One casualty of the economic recession could well be the position of “staff attorney.” We’ve reported that Skadden and Covington & Burling have had major cuts to their staff attorney programs. Above the Law is now able to report that similar reductions have happened at Paul Weiss. Sources report that at least a dozen staff attorneys have been let go by Paul Weiss over the past couple of months.

UPDATE: We are now hearing reports that the number is significantly higher than a dozen, perhaps as high as 45 (since November 2008). “This can all be confirmed by the lawyer lists that are sent out at the start of each month,” said our source.

A tipster puts it this way:

PW has sneakily let go [a number of] staff attorneys. There have been … cuts in the past few months and it is getting more steady and consistent in the last few weeks. They are letting a few people go every week. It is so ridiculous that they haven’t told anyone what’s really going on and everyone is just waiting around for the call.

Apparently they need to cut all the staff attorneys so they have some work for 80 or so first years that just started who are already doing nothing but doc review and who should expect to be doing nothing but doc review for the foreseeable future. Some of these staff attorneys have been there for seven and eight years and they are not even offering severance. They say it has nothing to do with performance but are letting some of the good people go first.

Paul Weiss declined to comment for this story. But we understand that no associates have been let go.

Are junior associates the new “staff attorney”? More from our tipsters after the jump.

The world of contract attorneys isn’t our primary focus around here. We make occasional forays into that territory, but for the most part we leave it to more specialized sites, like Temporary Attorney (aka Tom the Temp).

If the temp-attorney world is your cup of tea, however, then check out this interesting new site, which several ATL readers have emailed us about: Big Debt, Small Law. We reached out to Law Is 4 Losers — the angry author, who still works as a contract attorney (he just finished a New York project for a large national law firm) — and asked him about the site’s origins. He explained:

I was prompted to start the blog for two reasons. First is the membership solicitation from the ABA asking me for $250 in dues and listing all the wonderful things that they’ve been doing of late to “improve” this profession (curiously, outsourcing my job to India via ethics opinion 08-451 was not among them).

Another reason was my recent NYS Law license renewal of $350. There was no waiver provision or extension for unemployed lawyers. [W]e contract attorneys have to pay health insurance, bar dues, CLE fees, and other obligations out of our own pocket. And at the $28 an hour straight-time now offered by NYC Biglaw (or the $40K small firms are paying), this is a hell of a lot of money. Forcing people to choose between their rent and their job is unconscionable….

I hope to warn incoming One L’s and prospective law students about the reality out there behind the slick admissions brochures and silver-tongued charlatan deans who will lie thru their teeth to get their hands on that Sallie Mae loan money. I’d also like to lobby the state bars to offer fee waivers or extensions on dues to unemployed lawyers who can prove financial hardship.

If you’re an associate and feeling sorry for yourself, perhaps because your pay has been cut or layoffs are taking place at your firm, Law Is 4 Losers doesn’t want to hear it:

Bad as things are for associates, they are 100 times worse for doc reviewers. We’ve been losing jobs every few weeks or months ever since leaving law school, having no “careers” to speak of, and also no health insurance, severance, or savings.

His most recent blog post — deeply depressing, but scabrously funny — describes the misery of temping at two of Biglaw’s biggest names: Paul Weiss and Sullivan & Cromwell. And he doesn’t pull his punches.

Ed. note: Welcome to the latest installment of “Notes from the Breadline,” a column by a laid-off lawyer in New York. Prior columns are collected here. You can reach Roxana St. Thomas by email (at roxanastthomas@gmail.com), follow her on Twitter, or find her on Facebook.

I am sitting in the war room, trying to guess what time of day it is and what the weather is like. Have I been here for an hour, or is it closer to lunchtime, and a brief respite from the monotony of document review? Is it a beautiful day outside, or is it dark and rainy? There are no windows in the room, so these details can be elusive. I will myself not to look at the clock, anticipating the pang of disappointment that comes with knowing just how many hours lie ahead. A moment later, I give in: 10:30. I sigh and turn back to my computer.

A week into the document review, my days have taken on a deadening sameness. I go to the office. I plow through documents. Ben Gay applies healing ointments to his joints; Mr. Potato Head samples from each of the major food groups. At some point, Elisa comes in to verbally abuse one or more of us. When she leaves, no one can get back to work until the nature of her bitchiness and the ridiculousness of her review protocol have been thoroughly deconstructed. These sessions seem almost necessary, a way to cleanse the collective palate of something bitter and distasteful.

