Buzzing around the internet today is a ridiculous study from the Chicago Sun Times:
A new survey found that about 35 percent of professionals would pick their PDAs over their spouses if they had to choose.
A surprising 87 percent take their personal digital assistants into their bedrooms, and 84 percent check them just before going to bed and as soon as they wake up, according to a work-life survey from Sheraton Hotels & Resorts. Another 85 percent say they look at their PDAs in the middle of the night.
Sounds to me like 35 percent of professionals do not fully understand the ramifications of losing half their stuff.
But what’s worse is that many readers have emailed the story to ATL contending that the numbers for professionals “in the law” would be much, much higher.
Bloggers tend to be so hyper-connected that being away from Internet service for more than two hours can feel like an eternity. Due to the numerous e-mails flying around law firms, and the expectation of rapid response, lawyers tend to have a similar connectivity addiction. The Blackberry is the sweet, sweet drug that feeds the need.
We know how dedicated you all are to your Blackberries. What if you were forced to give it up in order to really go on vacation and get away from the firm?
UK-based Linklaters is doing just that, reports Law People.
Linklaters is reported having decreed, in a fit of concern for work/life balance, that lawyers leave their Blackberrys at home while on holiday (vacation to us).The order is designed to insulate associates, in particular, from the relentless rat race for a few sweet weeks a year, according to management. “Sometimes it’s the small things that count,” one partner averred. While another lawyer confessed that “I feel naked without my Blackberry and there are times when you just have to be reachable.” Whether the firm is successful in enforcing this edict is not yet clear.
We think this will just result in compounding of guilt, as attorneys feel the shame of obsessively checking their Blackberries while “on holiday,” and the need to hide the illicit Blackberry checking from the firm. What do you think about the policy?
We’ve blogged before about the danger of Blackberry addiction. However, the latest research linking cell phone use with brain cancer risk is much scarier than Blackberry orphans.
We first started worrying about cell phone radiation at the ending of the film Thank You For Smoking. It was easy to dismiss a Hollywood quip, but it’s harder to ignore a news report on an award-winning expert on cancer research:
Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded. He says people should avoid using them wherever possible and that governments and the mobile phone industry must take “immediate steps” to reduce exposure to their radiation.
The study, by Dr Vini Khurana, is the most devastating indictment yet published of the health risks.
It draws on growing evidence – exclusively reported in the IoS in October – that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. Cancers take at least a decade to develop, invalidating official safety assurances based on earlier studies which included few, if any, people who had used the phones for that long.
The article goes on to cite a dismissal of the doctor’s work by the “Mobile Operators Association.” Given that the MOA’s members include T-Mobile and Vodafone, we’re not exactly reassured.
Is the fear of brain cancer enough to make us stop using our cellphones and Blackberries? Probably not. We know french fries likely cause cancer, but we can’t give those up either. We are warming to the idea of a phone headset, though. Mobile phones ‘more dangerous than smoking’ [The Independent via Drudge]
Despite the recent turmoil in the economy and the stock market, all appears to be well at Milbank Tweed Hadley McCloy. A tipster provided us with the highlights of chairman Mel Immergut’s “State of the Firm” address from last week:
1. Primary caregiver leave is now 18 weeks paid.
2. Blackberries will get replaced every two years instead of three.
3. “We’re not getting fired.”
It appears that Milbank has effectively made a “no layoffs” promise. It learned that lesson the hard way:
Mel stressed that in the last downturn, they had slowed hiring, and then found themselves at a loss for mid-level associates when things picked up later. So the plan is to continue to hire new people (our summer program is the largest to date at 100+) and retain, but not really hire laterals.
Will other firms make a similar pledge? We’ll see.
Here’s some news that must have had many lawyers tearing out their hair (or what’s left of it). From the AP:
A major service outage afflicted users of the popular, addictive BlackBerry smart phones across the United States and Canada on Monday. Officials with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless said BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. told them customers of all wireless carriers were affected….
Garth Turner, a member of the Canadian Parliament, said during a caucus meeting that the incident — the second widespread disruption in 10 months — was having a big impact.
“Everyone’s in crisis because they’re all picking away at their BlackBerrys and nothing’s happening,” Turner said. “It’s almost like cutting the phone cables or a total collapse in telegraph lines a century ago. It just isolates people in a way that’s quite phenomenal.”
When the Canadian Parliament grinds to a halt, you know the situation is grave.
So how were you affected by the BlackBerry outage? Were you forced to stay in the office due to an inability to receive wireless email? Did a crucial email message fall through the cracks? Did you suffer from delirium tremens, a well-known symptom of CrackBerry withdrawal?
Feel free to vent, in the comments. BlackBerry Service Out in N. America [Associated Press] RIM reports “critical” BlackBerry outage [Reuters]
The firm of Dewey Ballantine was never known for being particularly PC. From a 2004 article by Anthony Lin, for the New York Law Journal:
Nearly one year after lawyers at Dewey Ballantine infuriated members of the Asian-American community by performing a stereotype-laden parody song at their annual dinner, the law firm is again dealing with allegations of racial insensitivity….
On Monday, an employee sent a firmwide e-mail advertising the availability of some puppies for adoption. Douglas Getter, a London-based American who heads Dewey Ballantine’s European mergers and acquisitions practice then sent a firmwide reply.
“Please don’t let these puppies go to a Chinese restaurant!” Getter wrote in his e-mail.
Now Dewey has merged with LeBoeuf Lamb. Happily, it appears their firm cultures are a good match. Check out this email exchange appearing below — and note that Partner X came from the LeBoeuf Lamb side of the marriage….
Recently submitted to Fortune magazine by “Bored in BlackBerryLand”:
I am a recent law-school graduate and, though I’m not yet working at a law firm, I have friends who are. I understand that things in international firms happen 24/7, 365 days a year, and I want to be as supportive of my friends’ careers as I expect them to be of mine.
My question is, to what degree in social settings, on a regular basis, should friends be checking their BlackBerries, and at what point should I say something? What’s rude and what’s truly necessary?
So, readers, whaddya think? Check out what the expert had to say, express yourselves in the comments, and take our poll — after the jump.
* Let’s just steal Drudge’s tagline: “JUDGE: PLAME HAS NO GAME.” [Washington Post; Associated Press]
(But she does bear an uncanny resemblance to Patricia Wettig, who plays Holly Harper on Brothers and Sisters. See photos at right.)
* A lawsuit against Hillary’s pollster, Mark Penn, has been dropped. [AP]
(Watch out: your employer might be reading your Blackberry messages.)
* Lots of lawyers among the D.C. Madam’s clientele. [CNN]
(“[B]ut of course in Washington it sometimes feels like everyone is a lawyer.”)
* Escalation in the battle over executive privilege. [Washington Post]
(Bush Administration to Congress: “You wanna prosecute us for contempt? You and what prosecutor?”)
Hi, Billy Merck here once again, hosting through the end of the week so that Lat can take another brief vacation. No intro post this time; check here or here if you don’t know who we are. But enough of that, let’s get right to it.
The Wall Street Journal has this article about the extremely high demand from employees for and the equally strong reticence on the part of businesses, including of course large law firms, to give access to corporate email services on the soon to be released Apple iPhone. From the article:
While millions of consumers are eagerly anticipating Apple Inc.’s launch of its iPhone next week, Bill Caraher is bracing for the worst.
Mr. Caraher, technology director of von Briesen & Roper, a Milwaukee law firm, says he is being besieged by inquiries from employees wondering whether the office’s email system can be used with the device.
His answer, at least initially, has been no. The main problem is that the iPhone can’t send and receive email through the company’s corporate BlackBerry email servers. He says he is unwilling to look into workarounds, because they might compromise the company’s security. “It’s another hole in the system people can exploit,” he says.
Despite concerns about opening up email systems, Apple is apparently pushing to grab some crackberry market share:
All this may change later this month when Apple plans to unveil the iPhone. According to a person close to Apple, the company is expected to fight for this market, currently dominated by players like BlackBerry’s RIM, Palm Inc. and, increasingly, Nokia Corp. and Motorola. If Apple comes up with an acceptable strategy for integrating with business software systems, many companies might change their tunes.
At least one law firm is open to the idea:
Other businesses are taking a wait-and-see approach. Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP of New York has been getting hit with a range of iPhone inquiries, according to spokeswoman Claudia Freeman. The law firm may try to support the device once it is launched, she says.
So we have three questions we’d like to throw out there to open up discussion:
1) Will law firms open up their email systems to the iPhone?
2) If they do, will the iPhone grab a substantial chunk of the crackberry market?
3) Will whether a firm integrates the iPhone into email services become a factor in the compensation wars?
* “Crackberry” is used in the context of this post to refer to any device similar in function to a Blackberry, and is not limited to the Blackberry.
Are you a Biglaw associate who left the office early last night, relying upon your trusty Blackberry to keep you posted about what was going on back at work? If so, your reliance was misplaced. From the NYT:
Technical problems at Research in Motion cut off wireless e-mail service to millions of users of its BlackBerry hand-held devices in the United States for more than 10 hours overnight.
Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T Wireless, which has the largest BlackBerry customer base in the world, said the service was lost to all carriers in the United States around 8 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday. RIM told AT&T Wireless that the problem that caused the shutdown was resolved by 6 a.m. Eastern time today. However, he said that the enormous backlog of e-mail messages that must now be processed would continue to delay or disrupt service for some users.
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.
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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.
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Buzzing around the internet today is a ridiculous study from the Chicago Sun Times:
