Hands off the dancers, sir.
Our latest Biglaw blind item concerns the sighting of a partner at a strip club.
Right now you’re probably thinking: yawn. A law firm partner at a strip club? As they say, it happens every day (or night — and often gets billed to “business development”).
But there are a few more details that make this item noteworthy….
Continue reading “Biglaw Blind Item: A Partner Walks Into a Strip Club….”
Tomorrow, associates at Goodwin Procter will receive individualized news of their bonuses. You may recall that last month, when ATL’s new director of research, Brian Dalton, compiled a list of Biglaw’s ten most generous firms — i.e., the ten firms that pay the best bonuses, when measured against their profits per partner — Goodwin did good, winning fourth place. (The firm fares well in rankings; last month, it made Crain’s list of best places to work in New York.)
Will this year’s bonuses preserve Goodwin’s good standing? Let’s find out. Although the individual amounts are being communicated tomorrow, the firm has outlined its overall approach in a memo….
Continue reading “Associate Bonus Watch: Goodwin Procter Makes Good”
The other day, I was at dinner with some Biglaw friends. While I prefer to associate only with my small-firm kin, I needed someone to pick up the check. And, I thought I could do some missionary work and convert my friends in to small-firm lawyers (so I could mine them for story ideas, obviously).
Something unexpected happened during dinner. One of my friends asked me why I believe small-firm life is so different from Biglaw. I went through my standard list of reasons: quality of life, money, autonomy, mentoring, etc. I even cited Tom Wallerstein’s Top Ten.
That was where things took an unexpected turn: my friend did not buy it. Indeed, by the end of our dinner he had me questioning my beliefs. Does size matter, I thought? Needless to say, as a woman who has devoted her “career” to writing about small-firm life, this experience shook me to my core.
Let’s see if you can help me make sense of that night….
We’re still catching up on bonus news that broke over the holidays. Remember, if we missed your firm, please let us know at tips@abovethelaw.com.
Just after Christmas, Dechert announced its 2011 end-of-year bonuses. I guess you’d call it a “match” of the Cleary Gottlieb scale. Dechert is paying a pro-rated bonus to first-year associates and has a top payment of $42,500 for very senior associates.
But Dechert isn’t a lockstep firm. You have to meet a requirement in order to get the bonus. That requirement looks very much like an hours requirement, but Dechert doesn’t want you (or its clients) to think that they have an hours requirement — so they have some kind of nebulous performance requirement that can most easily be defined with reference to hours.
Oh, and they’ll dock you if you didn’t input your time, on time, throughout the year….
Tom Wallerstein
When I started my firm, several mentors gave me the same advice: Don’t work for free. It’s easy to see the problem with working for free. Giving away what you’re trying to sell isn’t exactly in the business plan. Unfortunately, this sage advice can only really be learned the hard way, through experience.
Working for free can arise in many different ways. The most obvious example is a client who wants you to represent him but can only promise to pay you later.
Even if your gut tells you that taking on that client is a bad idea, this can be surprisingly tempting to a new firm or solo practice. For starters, there is such a thrill with getting your first client, or your first “real” client, or your first big client, or your first whatever client, that the excitement can cloud your better judgment. You will be tempted to overlook the red flags that you will not be paid for your work….
Continue reading “From Biglaw to Boutique: Working for Free”
Tom Wallerstein
Recently, someone remarked to me that the week after Christmas is a “dead week.” He meant that many people take the week off, many companies are short staffed, and business generally is light.
When I was in Biglaw, I always worked the week after Christmas. Even though most partners wouldn’t be around, I figured that left it up to me to make sure my cases were being handled properly. With hindsight, I know that I probably wasn’t quite as essential as I thought, but that was my attitude at the time.
Now that I am a partner in my own firm, you might think that I can finally relax and let my associates mind the store. Negative. First, I care about my associates’ quality of (work) life. Having spent years in Biglaw, I am committed to trying to lessen at least some of the unpleasantness that often entails. So I want my employees to be able to take time off, or at least work a lighter schedule, during a week that is traditionally light. Second, running my own firm just raises the stakes. Now I really do have ultimate responsibility for all my cases, so I feel even more pressure to work harder and better than ever before.
So much for a dead week. Still, the comment got me thinking about what it means to be “swamped” with work versus having a “dead week,” and how those concepts differ when applied to Biglaw versus a running a solo or small firm practice….
