Ed. note: This post was originally published at 4:27 p.m. today. We have changed the timestamp to place it at the top of the page, but we will eventually return it to its original place.

We have confirmed the news of a Cravath bonus match with multiple sources at Cleary Gottlieb. One exchange went something like this:

ATL: Any good news today?

CGSH: No. Cravath news. Bonus FAIL.

So the 2009 bonus market is probably going to coalesce around the Cravath-level bonuses — unless S&C shows up and trumps CSM. Stay tuned.

The timing of the announcement is telling. Usually bad news is saved for Friday afternoons, so it gets lost in the pre-weekend shuffle. Did CGSH view its bonus numbers as potentially disappointing to the recipients?

Perhaps. In our reader poll on the Cravath bonuses, a majority of respondents said the CSM bonuses made them either “unhappy” or “very unhappy” (the most popular choice). Approximately 30 percent said the bonuses made them “neither happy nor unhappy.” Under 20 percent said the bonuses made them “happy” or “very happy.”

The Cleary memo and another READER POLL, after the jump.

Congratulations to Caroline Nyenke and LaRue Robinson, selected by ATL readers as our August Couple of the Month in a close race. Things were a bit more lopsided in our September Couple of the Month poll, as SCOTUS clerks and lovebirds Karen Dunn and Brian Netter took the crown with 40 percent of the vote. Both couples will compete for Couple of the Year honors in a few months.

Now, this week’s contestants:

1. Molly Rusten and Peter Rosen

2. Xixi Yin and Edward Amley Jr.

3. Simrin Parmar and John Bennett

Check out these newlyweds’ pictures and bios, after the jump.

LEWW’s memory isn’t what it once was, but we can’t recall a stronger week in legal nuptials than this one. All six of our featured newlyweds are truly impressive, and a few are even interesting! And not to give anything away, but if you love SCOTUS clerks (and oh, we do!) prepare to curl your toes in ecstasy.

Here are our finalists:

1. Lee Bickley and Martin Carr

2. Betsy Anderson and David Gottlieb

3. Karen Dunn and Brian Netter

Join us in evaluating these couples, after the jump.

Yesterday, we covered Andrew Cuomo’s letter to Bank of America. In it, the New York Attorney General ask BofA to essentially waive its attorney client privilege and allow the AG’s office to question BofA outside counsel at Cleary Gottlieb.

Update: The NYAG is looking to talk to the lawyers who consulted on the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch merger. Cuomo wants to talk to attorneys at Wachtell and Shearman & Sterling. He is not asking to talk to Cleary lawyers about their work for the bank.

Today, Cleary commercial litigation partner Lewis Liman, fired back at New York’s chief lawyer. The Charlotte Observer has the details:

“First, the basic premise of the letter is simply wrong,” Bank of America’s attorney, Lewis Liman, wrote in the bank’s response. “Bank of America has not put at issue the subject matter of any advice of counsel. Nor has Bank of America offered reliance on legal advice as a justification for its disclosures. Bank of America’s position has been clear and consistent throughout: the proxy statement and related disclosures complied with all applicable laws, rules and regulations. Because Bank of America did not violate the law, it has not offered reliance on legal advice as a defense.”

Lewis Liman? That sounds more like something Josh Lyman would write.

Apparently, the NYAG isn’t the only one that knows how to litigate in through the press. More from Liman and Bank of America, after the jump.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked if the mainstream media was aware of the existence of Biglaw lawyers. They’re still not, but the New York Attorney General is. Dealbook reports:

Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo fired another shot at Bank of America on Tuesday, asking the bank to allow its lawyers to be questioned.

In a letter to the bank’s outside counsel, Lewis J. Liman of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, Mr. Cuomo wrote that “attorney-client privilege is hindering this office’s ability to make fair and fully informed decisions as to what charges, if any, to bring and whether individual Bank of America officers should be charged.”

What, does Andrew Cuomo want BOA to waive privilege to help him out? I’m not sure that this is how to run a prosecutor’s office, but it seems like a pretty effective way to run for Governor through the headlines.

Cuomo Takes Aim at Bank of America’s Lawyers [Dealbook]

Earlier: The Mainstream Media Is Aware That Law Firms Exist, Right?

This week’s Vows column is a jaw-dropper. Twelve-year-old girl has crush on doorman (“‘He looked like the guy from Tiger Beat,’ she recalled”), stalks doorman for over a decade, and finally marries him. And he’s still the doorman!

Also, don’t miss this Skadden associate’s unorthodox proposal: He had his girlfriend served with a “complaint” while he was in the men’s room.

On to this week’s couples:

1. Florence Davis and Anthony Gooch

2. Alexandra Seggerman and Stephen Poellot

3. Marin Levy and Joseph Blocher Jr.

Read all about this week’s featured newlyweds, after the jump.

Moving right along with our Vault open threads, it’s time to take a look at the firms ranked #6 - #10.

6. Weil Gotshal
7. Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett
8. Cleary
9. Covington & Burling
10. Kirkland & Ellis

Weil’s strong move up the Vault charts — the firm was ranked #9 last year — shows the power of high profile work. The Lehman bankruptcy and the General Motors restructuring were just two of the many recognizable matters Weil has had its hands on in the past 12 months.

But Weil also seems to have timed the Vault rankings quite well. The firm didn’t start deferring incoming first years until March, didn’t start laying off staff until May, and didn’t start laying off associates closing offices until the end of June.

Regardless of whether or not those moves catch up with Weil next year, right now is Weil’s time to shine in the warm recruiting light of sixth place. Congrats.

Let’s look at the other firms after the jump.

This year’s batch of summer associates are roughing it at Biglaw summer camp, with fewer meals out on the firm and less lavish events. To make matters worse, some summers are being told now that their future job will be deferred. Summer associates at Skadden and Ropes & Gray have been informed that they can’t come back to the camping ground until 2011. Tents can’t be repitched at Orrick until 2012.

This seems like a good time to focus on the light side of the summer associate experience. For the past month, we’ve been soliciting entries for our Summer Associate Event Contest of 2009. They came trickling in slowly, whether because there aren’t many events to brag about or because summer associates are too busy (or too scared) to email us. One SA was so fearful of “tipping” us that the announcement about the firm’s event was sent anonymously via snail mail. [FN1]

One ATL reader from a small firm had this to say about the environment at firms this summer:

Our firm does a lot of corporate bankruptcy work, so we’re faring better in this economic storm than most, but we had to scale back our summer associate program a bit. We do not have as many summer associates as we used to, and we are not having as many major, expensive events. No more big-ticket concerts; no more dinner theater on a river boat; no more renting out an entire movie theater for a pre-release movie showing….

Certainly, the difficulties of this economy are showing in the makeup of our summer class: because we have a summer program at all (unlike many law firms), we’re getting students from higher ranked schools. Most of them are from Top 20 law schools, all of them from Top 75 law schools, none of them from the fourth-tier local law school that usually supplies some of our summer class. And our summer associates are noticeably more stressed about the experience and their prospects than I’ve seen in the past 10 summers.

Despite the foregoing, we have a nice selection of events for the contest. We ask you to vote on the best one, plus offer a few honorable mentions (for events involving public urination and broken bones), after the jump.

A Cleary Gottlieb partner thinks that an automated “out-of-office” reply send the wrong message to clients. AmLaw Daily reports:

Raj Panasar, a partner in Cleary’s London office, apparently sent an e-mail to London-based lawyers suggesting that they should always be available to answer e-mails or at least arrange for a colleague to answer messages when a lawyer is truly unreachable. The only time an “out of office” reply might be acceptable is when a lawyer is on a long flight, Panasar wrote.

Umm … wtf?

[T]he “out of office” reply should indicate which time zone the lawyer is traveling to and when he or she will be able to respond to the message. At The Am Law Daily, we find that such detailed “out of office” messages are already typical among oft-traveling partners, but we had never heard of a near-blanket prohibition on “out of office” replies.

On the one hand, Cleary hasn’t cut or frozen salaries or gone through a round of mass layoffs. We imagine Cleary attorneys are willing to go the extra mile to serve clients in this market.

On the other hand, what kind of crazy, self-important, gunner-emeritus do you have to be to think that a client cannot process the line: “if you have a pressing question, please contact [Name], [email], [phone number].” Maybe Mr. Panasar is only “truly” unavailable when he is fighting with the flight attendant about the relevant FAA regulations. But the vast majority of people — partners or associates — are not in the best frame of mind to answer pressing work questions when they are trolling for recent divorcees on Grand Cayman. Aren’t you serving your clients better by directing them to attorneys that are in the office and capable of responding in real time, instead of handling it yourself while you are distracted by other vacation activities?

Unless Panasar thinks lawyers shouldn’t ever take a vacation in the first place? But I don’t think Cleary is going to put that in its fall recruitment brochure.

Cleary Partner: “Out of Office” Replies Not Acceptable [AmLaw Daily]

Six impressive lawyers headline our survey of this week’s NYT wedding pages. Even more impressive is that four of them are still clinging to Biglaw jobs — assuming, of course, that bad news does not await any of our returning honeymooners.

Here are the finalists:

1. Neda Karamouz and Stephen Vander Stoep

2. Danielle Cohen and Bradley Friedman

3. Leslie Tobin and Nathan Ostrander

Click on the link below to get the story on these newlyweds’ degrees, jobs, and china patterns.

Today, the Minority Law Journal published its new Diversity Rankings. There was a big change in the publication’s methodology, and that resulted in significant upheaval in the rankings:

All this churn comes courtesy of a new ranking formula adopted after we found ourselves wondering whether our traditional approach to measuring diversity—calculating the overall percentage of minorities within a firm—ignored something significant. Did it really make sense to treat all lawyers of color as essentially equivalent in stature? Should a firm get the same kind of credit for a minority associate as it does for a minority partner? We decided that it was time to start giving more credit to firms that have increased the racial diversity of their partnership ranks. Under our revised formula, we add each responding firm’s percentage of minority lawyers to its percentage of minority partners to come up with a diversity score. This number is a truer gauge, we believe, of what kind of progress a firm is making in hiring lawyers of color at every level, with an emphasis on those at the most senior levels. (Click here for a fuller explanation of our methodology, and a list of firms that did not respond.)

The change knocked Cleary Gottlieb off its long standing perch in the top spot. In its place, Wilson Sonsini claims number one status.

After the jump, additional details from well known firms.

Everyone is writing about how summer associate programs will be lean and mean this year due to law firm cutbacks in the recession. The summer associate classes will be smaller. The summers will be shorter. The perks will be less lavish. The long summer associate lunches will be few and far between. And on and on.

Well, Cleary Gottlieb got the memo… and has posted a memo to the firm intranet letting their attorneys know just what to expect from the summer associate program this year. One source there said:

Cleary released some very bizarre summer associate rules. Can’t tell if they’re joking.

Here is a sampling, from the “2009 Summer Associate Lunch Policy” portion of the memo, neatly incorporating our suggestion to McWine and McDine SAs.

The full memo, a response from the firm, and special discounts to look out for this summer, after the jump.

Back in 2007, two female Yale Law School students filed a lawsuit over allegedly defamatory and threatening comments written about them on AutoAdmit.com. The stuff written went way beyond lobsters and buttcheeks, and the women said the resulting Google hits on their names did serious damage to their job prospects.

The case was near and dear to ATL readers’ hearts in its challenge to the culture of anonymous online commentary, as the YLS students sought to out their unknown assailants (including the incongruously-named :D and more appropriately-named AK47) through the course of litigation. We covered the various twists and turns of the case, but hadn’t heard anything since last summer.

The newest issue of Portfolio Magazine has the case on its cover. In Slimed Online, David Margolick identifies the YLS plaintiffs as Brittan Heller and Heide Iravani and explores the legal ramifications for cyber bullying.

The article is a great read, and we’d advise checking it out. We’re a big fan of the writer: Margolick covered the O.J. Simpson trial as the New York Times national legal correspondent in the 90s, and was one of Kash’s favorite journalism professors last semester.

For the lazy among you, we have chosen some highlights, including the “where are they now” grafs (hint: hello, Cleary). Find out whether job prospects were really damaged, after the jump.

Some of our friendly commenters frequently gripe about the high number of Rabbi-officiated weddings featured in this space. They’ll be delighted to know that only one of our three weddings this week is a straight-up Rabbi wedding. The others were jointly officiated by a Rabbi and a Mennonite minister and a Rabbi and a bankruptcy judge. Yay for diversity!

Here are this week’s lucky finalists:

1. Harper Fertig and James Robinson

2. Marion Ringel and Joshua Panas

3. Julie Hootkin and Benjamin Schneider

Read all about these couples, after the jump.

We know what Cleary is doing for associate compensation: they are paying Cravath bonuses but have decided against freezing salaries. Is anybody interested in what the partners will be taking home this year? According to AmLaw:

Gross revenue is up roughly 8 percent to $965 million; profits per partner increased about 12 percent to $2.4 million. Revenue per lawyer, however, was basically flat, down less than 1 percent.

$2.4 million in this economy? Where do I sign up?

More on Cleary and money after the jump.

The latest major law firm to fall short of Skadden in terms of bonuses: Cleary Gottlieb.

Here’s the official CGSH bonus scale. The specific numbers should look quite familiar to you by now:

2008 and participants in the International Lawyer Program: $17,500 (prorated)

2007: $17,500

2006: $20,000

2005: $22,500

2004: $25,000

2003: $27,500

2002: $30,000

2001 and more senior: $32,500

The Cleary memo concludes by thanking associates for “demonstrating time and again your ability to adapt to the rapidly changing legal landscape presented by current global economic conditions.” E.g., by happily and gratefully accepting Half-Skadden bonuses.

