As you will see, it’s not all about the money in life: it’s about health, love, respect, happiness and then at some point about the money, which is the only thing that will survive all of us.
– Emel Dilek, the pulchritudinous plaintiff who is suing her former employer for breach of contract. Dilek was the mistress of the company’s former chief operating officer, who hired her; after he passed away, the company fired her.
(A closer look at this sexy plaintiff and her salacious suit, including some rather amusing deposition excerpts, after the jump.)
We previously reported on Ropes & Gray hoarding Tamiflu for its employees. Reaction was mixed. Some people applauded Ropes looking out for the health of their employees and their families; others feared that Ropes was unwittingly contributing to a drug-resistant strain of the H1N1 virus.
But there are many ways to prevent an outbreak of piggy pestilence at a law firm near you. One of the most, dare I say rational, measures is to make sure that people who are sick aren’t coming into work.
That’s what they are doing at Akerman Senterfitt. The Washington Post reports (gavel bang: ABA Journal) that the firm is allowing people with the sickness to take time off of work, without counting it against their allotted leave time:
When Great Falls resident Carolyn Cuppernull’s 10-year-old daughter came down with swine flu, she didn’t have to take time off work to stay home with her.
Cuppernull is senior marketing manager of the Washington office of the law firm Akerman Senterfitt. Under the group’s former policy, she would have had to use paid leave to stay home if she or a relative got sick. But the firm recently updated its rules to allow employees to stay home with full pay — without using leave time — for H1N1-related absences.
Now that’s a way to make sure your office doesn’t suffer a swine flu outbreak without potentially contributing to the mutation of a global super virus.
Of course, there is a downside.
Some of you have been asking for layoff news. Be careful for what you wish for; you might just get it.
There’s not a lot going on these days in terms of lawyer layoffs. The rate of job loss in the broader economy is slowing, and perhaps the legal economy is getting better too.
But we do have a small amount of layoff news to report. In response to ATL inquiries, a spokesperson for the Florida-based firm of Akerman Senterfitt stated that it laid off five associates (out of more than 150 associates at the firm). We heard that first-year associates were affected; the firm confirmed that two out of the five were first-years.
If there’s layoff news at your firm that we’ve missed, please email us. Thanks.
Akerman Senterfitt is a Florida based firm, so — given the economy in Florida — it’s not all that surprising that the firm has decided to join the salary cutting party.
Multiple tipsters independently confirm that Akerman has instituted an across the board, 10% pay cut on all class years. Here is the internal email about the salary cuts obtained by Above the Law:
We are announcing today a 10% reduction in all associate salaries, effective immediately. This action is being taken in response to market conditions, which I know you are all aware of and which I need not belabor. I want to make it clear that our firm’s financial condition remains very strong, and even clearer as to how much we appreciate all your hard word and effort on behalf of the firm.
As previously announced, the associate bonus hours grid that we have used during the past few years has been eliminated. Instead, we will be carefully reviewing each associate’s performance at the end of this year as we consider paying merit-based discretionary bonuses to those meeting the established minimum qualitative and quantitative requirements.
As the email suggests, everybody is well aware of the terrible situation happening in the legal economy. But is the terrible economy forcing Akerman into this situation, or is the firm simply taking advantage of the difficult economic situation to roll back salaries?
After the jump, tipsters who have seen Akerman’s books claim that this is a salary cut of choice, not necessity.
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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Continue reading “Quote of the Day: A Material Girl in a Material World”