Continue reading “From Biglaw to Boutique: It’s a Dead Week”
Edward Hayes (on The Charlie Rose Show)
What draws people to the practice of law? Some do it for the paycheck, some do it for the prestige, and some do it for the excitement and fun of it all.
Veteran New York litigator Edward Hayes belongs firmly in the final camp. Although he has amassed fame and fortune over almost four decades of practicing law, his legal career reflects a quest for adventure.
And what adventures Hayes has had. After graduating from the University of Virginia and Columbia Law School, he joined the Bronx District Attorney’s office, where he prosecuted homicides (which there was no shortage of in the Bronx in the 1970s). He then launched his own practice, handling civil and criminal matters for such clients as the estate of Andy Warhol, notorious “Mafia cop” Stephen Caracappa, acclaimed architect Daniel Libeskind, actor Robert De Niro, celebrity editrices Anna Wintour and Tina Brown, billionaire publisher Si Newhouse, and then-paramours Sean Combs and Jennifer Lopez (after they were arrested together back in 1999).
Eddie Hayes has even found his way into literature. He served as the basis for Tommy Killian, Sherman McCoy’s defense lawyer in Tom Wolfe’s great novel, Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe dedicated the book to Hayes, a close friend of his for many years.
This past summer, I enjoyed the privilege of spending a day with Ed Hayes. We met up at Penn Station and took the train out to his vacation home in Bellport, Long Island, where we enjoyed a leisurely lunch, dining outdoors and overlooking the water. (There are Lawyerly Lairs-style photos of his house, after the jump.)
During our time together, Hayes reminisced about his extraordinary life in the law, offered career advice for fellow lawyers, and showed me how to properly prepare a caprese salad….
Continue reading “An Afternoon With Ed Hayes, Celebrated Litigator and Memoirist”
It seems that founding partner John Quinn isn’t the only one at Quinn Emanuel with a surplus of Benjamins right about now. On Friday, the litigation powerhouse announced its 2011 year-end bonus scale — and, for the most part, it’s more generous than the benchmark Cravath bonus scale.
We say “for the most part” because, for associates billing under 2100 hours, the scale is below Cravath — but just slightly. And it’s our understanding that not many QE associates bill less than 2100 hours anyway.
Let’s take a look at the details….
Continue reading “Associate Bonus Watch: Quinn Emanuel Rewards High Billers”
Years ago, I handled a pro bono case for a client unable to afford legal services. (I actually handled a fair number of pro bono cases, but I’m choosing to describe just one here.) The client was a very nice guy, and he desperately needed legal services. But he had no idea how to use a lawyer cost-effectively and, because he wasn’t paying for my services, he had no incentive to restrain himself. The guy called incessantly, asked endless questions, and was always trying to schedule meetings with me. I mentioned the situation to one of my senior colleagues, and the colleague’s reaction was immediate: “What that client needs is a bill.”
During the decades when I served as outside counsel representing clients, I noticed that some of my clients permitted me to do their work efficiently and others affirmatively obstructed that effort. Now that I’m an in-house lawyer, I’m thinking about the other side of that coin: What should I, in my role as client, do to permit outside counsel to represent me efficiently?
Continue reading “Inside Straight: Inflating Your Own Outside Legal Spend”
Here’s a puzzle for you. What decade am I discussing in the following paragraphs?
I’m doing something a little different here. The entire text of this column appears before the jump. I’ve hidden only the citations after the jump. Ponder while you read these paragraphs when the source materials supporting these words were written:
The excessive cost of legal services is not a function of the economy that will abate as the recession finally fades. In the words of one recent report, “Don’t fool yourselves that when the recession passes things will return to normal.” That report quoted the general counsel of a major financial institution as saying, “The way we are now is the way it is now, not a temporary situation . . . . [I]n the [decade omitted] we’re going to see straight hourly billing die.”
Surveys confirm the concerns about the high cost of legal services. For example, in a [year omitted] general counsel survey conducted by [the firm you know as PriceWaterhouseCoopers], a majority of the 350 respondents agreed that “legal fees have gotten out of control and are crippling businesses,” and pressure to reduce costs was a “major theme” of the survey responses. Surveys of corporate law departments conducted by Endispute, Inc. in [two years omitted] reveal that a third of the respondents faced actual cuts in their legal budgets and that, as the size of the legal departments increased, so too did the pressure to reduce legal costs. A [year omitted] Louis Harris survey of executives and legal officers of Fortune 500 service corporations reveals cost containment as a top priority for law departments, and a survey of major corporate clients in the United Kingdom demonstrates that this is now a worldwide issue.
The pressure to move away from standard billing, based on the billable hour, is likely to increase. Indeed, [name omitted], the recently appointed general counsel of [company name omitted], is leading an intense campaign to adopt alternative billing mechanisms. Her efforts have been broadly publicized and resulted in a highly visible panel at the [year omitted] ABA meeting.
In what years did these things occur? What decade are we discussing? And who the heck was the recently appointed general counsel of what company? Those citations and more after the jump….
Continue reading “Inside Straight: Things Will Not Return To Normal After The Recession!”
Are your in-house working hours recently rivaling the billable hours you thought you had permanently discarded? Is your workload getting way too heavy — i.e., it’s really getting difficult to watch Glee on a timely basis? Do you find yourself working on pretty much the same form of contract over and over and over and over and over and over and over, ad infinitum?
It may be time to take a break and evaluate the problem of Low-Value Work.
What’s Low-Value Work? It’s work that has three main characteristics….
Continue reading “Moonlighting: Low-Value Work (or, How to Catch Up on Glee)”
At large law firms around the country, associates and counsel are eagerly awaiting their bonuses. But partners and chief financial officers have their minds on other things: namely, collections. The fourth quarter is when firms step up their efforts at shaking down clients for cash.
As we all know from the law-and-economics reasoning that was taught to us in law school, people — yes, this includes lawyers — respond to incentives. At one leading law firm, bonus anxiety is being shrewdly harnessed in service of collections efforts.
CHECK YOU TIME SHEETS….
Continue reading “You Want Your Bonus? We Want Your Time Sheets.”
With Thanksgiving just a week away, turkey may already be on your mind. But hopefully so are family, friends, and a time to reflect on what you are thankful for this year. If you’re having trouble with that last part, the Career Center has put together a list of the top 4 reasons Biglaw associates can be thankful for their jobs this holiday season.
1. Next up, bonus season. Most of you have actually been feeling quite optimistic that bonuses will be bigger than last year’s combined year-end bonus plus spring bonus. Of course, we’ll have to wait until Cravath makes the first move to see whether there’s any truth to those predictions, but at least you know there will be bonuses to be had.
So what else made the list?
Continue reading “Career Center: Top 4 Reasons to Be Thankful for Your Biglaw Job This Thanksgiving”
Reema N. Bajaj
Next week, Reema Bajaj, the comely Illinois attorney who has been accused of prostitution, will celebrate her 26th birthday. (You can look up her date of birth on the DeKalb County criminal docket.)
But how happy will that birthday be? There’s a cloud looming over this lovely lawyer….
Last week, we asked you to report on how many hours you were on track to bill in 2011. Well, the results are in, and damn, people out there in Biglaw have been working like dogs.
I hope there is a big bonus payoff for all the hours people have been billing.
I also hope that people are still finding time to live their life. One commenter disturbingly said, “I’m currently at 2650 for the year. I was hoping to get to 3000 by year-end, although it will be a stretch.”
I think that this commenter is bragging that he’s on pace to kill himself. But all around Biglaw, people are putting in time…
Continue reading “The Hours Results: Y’All Been Working Really Hard”
We’re doing this a little bit late this year. We’re into the fourth quarter and we haven’t yet asked you guys: how many hours are you on track to bill this year?
It’s an important question.
Remember firm leadership has already started trying to manage expectations about 2011 bonuses.
And between the natural inclination to keep as much money as possible and prudent concerns over a double-dip recession, many firms will want to hold the line on associate bonuses.
But that’s going to be harder to do if people have been busting their tails…
Continue reading “The Hours Open Thread: How Are Your 2011 Billables?”
We enjoy giving our readers the occasional peek behind the Biglaw curtain. Last month, for example, we shared with you the internal interview manual that Sullivan & Cromwell provides to its attorneys who conduct on-campus interviews at law schools.
Today, in a similar spirit, we take an inside look at the annual review process for attorneys at Skadden Arps. We’re into the fourth quarter of 2011, so these reviews are not far away.
In this special report, we’ll provide general observations on the Skadden review process, highlight noteworthy comments from leaked attorney evaluations, and show you a few reviews in their entirety (redacted to remove lawyer and client names). This information should interest Biglaw associates who want to know what partners look for junior lawyers, and it should also appeal to partners at other firms who want ideas on how to structure annual reviews.
If you’re interested in learning more about performance reviews at one of the world’s biggest and best law firms, please keep reading….
Continue reading “An Inside Look at the Skadden Annual Review Process”
Occasionally it’s fun to see what non-lawyers think about the profession. Yes, we know they “hate” lawyers because, well, most people don’t like getting screwed out of alimony or dealing with insurance companies. But it can be interesting to remember just how little non-lawyers understand about the legal profession.
They don’t even really understand why lawyers get paid.
The other day, there was a good question on Quora: “Why are lawyers so expensive even with the excess supply of lawyers?”
You kind of love clients who bitch about the high price of lawyers, yet wouldn’t take a phone call from one of the thousands of unemployed or underemployed lawyers who are begging for work.
But, sure, some lawyers are still highly priced — maybe even overpriced — despite an excess supply of lawyers in general.
Let’s see if any of the lawyers here can actually give some helpful answers to this question….
Continue reading “Why Are Lawyers So Expensive? Well, Are They Really?”
Admit it: Your corporation has a lot of legal flotsam and jetsam.
This is probably true no matter what business you’re in. On the corporate side, you have routine business transactions, and you may well handle those in-house. On the litigation side, you have a bunch of routine cases that pose little risk to the company but represent a recurring, and predictable, expense.
I propose that you package up that flotsam and jetsam and sell it off.
What am I thinking?
Continue reading “Inside Straight: Packaging Flotsam and Jetsam”
Today’s Career Center Tips Series, focused on the billable hour, is brought to you by Lateral Link’s Frank Kimball, an expert recruiter and former hiring partner.
Students and new associates are concerned about hours. So are firms. You will hear anecdotes and twice-told tales about monstrous hours. You will hear that Smith & Jones is a sweatshop, but that Arnold and Baker is a laid-back place. Most lawyers are hardworking by nature, and will work hard no matter where they practice. You will work many hours beyond client hours to manage the practice, be trained and train others, stay current in your field and market, and manage the firm.
The differences among firms’ expectations have never been as great as law students believe (and hope). In the wake of the 2000 and 2007 compensation avalanches, expectations on billable hours changed forever….
Continue reading “Career Center: Hours – The Real (And Tough) Story”
Ed. note: This post is authored by Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney of Kinney Recruiting, sponsor of the Asia Chronicles. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates and partners in Asia than any other firm in the past five years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com
Happy Chinese New Year! We were extremely busy the past few months, including most of our US based team working from our Hong Kong offices during November and December.
As a follow up from our recent post, which listed our 62 US associate and counsel placements in Asia last year (vast majority in HK / China), please note that thus far in January ’12, we have already made seven US associate and counsel placements in Asia. This is an especially impressive number, considering the biglaw lateral hiring market in Asia is down right now (see state of the market brief overview below). These new placements are of new hires in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai, who were interviewing with their new firm for a month or more and they are spread out among different practice areas, including project finance, litigation, fund formation, M&A and cap markets. We are close on four additional new associate placements, in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai, that we expect to close soon. We do not discuss partner placements in these articles, but the pace of partner recruitment in Asia (a large part of our business) has continued.
Hedge Fund In-House Openings in Hong Kong
We are seeing a small run of new in-house openings in Hong Kong at hedge funds. We are currently filling three different in-house positions at three different hedge funds in Hong Kong, two of these searches we are handling on an exclusive basis. All three will most likely be filled by a US associate, with about 4 to 6 years of experience. Mandarin not required. Candidates from NYC and London will be considered, but at one of these funds the new hire will likely come from Hong Kong / China or Singapore (with HK being the strong preference).
Please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com if you are interested in these hedge fund openings. As you probably would expect, the competition for these spots will be fierce and the funds will be very selective when choosing which candidates to interview.
In 2009, a small group of Harvard Law School students noticed an absurd monopoly in the bar prep space, held by an unchallenged leader with a non-evolving product. In response, these students teamed up with Harvard Law alumni to launch BarMax on January 14, 2010.
The mission: democratize bar prep by embracing new technologies to provide the very best bar exam review courses at a fraction of the cost normally associated with these courses.
Since then, with the encouragement of thousands of students and an unwavering commitment to their success, BarMax has established itself as a comprehensive alternative to the stagnant, over-priced status quo.
As we continue to expand, we do not want to lose sight of the basic premises that led us to create BarMax in the first place. If you are a law student who believes that there is something fundamentally wrong with being forced to take out yet another loan to pay for a $4,000 bar exam prep course, you are not alone.
