There are plenty of attorneys in the major city offices who are not putting in enough hours and would love to be doing doc review versus the threat of being asked to look for another job. Wake up to what is happening out there in the real world!
— Ann Israel, in her advice column on NYLawyer.com (subscription), to a Yale Law School graduate and current federal law clerk seeking advice on how to get out of document review when she goes to a law firm after her clerkship (gavel bang: ABA Journal).
Back in this post, an ATL reader confessed to playing a little trick on Ann Israel, the legal recruiter who writes NYLawyer.com’s popular Advice for the Lawlorn column. He wrote:
Love ATL’s Advice for the Lawlame column. My friends and I have been reading NYLawyer.com’s Advice for the Lawlorn with a sort of amused contempt for a year.
After a while, we grew tired of the formulaic cluelessness of the posts and the answers, so we challeged each other to get our fake submissions answered. I won, with this entry….
Well, it appears that Ann Israel got wind of this prank. And she’s none too pleased about it.
Her fit of pique, after the jump.
Continue reading “Advice for the Lawlame: Hell Hath No Fury Like An Advice Columnist Mocked”
This actually isn’t a new installment of our Advice for the Lawlame column (although one is in the works). Rather, it’s a funny email we received from a reader who shares our fascination with NYLawyer.com’s Advice for the Lawlorn column. Here it is:
Love the “Advice for the Lawlame” column. My friends and I have been reading “Advice for the Lawlorn” with a sort of amused contempt for a year. After a while, we grew tired of the formulaic cluelessness of the posts and the answers, so we challeged each other to get our fake submissions answered.
I won, with the below entry. Note how spectacularly lame the “author” of the submission was — not only did he spend his law school career neglecting academics for drinks and rugby, but his team wasn’t any good! Ann was almost on to me, but the voices of her better and more credulous angels won out.
I’ll stay anon because I’m a partner at a big NY firm. Not to worry. No client was billed while I was teasing Ann.
Our reader’s “winning” submission — and Ann Israel’s response — after the jump.
Continue reading “Advice for the Lawlame: An Amusing Anecdote”
One of our favorite features over at NYLawyer.com are the advice columns. There’s Advice for the Lawlorn, a column by Ann Israel, a legal recruiter based in New York. And there’s Crossroads, in which job consultant Linda Laufer offers insights on career direction and job transition.
In a typical column, some clueless correspondent writes in to Ann Israel, says that he has a 2.3 GPA from a fourth-tier law school, and asks if he can land a job at Davis Polk. Sensibly enough, Ann tells him he has a better chance of being in a three-way with Petra Nemcova and Madeleine Albright. She then suggests that he hire a well-regarded headhunter — someone like herself, say — to help him get a paralegal position at a personal-injury firm somewhere on Long Island.
Ann’s advice is often sound, especially when it relates to her area of expertise: how to land a Biglaw job. But sometimes she’s off the mark — and sometimes she seems more interested in shilling for legal recruiters than offering actual insight.
So we’ve decided to offer our own version of an advice column here at Above the Law. We’ll take questions submitted to “Advice for the Lawlorn” or “Crossroads,” then offer our own unique take on them.
Here’s this week’s request for advice:
Dear Ann:
While on an interview with a BigLaw firm, the question came up about whether I was an attorney and passed the California Bar in July. The truth is that I passed in February; but I just agreed that I passed in July. The interview went really well otherwise and I expect an offer any day. I had no intention to not tell the truth – I just got caught up in the heat of the moment. What do I do if I am hired? I really need this job!
Our reponse to this legal Pinocchio, after the jump.
Continue reading “Advice for the Lawlame: Said I Loved You But I Lied”
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.
Also, we have the two below in-house openings:
Keep reading »
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
Keep reading »
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