Sensible shoes are for liberal chicks. Say hello to fabulous Federalist footwear!

As you may have noticed, from our two posts late on Monday night and one from Tuesday morning, we’re engaging in some after-the-fact blogging of last week’s Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention.

As in past years, the social highlight of the conference was the Thursday night banquet (black tie optional; and many availed themselves of the option, ‘cause that’s how conservatives roll). The speaker at the dinner was none other than Justice Samuel A. Alito, who delivered an insightful and hilarious speech that was a delight to listen to. Just as one might say of, say, a newscast by Jon Stewart, much of the entertainment value was in the delivery — Justice Alito is so dry and deadpan, and yet his remarks make you bust out laughing.

Interestingly enough, we haven’t come across many news accounts of Justice Alito’s speech. There was also no video recording allowed at the address. So we feel we can add some value with this write-up, despite its belated nature.

There may have been some confusion over the ground rules governing reporting about the speech. From the BLT:

Justice Samuel Alito Jr. spoke to the Federalist Society [last Thursday] night, but photos of him doing so are hard to come by. That’s because photographers other than the Federalist Society’s own were barred from the event. Keith Appell, a spokesman for the Federalist Society, said cameras were prohibited by Alito’s security detail….

Kathy Arberg, the court spokeswoman, said “The justice’s policy was that the event was open to still cameras and pencil press,” and that the Federalist Society was informed of that policy before the event.

Well, photos from the event aren’t hard to come by on Above the Law. Nobody told us that we couldn’t take photographs — so we did. And, as members of the “pencil press,” we jotted down notes in our reporter’s notebook. (We left the laptop at the hotel that night.)

Check out a slideshow of our pictures, along with a discussion of Justice Alito’s highly engaging and entertaining address, after the jump.

On Sunday, the Boston Globe released its list of the Top 100 Place to Work in Massachusetts. Goodwin Procter placed #74. That’s interesting because last Thursday Goodwin laid off 55 people.

Nice timing on the Globe report. In a companion article titled “They look past the paycheck” the Globe highlights Goodwin:

Under the traditional apprenticeship system at law firms, new lawyers learn from partners who handpick associates they want for particular cases. …

A new approach matches the associate’s professional development goals with a partner’s needs, leaving associates less at the whim of partners and partners more assured of a good fit. Goodwin Procter has a site online where associates enter their availability and their interests, but it takes more than a grand schedule to make the program work. Staffing managers who are lawyers themselves make the match.

Wrong day for that story. Wrong day.

Goodwin wasn’t the only law firm on the list. Other firms after the jump.

Congratulations to WilmerHale and two of its associates, Ross Firsenbaum and Shauna Friedman. They just scored a big-time victory in a pro bono case.

It’s a story straight out of the movies. WilmerHale’s client, Dewey Bozella, a 50-year-old African-American man, was released from custody earlier this week — after serving 26 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. From the New York Times:

Mr. Bozella would still be in prison except for a few lucky breaks. The first came in 2007, when he contacted the Innocence Project, a legal group that focuses on wrongful convictions. The group, after determining all the physical evidence had already been destroyed, asked the high-powered law firm of WilmerHale to handle the case on a pro bono basis.

Ross E. Firsenbaum, a senior associate, said the firm’s lawyers had spent 2,500 hours — worth $950,000 at customary rates — on the case, the kind of representation almost never available to indigent convicts.

Will Bozella file a wrongful imprisonment lawsuit — perhaps represented by Wilmer, on a contingency basis? It could yield up a nice chunk of change (to make up for the nearly $1 million in non-billable work). Given all the firm has done for him, Bozella certainly owes WH a debt of gratitude.

Anyway, it’s a remarkable case. Read more about the victory in the NYT and Am Law Daily.

Such success is not entirely surprising. Although WilmerHale has one of the country’s top appellate practices, WH lawyers know their way around the trial court too. As noted in the firm’s ATL Career Center profile,”[t]he firm is known for its litigation expertise, as well as its regulatory practice and Beltway connections.”

Meanwhile, in other firm news, we got our hands on the WilmerHale warning memo that we mentioned earlier this month. Truth be told, it’s a little disappointing — not nearly as scary as we were led to believe.

We were expecting associates to be threatened with 26 years of imprisonment (or doc review) for leaking firm information to ATL. Or maybe waterboarding by Bill and Bill. But the actual memo is not unreasonable and fairly tame, guilt-tripping rather than menacing.

Check it out, along with some cautionary words for law firms thinking of clamping down on leakers, after the jump.

Although we focus on Biglaw in these pages, our recent open threads on small (or at least smaller) law firms, centered around different areas of practice, have been very well-received. So we’ll continue the series. To look at the past threads, click here and scroll down; to suggest a topic to us, please email us (subject line: “Small Law suggestion”).

Today we turn our attention to APPELLATE LAW. This field is near and dear to our heart, since we clerked for a federal appellate judge and focused on appeals during our time in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. If you enjoy research, writing and arguing more than document review and discovery hell, and if you are as lazy as we are more of a “law” person than a “facts” person, then appellate work may be for you.

Unfortunately, there aren’t that many appellate boutiques out there. It’s not easy to build a practice around 100 percent appeals work. Many top appellate practitioners can be found in the Washington offices of large firms, where they can be roped into law-heavy work in the trial courts (e.g., summary judgment motions). Biglaw shops with leading appellate and Supreme Court practices include Gibson Dunn, Mayer Brown, Jones Day, Sidley Austin, and WilmerHale. Check out the Chambers and Partners list of top appellate shops for additional examples.

UPDATE: One appellate practitioner pointed out to us that you can do appellate work for a large firm outside D.C. as well (especially in this age of telecommuting). For example, Jones Day and Mayer Brown have sizable presences in New York (and other cities).

There are opportunities to do appellate work outside the big firm environment too. Read more, after the jump.

Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks, which has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.

We took the week off last week, but you didn’t miss much. In fact, we had another run of almost two weeks without a layoff, before WilmerHale laid off 57 staff. But we’ll get back to the layoffs after our regular sojourn through the broader American economy.

If you’re a regular reader of this column, this should sound familiar: initial jobless claims were worse than expected. 49 states and territories reported increased unemployment, with four seeing improvement. To the extent you believe this is a recovery (and even if you do, whether you believe this is sustainable is another question entirely), it appears to be jobless at best, and job-losing more likely.

Companies are salvaging net income numbers almost entirely on the expense side, and the stimulus has done nothing to create job and nothing demonstrable to save jobs. Just ask the Republicans, who point out that President Obama claimed his stimulus would create 3.5 million jobs, when the actual result has been a loss of 2.7 million - a 6.2 million-job deficit.

Part of the frustration, of course, is the long-running treatment of disillusioned jobseekers and people whose benefits have run out as not being counted as unemployed. When minor improvements in unemployment numbers were being hyped a few months ago, it now appears that was almost entirely the result of people falling off the rolls, not actually finding gainful employment. Maddeningly, that means 7,000 people a day are no longer counted as unemployed.

As usual, law firms continue to muddle through. Their efforts, after the jump.

We don’t have all of the details, but multiple sources report that WilmerHale is laying off 57 staffers today (secretaries and paralegals). We understand that the staff is being informed right now.

We don’t have information about what (if any) severance package is being offered to the departed staff. Our sources report that the layoffs will affect staff in Boston, D.C., and New York offices.

Spokespeople for WilmerHale did not respond to an immediate request comment. But we hope to have more information as people are informed of their job situation.

Good luck, WilmerHale friends.

UPDATE More from our tipsters, and a statement from the firm, after the jump.

As tends to be the case every year, August and September were fabulously prestigious months here on the Legal Eagle Wedding Watch. Three SCOTUS clerks were featured in this space during that period (two in the same announcement!), as well as a minor AutoAdmit celebrity, an astrophysicist, and Biglaw names like Cravath, Mayer, Jenner, and Covington.

Today, we’re asking readers to sort through all this excellence and choose the two most impressive couples of the bunch to advance to the Couple of the Year round.

