You can attend this event by registering here. CLE will be offered (details to follow), and there will be a special rate for groups. We hope to see you there.
As we’ve previouslymentioned, we are pleased to be hosting the Legal Technology Leadership Summit, in partnership with the Electronic Discovery Institute and the American Society of Digital Forensics and eDiscovery (ASDFED).
Today we’re happy to announce a new sponsor: Applied Discovery. We’ve also added some great speakers to the panels, including David King of Research In Motion (makers of the Blackberry), John Reilly of Lorillard Tobacco, Erika Santiago of ASDFED, and Mark Herrmann of Aon (and author of Inside Straight, our in-house counsel column).
You can learn more about the summit here, and you can register to attend here. We hope to see you there.
Last month, we announced our exciting Legal Technology Leadership Summit, which we’re hosting in partnership with the Electronic Discovery Institute and the American Society of Digital Forensics and eDiscovery (ASDFED).
We are pleased to announce TCDI and Planet Data as VIP Ambassadors of the event. We also continue to add great speakers to the panels, including Nishan DeSilva of Microsoft, Ronke Ekwensi of Pfizer, Paul Meyer of Towers Watson, and Demetrius Rush of Zurich N.A.
Space is limited, so please sign up now to attend.
Above the Law is partnering with the Electronic Discovery Institute to host a Legal Technology Leadership Summit from September 6 to September 8, 2011. We’ll be bringing together lawyers and technology professionals and offering a special track dealing with digital forensics, managed by the American Society of Digital Forensics and eDiscovery. And since this is ATL, we’re rolling to the Ritz-Carlton on Amelia Island, Florida.
If your law firm or organization is interested in attending, we’d love to see you. Click here to sign up now.
Patrick Oot, General Counsel and Co-Founder of the Electronic Discovery Institute (“EDI”), described the summit as an opportunity “to provide a setting where thought leaders from large organizations and corporate legal departments can collaborate on the current state of the law pertaining to various uses of digital information.”
Speaking for Above the Law, David Lat noted that legal technology directly impacts the day-to-day life of many of Above the Law’s readers. The summit will bring together counsel from many major corporations and leaders in providing cost-effective technological solutions.
Clients expect their lawyers to be using technology to keep costs down, lawyers expect technology to be intuitive to a bunch of people with liberal arts degrees, and Above the Law expects that putting all these people together will be good for the whole industry. Tech gurus, thought leaders, clients, David Lat and Elie Mystal, and a Florida resort. What could possibly go wrong?
Click after the jump for the full press release from EDI…
After we announced our special event for law students, We Know What You Should Do This Summer, we heard from a number of our readers from outside New York. These law students, from D.C. and South Carolina and elsewhere, expressed apoplectic anger regret that they wouldn’t be able to attend our NYC event and benefit from the wisdom of our great panelists.
So we’ve decided to make a change. As a web publishing company, we’ve decided to take our event to the web. We’re turning this panel discussion into a webcast — or, more precisely, a series of webcasts — which we will post on Above the Law, accessible for free to all of our readers.
Here’s where we need your help. These webcasts will be providing career advice, with a focus on summer opportunities. To make the webcasts interactive with our readership, we’d like to address the issues that are most relevant to you, our readers. So if you have career questions or requests for advice that you’d like our experts to tackle, please submit them to us by email (subject line: “Event Question”). We will review them and pose selected queries to the panel.
Thanks to the readers who took the time to reach out to us about this; thanks to our sponsor, the Practical Law Company (read more about PLC here); and thanks in advance for your questions to the panel. We look forward to reading them, and to hearing what our panelists have to say.
(And thanks to everyone who originally registered for the in-person event; we’ll be issuing you refunds shortly.)
As regular readers know, this is usually the time of year I go to Vegas, blow my bonus, and come back to work a week later angrier than ever.
Well, this year, it’s going to be different. Oh, don’t worry, when I return to Above the Law’s pages on March 14th, I’m sure I’ll be all kinds of pissed off. It just won’t be because a security guard prevented me from committing suicide by MGM lion enclosure.
No, for my vacation — which begins now and ends a week from this coming Monday, in case you’re wondering — I am going to start the process of quitting smoking….
Ed. note: This is the first installment of Size Matters, one of Above the Law’s new columns for small-firm lawyers.
Who am I? I graduated from a top law school in Chicago. (Okay, there’s only two.) From there, I went to work for Biglaw for several years. Or, maybe it was only a year and a half. I am pretty sure that time passes more slowly in Biglaw than in the rest of the world.
Then, I took the path well traveled and went to a small law firm to “get hands on experience,” “more client contact,” and “mentoring.” After almost three years — in real time — at my small firm, I have come to appreciate the unique aspects of practicing law at a small firm and these insights I hope to share with you.
While I do not want to give away the milk for free, I will give you a snapshot of what is to come. Small law firms have actual holiday parties. The holiday parties at my Biglaw firm took place in the lobby which was shared with other tenants when the other employees in the 40+ floor office building were attempting to exit. They served cheap wine and had a cheese tray and hired a high school band called “The Cats” to jam out for the partygoers.
At my current firm, where all employees could fit comfortably in a single floor of the 15-floor office of my former firm, they really throw a party….
I’ve been working in small law firms my whole career — nearly 17 years. I’d like to tell you that I chose this path for carefully considered and noble reasons, but I can’t. In truth, I ended up on the small-firm path for one simple reason:
A blonde.
Let me explain.
Now it’s not what you think. I didn’t turn my back on a BigLaw career to pursue a flaxen-haired beauty. That would almost be romantic, and this is a serious law blog. Ish. No, the story is a bit more prosaic.
I entered Boston College Law School in the fall of 1991. At the time, I had a serious girlfriend (the aforementioned blonde) who was not going to law school. And that became a problem. You see, like most 1Ls, I got caught up in everything that was new about law school: new friends, new challenges, new vocabulary (I mean really: how many jokes should there be with “res ipsa loquitur” in the punchline?). I didn’t realize it at the time, but I paid too much attention to my new law-school world, and not enough attention to my girlfriend.
As we recently mentioned, Above the Law is dramatically increasing its coverage of small law firms. Clients and lawyers are moving in the direction of smaller firms, and ATL is following suit.
In response to our posting for a new small-firm columnist, we received dozens of superb applications (and we thank everyone who applied for their interest). The pool of talent was so strong that we decided to take on not one but two new columnists — doubling our dedicated small-firm coverage, with posts on at least four out of five weekdays (in addition to our existing coverage of small law firms).
Let’s meet our new writers. One of them should be familiar to many of you, and one of them will remain shrouded in secrecy….
Above the Law’s coverage of small law firms is about to ramp up. We will soon be announcing our two new writers on the small firm beat.
(If you responded to our open call for new columnists, we thank you for your interest. We received a slew of excellent applications, which made the selection process very difficult.)
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?
The traditional job application and interview process can be impersonal, and applicants often struggle to present themselves as more than just the sum of their GPAs, alma maters, and previous work history. ATL has partnered with ViewYou to help job seekers overcome this challenge. ViewYou NOW Profiles offer a unique way for job seekers to make a personal, memorable connection with prospective employers: introduction videos. These videos allow job candidates to display their personalities, interpersonal skills, and professional interests, creating an eDossier to brand themselves to potential employers all over the world. Check it out today!
Preparations continue for the Legal Technology Leadership Summit, presented by Above the Law in partnership with the Electronic Discovery Institute (EDI) and the American Society of Digital Forensics and eDiscovery (ASDFED). We are pleased to announce three new sponsors:
