Bonus news is out at Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle. Basically the firm matched the Cravath scale. “Totally expected and acceptable,” said a contented Curtis associate, “since hours aren’t terrible and people (generally) don’t hate their lives.”
It was “basically” a Cravath match, because even Curtis — which only has around 200 lawyers, and which “tends to round out the bottom of the Am Law 200,” in the words of a Curtis source — was slightly more generous than Cravath and all the CSM followers, at least to certain top performers….
Loren Friedman earned Lawyer of the Day honors here back in 2008, when the then-Curtis Mallet associate was busted for doctoring his law school grades from the University of Chicago, by changing Cs into Bs and As.
Almost two years after the ethics complaint against Friedman was filed, the Illinois Review Board has rendered its verdict.
(We’re a little late in bringing you the news; the Legal Profession Blog noted the judgment last week.)
Good news for the unethical. Fudging your grades will get you gigs at Skadden Arps and Sidley Austin, but won’t get you disbarred. At least not in Illinois. Instead, the Board proposed an 18-month suspension, reduced from the three year sentence previously recommended.
UPDATE / CLARIFICATION: As noted by a commenter, Friedman won’t automatically be reinstated after 18 months. Rather, because the suspension is 18 months “and until further order of the court” (UFO), he will have to “satisfy his obligation of establishing his character and fitness before resuming practice.”
No big deal. Friedman has other things to occupy his time these days….
Despite last week’s welcome reprieve from Biglaw layoffs, it looks like some firms didn’t get the memo. Above the Law has learned that Curtis Mallet conducted layoffs early this week. We believe that 10% – 15% of its corporate associates have been let go. Multiple class years were affected, but it appears that first years were spared.
Curtis Mallet would not respond to our multiple requests for comment
Perhaps the firm is embarrassed to be laying off associates on the heels of last year’s strong profit numbers. In February, Am Law Daily reported:
Bucking the trend among New York law firms, Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle reports a 13.5 percent surge in revenue to $125 million. Curtis Mallet has chosen the worst business year in memory to cross the million-dollar profits per equity partner mark, with PPP up 11 percent to $1 million. Revenue per lawyer for the firm’s 225 lawyers, scattered among 14 offices worldwide, nudged up 3.5 percent to $570,000….
Firm chairman George Kahale, who was profiled in The American Lawyer last year, says that Curtis Mallet has the right mix of groups for the current economic climate.
So you see, laid off associates should be proud that they helped the partners make a million dollars before being shown the door.
After the jump, we learn that the work of soon-to-be-former Curtis Mallet associates is not quite done.
As the temperature rises, so does the desire to embrace informal summer fashions. Women are breaking out their strapless dresses and short skirts, and men are starting to sport shorts. While casual summer wear is fine on the weekends, don’t yield to the temptation to wear your flip flops to your white shoe firm.
Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle conveyed that message to its New York office with a memo sent out last week. In its e-mail making the case for “business casual,” the firm reminded associates that pecs are not to be admitted into evidence:
By all means resist the urge to acquaint us with your chest hair. If you think it necessary to impress the ladies with your efforts at the gym over the winter, think again – we are not a particularly good demographic for that.
After that, the memo’s author reminds the gents that loose-fitting suits can help hide pounds. We’re not sure what that has to do with business casual exactly, and suspect the firm just wanted to try to give equal attention to men and women so as not to appear to be solely lecturing females guilty of summer-slutty fashion sense. (As the Seventh Circuit did last month.)
After the jump, we bring you the full memo, which advises the ladies to “save it for the clubs or the beach.” According to the tipster who sent this along, the advice “wasn’t well received.”
Facebook just got a lot less cool, and a lot more LinkedIn. Watch out, for your firm may be coming to F-book soon.
The ABA Journal reports that Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle has launched a Facebook page to aid in its recruiting efforts:
Looking for a way to better promote itself to the next generation of lawyers, Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle has launched a Facebook page as part of its broader law school recruiting efforts.
“We are pleased to be capitalizing on the popularity of the most widely used social networking site,” Nancy Delaney, a Curtis partner who is a member of the firm’s personnel committee, says in a release (PDF) about the page. “As a Firm, we recognized the power of this format of communication and the wide use being made of it by future lawyers.”
Ah, those inscrutable transcripts from the University of Chicago Law School — gotta love ‘em. They’re chock full of numbers, but they don’t use the standard “As = 90s, Bs = 80s” scale. For example, if your grades are all in the 80s, you’re a rock star.
Nobody can make heads or tails of the U. Chicago transcripts. So what’s wrong with a little “tweaking” here and there? From the ABA Journal (via TaxProf Blog):
A lawyer who attended the University of Chicago Law School has been accused in an ethics complaint of lying about his grades when he applied for a summer position at Sidley Austin.
Loren Elliotte Friedman is accused in a complaint filed May 6 by the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission. He was listed as an associate at Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle in New York on the firm’s website earlier Tuesday, but his name was removed by the afternoon.
Joseph Pizzurro, managing partner of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, told ABAJournal.com that Friedman, a bankruptcy associate, disclosed the bar complaint to the law firm on Friday and submitted his resignation.
The complaint says Friedman altered transcripts of his law school grades in 20 classes to reflect better grades than he received. Friedman worked at Sidley Austin the summer of 2002, and the firm extended an employment offer for him to begin work as an associate in 2003.
The complaint also alleges that Friedman failed to reveal he flunked out of medical school in his application to law school, and that he failed to disclose the altered law school transcripts in his bar application.
It looks like medicine, and now law, haven’t worked out for Loren Friedman. What’s next?
Maybe betting on horseraces? The Legal Profession Blog has dubbed his three alleged omissions a “trifecta.”
More details, after the jump.
The markets are closed today for Good Friday, which is why it’s a reduced-publication day here at ATL (and our sister sites, Dealbreaker and Fashionista). We’re ready for the holiday weekend to begin — and so are most of you, we’re guessing. We have a few more posts to publish, but things are winding down around here.
To start the holiday weekend off on the right note, here is a heartwarming tale: lawyer couple saves family from fire! Hopefully this will improve the standing of the legal profession in the eyes of the public. Read the full story over at Newsday.
We’re not sure where Helene Horowitz works (and some cursory online searching didn’t yield an answer). But Kenny Horowitz (pictured) is a real estate associate at Curtis Mallet.
ATL salutes Helene and Kenny Horowitz for their heroism. Maybe they can get pro bono credit for this? Family of 6 OK after escaping burning house [New York Newsday] Kenneth Horowitz [Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle]
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?
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Bonus news is out at Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle. Basically the firm matched the Cravath scale. “Totally expected and acceptable,” said a contented Curtis associate, “since hours aren’t terrible and people (generally) don’t hate their lives.”
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