After the jump, you’ll find recaps of our write-ups on each set of newlyweds, as well as two reader polls, one for each month. Voting ends on Thursday at midnight; we’ll announce the winners on Friday.

* Here’s all you need to know about this link: Elizabeth Wurtzel, curtains, no rug, “vaginal hegemony.” [Jezebel]

* Never take sex photos you don’t want everybody to see after you break up with the guy. [True/Slant]

* On-campus interviewers are very interested in your answers to “behavioral questions.” I guess they are trying to figure out if you are a drone or a droid. [Young Lawyers Blog]

* Can law firms use the grapevine to their advantage? [Law and More]

* It appears that Jobless Lawyer (we linked there yesterday) is a former associate at Latham & Watkins. Maybe he’ll be an inspiration to all of the former Latham associates? [Legal Blog Watch]

* Alfred Nobel’s grudge against lawyers. [Legally Drawn]

* Lat is doing a call-in program tomorrow at 2 p.m., moderated by Edward Adams of the ABA Journal, entitled “Why Openness & Transparency at Law Firms Matters.” [Legal Rebels / ABA Journal]

As Justice Brandeis famously observed, “[s]unlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” A certain amount of transparency keeps organizations honest and ethical. Alas, it seems that some law firms, like vampires, have a lower tolerance for sunlight than others.

In late August, we ran an offer rate open thread. There were over 550 comments, and some of the ones about WilmerHale were a little disturbing. They came to our attention when an individual weighing offers from WilmerHale and other top law firms sent us this message:

Could you follow up on all of the negative comments re: WilmerHale in your Summer Offer Rate Open Thread? I’m considering an offer from this firm, and there seem to be a ton of disgruntled associates there. The whole thing seems to center around an internal memo warning associates not to send tips to ATL. This deserves some investigation. Thanks for running an excellent blog.

So we took a closer look at the WH comments on the thread. Like this one:

The firm has made it abundantly clear that no one should provide tips to ATL or post comments. The clear message is that if caught, you’ll be fired. I, however, have already been “transitioned out”, so I have nothing to worry about other than feeding my family.

And this one:

Didn’t you just love the scathing internal memo meant to scare the living &*^$ out of those who were even thinking about tipping ATL? Apparently it worked, because it didn’t end up here (though it should have). I guess the few that were spared from the bloodbath are shaking in their boots.

We haven’t received the memo itself — yet — but we certainly received an awful lot of detail about it.

More reactions to the memo, plus comment from the firm, after the jump.

We suppose it’s fitting that on Yom Kippur, when our Jewish friends are fasting at home, today’s Legal Eagle Wedding Watch is a total WASP-fest. (Last weekend was Rosh Hashanah, which explains the unusual dearth of Jewish nuptials in the NYT announcements.) We look forward to receiving plenty of tasteful feedback about how there are “too many gentiles” this week.

Here are your six finalists — all Biglaw associates, as it happens:

1. Elisabeth Madden and Wesley Mullen

2. Ann Parker and Robert McKeehan

3. Emily Harris and Matthew Mauney

Read all about these couples and evaluate their credentials, after the jump.

Let’s finish off the prestigious Vault 20. Here we have some firms on the rise, and some firms that are … not.

Here is the next batch of firms:

16. WilmerHale
17. Latham & Watkins
18. Arnold & Porter
19. Jones Day
20. White & Case

Okay, before we discuss Latham and White & Case, let’s give a good cheer for WilmerHale (up one spot from last year), Arnold & Porter (up two spots from last year), and Jones Day (up four spots from last year).

The Jones Day surge is particularly impressive. You’ll remember that the firm slammed its competitors earlier this month. But it seems like the firm is walking the walk as well as talking the talk.

After the jump, you know what happens next.

Ed. note: As previously mentioned, LEWW is on vacation this week. Regular weekly posting will resume with a double issue on Friday, August 28.

Today we ask readers to choose the most impressive lawyer newlyweds of the past two months. Early summer traditionally represents the height of the wedding season, and this year’s June and July couples have not disappointed. Below the fold, you’ll find two SCOTUS clerks, a Harvard JD/MD, the GC of a major corporation, a Google millionaire, and two managing editors of the Harvard Law Review, plus the typical amount of prestigious Biglaw employment.

Click on the link below to review our prior write-ups of the Couple of the Week winners and vote for your favorites. (And remember: The two lucky couples who are selected will be eligible for Couple of the Year consideration.)

If you side with those who think baby-making is a good option these days, you’ll read this post with special interest. The Bulldogs have named the top ten pup-friendly Biglaw firms.

Here are the best firms for the family-minded according to the Yale Law Women:

Arnold & Porter
Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton
Covington & Burling
Jenner & Block
Katten Muchin Rosenman
Mayer Brown
Munger, Tolles & Olson
Patton Boggs
Sidley Austin
WilmerHale

Earlier this month, Working Mother named the 50 Best Law Firms for Women. Covington, Jenner, Katten, Munger, Sidley and WilmerHale have bragging rights for making their way onto both lists.

So what are the stats at these firms that earned them this distinction? Hint: Granting more than three months of maternity leave is a good start.

Working Mother magazine has released its annual review of law firms and named the 50 Best Law Firms for Women. No shame on these firms (unlike the one in our caption contest), at least when it comes to “flex-time, reduced-hour and other family-friendly policies”:

[O]ur winning firms have more lawyers working reduced hours (8 percent versus 5 percent nationwide) and also employ more female equity partners, who share in their firm’s profits (20 percent versus 16 percent nationwide)—and that’s just for starters. We salute these firms for recognizing that making the legal profession work for women is good business for everyone.

As pointed out by the ABA Journal:

A bad economy may be hurting law firms, but it’s opening up more flex-time opportunities for male as well as female lawyers.

Only one firm from the top five most prestigious — as ranked by Vault last year — made the cut.

Since it has been so long since Heller Ehrman collapsed, it’s easy to forget that the firm’s dissolution continues to affect so many. Today, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that the owners of the building that housed Heller will now have to forfeit that property:

The owners of a premier San Francisco office tower plan to forfeit the property to their lenders, the city’s second distressed transaction involving a major commercial building in recent weeks and another sign of the growing pressures in the sector.

Hines and Sterling American Property decided to transfer their interest in 333 Bush St. to the original financers, following the surprise dissolution of law firm Heller Ehrman in September, according to a letter Hines sent to local real estate brokers and obtained by The Chronicle. The 118-year-old law firm defaulted on its 250,000-square-foot lease, leaving the nearly 550,000-square-foot property 65 percent vacant.

That’s one hell of a jingle mail.

How are former Heller associates and partners doing these days? Have people put the Heller experience behind them? Or is the pain still too near to talk about it?

S.F. tower’s owners will forfeit it to lender [San Francisco Chronicle]

Earlier: WilmerHale Hires Operational Wisdom, From Heller Ehrman

The current online front page of the NYT weddings section is worth a click. The head blurb leads with “Despite their differences in age … ” underneath a picture of a 20-something bride embracing a “groom” who appears to be about nine years old. “Differences in age,” indeed. Somebody alert Morality in Media! (Of course, when you click on the link, you learn that the real groom is 40-something. Still yucky, but not illegal.)

Our spotlighted weddings this week feature couples who are well-matched not only in age, but in accomplishments. Here they are:

1. Robyn Maslynsky and Paul Goldschmid

2. Stacy Humes-Schulz and Matthew Frazier

3. Courtney Dankworth and Russell Capone Jr.

Read more about these couples, after the jump.

[Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks. Law Shucks has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.]

Fortunately, this week’s law-firm layoffs didn’t follow last week’s surprise return to March form. In fact, there were fewer layoffs this week than any other this year.

While this is a nice reprieve, unemployment continues to rise, despite some indicators of stabilization in housing and manufacturing. Non-farm payroll fell by 467,000 last month, which was worse than estimates, and unemployment hit 9.5% - the worst in 26 years but still not at the peak levels Obama predicts (10%+).

Closer to home (geographically, for most of us, and metaphorically for those of us whose fortunes rise and fall with the financial services industry), the financial sector "continues to bleed jobs." Unemployment in NYC reached 9.5% in June, the highest level since 1997.

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, Mort Zuckerman wrote an op-ed in the WSJ, saying it’s even worse than we realize:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics preliminary estimate for job losses for June is 467,000, which means 7.2 million people have lost their jobs since the start of the recession. The cumulative job losses over the last six months have been greater than for any other half year period since World War II, including the military demobilization after the war. The job losses are also now equal to the net job gains over the previous nine years, making this the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all job growth from the previous expansion.

After the jump, we sift through this week’s activity in our little slice of heaven.

What’s your summer been like? Though the summer of 2009 has seen some exciting events, the summer of 2010 is shaping up to be very different, as summer programs are already under siege. Before the summer slips away, and those lucky few of you getting wined and dined are again on a steady diet of Top Ramen and Diet Coke, we want to know what you really throught about your summer associate experience. From the work assignments, to the lunch budgets, to the nightly escapades, we want the scoop!

If you are a 2009 summer associate, please take our short survey - Click Here (of course the survey is completely confidential).

Don’t worry, you’ll get to see the results of this survey on The Career Center, brought to you by Above the Law and Lateral Link . And we’ll have them posted in time to help inform / sway your decisions for fall on-campus recruiting (or perhaps spring, if you are considering Orrick).

After the jump, we’ll reveal which firms we most popular in the month of June… because we know you like to see who is on top.

Last month, the firm of WilmerHale denied that any layoffs have taken place at the firm. The accuracy of that statement depends on what the meaning of “layoff” is.

In an internal memo obtained by Above the Law, the firm acknowledges that “a very small number of individuals” have been asked to leave WH for economic reasons. The memo also notes that the performance review process “is affected by the reality of current economic conditions, as performance issues sometimes come to light more when business is slower.”

(This may constitute some welcome candor. Other firms try to claim, somewhat implausibly, that performance reviews are utterly unaffected by the economy, i.e., that associates are judged by the exact same standards as in boom times.)

Still, the knowledge that the economy contributed to one’s purportedly performance-based dismissal is cold comfort. From an affected associate at WilmerHale:

I was one of the ones that was cut for “performance” reasons. My evaluations were [several] pages long, single spaced — of accolades… with one half of one sentence that mentioned something I could improve on… from one partner out of [many] that evaluated me. I was let go based on that one phase, copied and pasted on the front of the eval…. Unlike the claim [in the memo] that the firm cannot give associates “three or four” chances to make improvements, I had never received a similar comment in the past.

Many partners were apparently left out of the process of deciding which associates to cut — and as a result have begun to “vent” to the associates that were cut about the process. We (as cut associates) actually had the incredibly uncomfortable task of informing partners that we worked with, who did not know we had been cut, that we were leaving. The resulting frustration of partners has led to a leak of a few tidbits of info on the numbers cut. The numbers floating around differ, but I’ve heard that between 10-15% of all associates firm wide were informed of their “transitions” over the past month. Apparently, another round may be coming in the fall.

Anxiety-inducing for current WilmerHale associates, but perhaps not a surprise. Expect a number of firms to trim their ranks after summer associates head back to school.

More discussion, plus the full memo, after the jump.

LEWW often hears complaints about the elitism and snobbery of the NYT’s wedding coverage (and, by extension, our coverage of the coverage). “What about all the couples who didn’t meet at Harvard?” critics cry.

In response, we’d like to point you to this Vows column from mid-June. Roughly twice a year, the NYT covers the wedding of what it presumably considers “average Americans,” seeking thereby to demonstrate that its weddings sections isn’t only for privileged Ivy Leaguers and their wealthy parents. This one, for example, features a pregnant bride and at least one electronic monitoring bracelet. Enjoy.

And now, this week’s legal eagle finalist couples (six people, six Harvard degrees, zero ankle bracelets):

1. Katherine Zeisel and Joshua Salzman

2. Maria Gambale and Zachary Taylor

3. Karen Milkosky and Patrick Curran

Check out these couples’ résumés and photos, after the jump.