but its citizens need food and water today.
We’ve now received word that even more Biglaw firms are pitching in to do what they can. If you know of additional firms supporting relief efforts that we have not mentioned, please tell us in the comments to this post….
Continue reading “More Law Firms Contributing to Japanese Relief Efforts”
Ed. note: This is the latest installment of Inside Straight, Above the Law’s column for in-house counsel, written by Mark Herrmann.
I need your help here.
I occasionally give “book talks” about my silly little ditty, The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law. During those talks, I explain that my book is written in the voice of a jaded old coot who rants at young lawyers about how to do their jobs. I explain that I would have liked to include in the book a chapter called, “How To Be A Crappy Partner.” That chapter would have been written in the voice of a young lawyer ranting at an older one about the ways the old guy messes up his job. I didn’t include that chapter because it would have required changing the authorial voice from an old coot to a young one, and I couldn’t figure out how to execute the switch.
(Why are there so many great words for nasty old men, but none for nasty young ones? We have “curmudgeon,” “coot,” “crank,” “grouch,” and probably a bunch of others for the old guy. But there are so few (that you can type in public) for the younger version of that character. I propose to add “snark” to the lexicon, meaning a nasty young coot.)
If I’d been able to include the missing chapter, I would have included many examples of how to be a crappy partner. For example….
Continue reading “Inside Straight: ‘How To Be A Crappy Partner’”
* Drunk, poor, and unemployed. No, the Wall Street Journal isn’t talking about ways to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day – they’re talking about the reasons why people aren’t applying to law school. [Wall Street Journal]
* Is it really in the public interest to hear what John Edwards had to say in his depo about making a sex tape with his mistress? The media should be more like the commentariat: pics or it didn’t happen. [Washington Post]
* Charlie Sheen fell victim to warlock trickery after JAMS decided that his $100M legal dispute should go to arbitration. He’s going to need to smoke a lot of Charlie Sheen, because duh, he’s not winning. [TODAY News]
* Jenn Sterger, please don’t be an Indian giver. I, for one, would love to read a book from Game of Inches, LLC, because as we all know, size matters, especially when it comes to Brett Favre. [New York Post]
* You know it’s bad when your client’s case is bombing harder than The Situation at the Trump Roast. Widener Law’s Lawrence Connell may be fired over an in-class hypothetical. [National Law Journal]
* You’re not going to want your baby back-baby back-baby back ribs from Chili’s anymore after reading about this. My take: you’d have an easier time finding a needle in a hay stack than your mashed potatoes. [New York Daily News]
* The IRS confirms that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, much less a free doughnut. After winning a year’s supply of doughnuts, a baseball fan faces some serious tax consequences. [ABA Journal]
Based on the overwhelming number of submissions we’ve received — please don’t be offended if yours doesn’t make the cut — it seems you’re enjoying our recent series on legally-themed license plates. You can send in your photos via email (subject line: “Vanity License Plate”).
Here’s one license plate we received that’s not explicitly law-related. But the reader who submitted it described it as “a DUI lawyer’s worst nightmare.”
You should not drink and drive — especially if this is your license plate….
Continue reading “Law License Plates: Don’t Drink and Drive (With This License Plate)”
If you paid attention during high school geogrpahy and chemistry classes, you are not afraid of Fukushima Daiichi radation wiping out California.
* It’s amazingly self-centered and really quite stupid for the tragedy in Japan to be making everybody in America freak out about the safety of our nuclear facilities. But you couldn’t throw a dart at New York and come up with a geologically worse place to put a nuclear facility than Indian Point, so if Fukushima Daiichi’s near meltdown gets people to do something about that, it’s a good thing. Even if they ended up there through a series of stupid, self-centered, irrational fears. [NY1]
* The thought of McKinsey needing to hire consultants makes me warm inside. [Business Insider]
* I need to have a breathalyzer attached to my laptop to keep me from working while intoxicated, but we should be able to expect professionals to behave like adults. [Vault]
* Why won’t you just die? [Huffington Post]
* St. Patrick’s Day is tomorrow. Like most black people, I’ll be spending the day inside with green blood painted across my front door hoping that the festivities merely pass me by. But happy holiday. [What About Clients?]
* If studying is so hard that you need to set your Contracts notes to the tune of Lady Gaga, maybe you should try business school? [Beyond Hearsay]
* If a blogger did this, the old media would make a big story about how the new media cannot be trusted. But since it’s the Washington Post getting caught being unscrupulous, nobody will make that big of a deal out of it. [Politico]
* Would that I could proactively “go after” racists who wanted to be part of the legal profession. But really, all I can do is sit here and tell you what I think of people like Kyle Bristow. [The Toledo Blade]
Bonus news is starting to look like something we’ll be having all year long. Today, Dewey & LeBoeuf announced via teleconference that the firm will be paying out “spring bonuses,” along the top-of-the-line Cravath scale. These are on top of the regular Dewey bonuses that are being paid on April 1st.
Most of the other firms that are paying spring bonuses are making the payment on April 29th. But since Dewey is joining the fun a little bit late, it won’t be paying out the extra bonuses until July or August. Does that make them summer bonuses?
(And in case Dewey associates are wondering, no, nobody has invited me out to the Hamptons for Labor Day weekend this year.)
Tipsters who were on the bonus call report even more good news about bonuses at Dewey….
Continue reading “Associate Bonus Watch: Good News from Dewey & LeBoeuf”
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