Full memo, after the jump.

We mentioned yesterday that Simpson Thacher has been chosen to advise the government on the massive $700 billion bailout plan. They were chosen on Friday and are already racking up billable hours on it.

Six other firms were approached by the Treasury, but only two expressed interest. Zach Lowe at the American Lawyer reports:

Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton confirmed Tuesday that it was one of the six firms the Treasury Department considered as candidates for a role as lead adviser on the $700 billion bailout plan.

Only two of those six firms pursued the work that eventually went to Simpson Thacher & Bartlett.

Four of the six law firms have confirmed that the Treasury reached out to them: Simpson, Cleary, Davis, Polk & Wardwell, and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. The two others, including the firm the Treasury turned down, remain unidentified. Two of the most likely candidates — Sullivan & Cromwell and Latham & Watkins — would not comment on the matter. A third, Shearman & Sterling, has not responded to messages.

Lowe tracked down a lawyer at one of the firms that rebuffed the Treasury. The lawyer admitted it was “prime work,” but that they feared not being able to represent “regular clients on the program.” In the cost-benefit analysis, the potential billable hours to financial services companies clamoring for bailout money must outweigh the government possibilities.

But Simpson Thacher is not sweating it:

Richard Beattie, chairman of Simpson Thacher, says the Treasury did not put any pressure on the firm to drop clients and that the firm is not concerned about losing business.

“They did not say that,” Beattie says. “It’s ridiculous. We represent JPMorgan Chase and would not give up a client like that.”

AmLaw reports that Simpson’s other financial clients include Washington Mutual (now part of JPMorgan Chase), Lehman Brothers, and AIG. Given that list, we can see why the government is the more attractive client at the moment.

Cleary Confirms It Rejected Lead Adviser Role on Federal Bailout Plan [American Lawyer]
Simpson Thacher Wins Treasury Sweepstakes, Four Firms Decline [American Lawyer]

On Friday we told you the story of 2 Cleary associates whose late night mistake caused problems for Cleary Gottlieb and their client, Barclays. Many were sympathetic to the associates and pointed out that blame should be shared with Cleary partners.

Cleary has declined to respond to the story, but that doesn’t mean they are unconcerned about what is said about them in the press. They are not shy about capitalizing of the global financial crisis either; their website now links to a financial crisis resource center. Yesterday, the firm sent around a hyper-positive email to all new Cleary offerees:

Congratulations on your offer to join Cleary Gottlieb!

We thought you may be interested in some recent media coverage of Cleary Gottlieb’s deals and cases.

The message goes on to list all of the great press stories Cleary has received since the firm’s attorneys first discovered fire. What do you think of this effort at firm PR?

Read the full message after the jump.

Today, every associate’s worst nightmare came to a merciful end in a New York Bankruptcy Court.

The nightmare started for a first-year Cleary Gottlieb associate on the night of September 18th. The associate was called in for some extra muscle on the Barclays acquisition of Lehman assets. At the request of a second-year associate, the first-year reformatted an Excel spreadsheet of critical contracts to be assumed and assigned in bankruptcy on the closing date of the Lehman/Barclays sale. Predictably, this work was done long after normal business hours, just after 11:30 p.m.

On September 19th, Cleary produced the list of contracts based on the associates’ work the night before.

The problem was that the list contained 179 contracts that should not have been included. The Lehman/Barclays sale closed on September 22nd, with the over inclusive list of contracts.

My stomach gets tied up in knots writing that.

The resolution after the jump.

Am Law Daily highlights the work of James Clark, a fifth-year at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, who took a two-month unpaid leave to volunteer for the Obama campaign in Pennsylvania.

Clark was a community organizer for three different townships in Bucks County, a county Hillary Clinton carried with over 60 percent of the vote. He felt that his Cleary litigation experience helped him in his campaign stint organizing local volunteers:

Volunteers are kind of like junior associates in that you have to clearly articulate what needs to be done so that everyone is on the same page.

Also don’t make any sudden movements. Be firm, yet gentle.

Clark credits Cleary for allowing him the opportunity to work in rural Pennsylvania:

The firm has always made it clear to me that they are committed to the community and they’ve allowed me to sort of be a pro bono rainmaker and go out and find things that are worthwhile.

Can Clark make partner with his book of pro bono business now?

We jest, but only out of jealousy. Taking two months off to do something you feel is important is commendable, regardless of your politics. Keeping your Biglaw job while you do it (Clark is getting married soon) makes you the winner, even though you lost.

ELECTION 2008: Cleary Associate Gives Up Paycheck for Obama [Am Law Daily]