They are also, sadly, the moments when the occupants of our forgotten room seem most alive, and when I catch flickering glimpses of the lawyers many of them are, or have been. In the process of discrediting Elisa and her somewhat arbitrary choices, the reviewers defend their judgment calls, piece together strategic arguments, and display a practical command of litigation that seems far greater than that of our young overseer. Still, these attempts at legal discourse invariably remind me of law school, when people immerse themselves in the painfully earnest discussion of substantive issues, with no sense for how ultimately unimportant their opinions are.

I try to remind myself that this is work, and — while far from ideal — it is better than the alternative … or at least more lucrative. But it’s hard for me not to think about document reviews I did as an associate. Although they could be tedious or frustrating (or tedious and frustrating), they often felt more like a blitzkrieg than a prolonged occupation. It was different when I was immersed in a case, faced with a deadline, and anxious to see what the documents would reveal; I remember the purposefulness of turning my attention to the task at hand, the measurable sense of progress, and the feeling of dorky satisfaction that came from seeing the pieces of the puzzle fall into place.

This assignment has none of those features. Elisa has given us almost no background information; without a feel for the context of the case, I spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about whether I’ve missed some crucial nuance. I can recognize names, but I still have no sense of the people they belong to. And while I — like many lawyers — have indulged in the fantastic notion that my hours of scut work will pay off with a Perry Mason moment, I don’t even know enough about the case to picture the eventual cross or deposition during which the important documents will be brandished at a blanching witness.

More after the jump.

Ed. note: Welcome to the latest installment of “Notes from the Breadline,” a column by a laid-off lawyer in New York. Prior columns are collected here. You can reach Roxana St. Thomas by email (at roxanastthomas@gmail.com), follow her on Twitter, or find her on Facebook.

This column is a continuation of last week’s column, which you can read here.

After the departure of Elisa — who, I now have it on information and belief, is a bitch — I have the distinct sense that I have been sent to my room. “Go to your room!” I imagine her screaming at a petulant child, “and don’t come out until you’ve reviewed 68,000 documents!”

I want to ask one of my new colleagues for some guidance — an insider’s view of what to expect, and how things work in this strange ecosystem — but I am reasonably certain that my inquiry will be futile, since none of them can hear me: they are all wearing headphones. Even the carpal tunnel guy has retreated to the auditory solace of his own world, and is bobbing his head gently while he applies something pungent to his visibly swollen joints. I watch him pull a tattered plastic shopping bag out from under his desk and rifle through a collection of tubes, bottles, and jars, one of which he finally selects and opens, filling the room with the smell of menthol. I wonder if he is going to apply it directly to his forehead.

I start to flip through the review protocol, which seems inordinately complicated. The document tags appear to have been created by several different people who were not in the same room at the same time. Like anything produced by multiple lawyers (with multiple egos), it looks like the product of a stubborn refusal to compromise. Perhaps it will make more sense once I start reviewing actual documents, I think, opening the database. I am hoping that the fine points of the “review tool” will come back to me quickly.

Instead, looking at the screen in front of me, I am flooded with the memory of a case I worked on a few months before I was laid off. For a moment I am back at my desk in my old office, talking to the client on the phone about what we need to identify in the documents. I want to laugh at the absurdity of revisiting the nuances of Kroll Ontrack the way some people remember the details of an old relationship. In this scenario, Kroll would be the ex-boyfriend, which, I suppose, is not so far-fetched given how much time I spent with it.

Kroll would be a bad ex, I muse. Remember that restaurant we didn’t go to? The time we didn’t go for a walk together? Remember when I marked that document “privileged,” and then someone else marked it “non-responsive”? Remember how hard we didn’t laugh? I’m sorry we had to break up, Kroll, but you never wanted to do anything but talk shop and stay in on weekends. Yes, I remember when you said I’d be back, and I guess you were right. But I want you to know that I saw other documents — lots of other documents — while we were apart.

More after the jump.

Ed. note: Welcome to the latest installment of “Notes from the Breadline,” a column by a laid-off lawyer in New York. Prior columns are collected here. You can reach Roxana St. Thomas by email (at roxanastthomas@gmail.com), follow her on Twitter, or find her on Facebook.

This column is a continuation of last week’s column, which you can read here.

When Olivia tells me that she may have a “possible” document review on which I could “potentially” be staffed, I don’t really believe her. In fact, I have the same feeling I get when I read the spam in my Gmail inbox. I’ve won £1,500,000,000? An undisclosed sum from the Loteria Espana, or perhaps De Lotto Netherlands? It sounds nice for a moment, until you realize that it’s bullshit. The promises of the British Lottery, the “Microword Corporation,” and Mr. Van Curtis of the Delta Lloyd Bank are illusory, gigabytes of sounds and fury, signifying nothing. Likewise recruiters, who often make it sound as though the fabulous job they are describing is yours for the taking — a done deal! Then you never hear from them again.

So I am surprised when Olivia calls me back a few days later to tell me that the “possible” document review has actually materialized. “How would you,” she breathes, pausing dramatically, “like to be staffed on the project?” Something about her delivery makes me wonder if she once dreamed of being a game show host, and has stood before her bathroom mirror telling imaginary guests that they will be going on a four night, five day trip to … Aruba!! I feel as though I should jump up and down and scream, clapping my hands. Instead, I tell her that I would be delighted to work on the project.

“That’s great!” she effuses. She gives me some minimal information about the project (a large pharmaceutical case) and the pay ($30 an hour for the first forty, and around $35 thereafter), then tells me a little bit about the firm, using the most generic terms possible. The people who work there, she says, are “just really nice,” and “a pleasure to work with.” She thinks I’ll “have a lot of fun.” In addition, she adds, the firm sometimes hires temps for full time positions. She says this as though she is telling me that, if I am really good, I might get ice cream at the end of the day.

“Really?” I say. “How often does that happen?”

“Oh, from time to time,” she answers. “It has happened.”

I do not jump up and down and scream when we get off the phone, but I have to admit that I am excited. Though the pay is modest at best, $1200 a week is more than I’m making now. And if the gig lasts for two or three weeks (Olivia’s estimate), I’ll have at least $2400 (or more, if there’s overtime) to throw at my bills.

But I also have some concerns. Read about them, after the jump.

Back in the golden days of Biglaw (in the before times, in the long, long ago), associates were fired all the time. Getting laid off for poor performance or low hours is nothing new.

Of course, back when we had a functional American economy, getting fired was a temporary bump in the road. You could always work at a smaller firm or for the government. Back in the day, you could even work as a contract attorney if you needed something to tide you over.

Now … everything is different. And contract attorney jobs are great gets in this market. Yesterday, the National Law Journal ran a piece about the curious case of paying off law school debt while making $35 an hour:

As law firms downsize, laid-off attorneys and new law school graduates unable to find jobs have been turning to an option they may never have imagined at law school: becoming contract attorneys — hired guns for $35 an hour.

Yet in the past couple of months, even that field appears to be showing signs of a slowdown.

People who waited too long to swallow their pride and confront the reality of the financial crisis are finding that contract work has already been snapped up by less prestige conscious job seekers.

And it probably isn’t helping that just as the American legal market is starved for low level work, the ABA has made it easier to outsource doc review to other countries:

Also cutting into their business is the growing popularity of outsourcing to India. Hudson Legal has countered with an ad campaign that encourages law firms to “onshore,” and choose U.S. staffing companies where there are no security or privacy concerns and where they operate in the Eastern time zone.

Even if you land a contract attorney job you never thought you wanted, the working conditions remain just as bad as you remember them.

While the world waits for S&C’s bonus memo, here’s some interesting news from a person with a ground-level view at Sullivan & Cromwell: a contract attorney.

The blog Temporary Attorney has a post up about how the other half is living at S&C. An excerpt:

The economy is bad, so that means that down here at S&C, the clients are starting to dwindle, and the ones the firm has are having trouble paying their legal bills. New cases aren’t starting, which means that associates and litigation analysts don’t have anything to do. That means they’re starting to get the work that contract attorneys usually get.

This means that even “lifer” temps who have been working at S&C are being summarily dismissed, usually with little to no notice that we could lose the steady source of income that we’d come to expect. No notice, no severance. Your last day of earning is today. If you discuss this with lawyers not trapped in the temp system, or with basically anybody not on the inside, the situation smacks of outrageous and patent injustice.

Read the full post over here.

Even during good times, the work of a junior associate doesn’t differ much from the work of a contract attorney. When things are slow, it makes sense to funnel even more grunt work to your highly paid juniors — who have nothing else to do.

And we expect that work is slow all over.

But work is not so slow that it’s going to make S&C think about pulling a Half-Skadden?

Right?

P.S. Speaking of S&C contract attorneys, as we mentioned previously (see the “P.S.”), we’re also working on an item about a former contract attorney supervisor at the firm. We already have multiple sources but would like a few more. If you can help, please email us (subject line: “Sullivan and Cromwell”). Thanks.

Sullivan & Cromwell Update [Temporary Attorney]

A staff attorney reader of ATL once described his position as “either the bluest white-collar job, or the whitest blue-collar job.” We found the description quite apt, based on what we know about being a staff attorney.

For those of you who are not familiar with them, staff attorneys perform work similar to contract attorneys — e.g., document review, document production, other discovery-related tasks — but, unlike contract attorneys, they are “on staff” at their specific firms (hence the title of staff attorney). They don’t have to worry, like contract attorneys, about what their next gig will be, since they are employed directly by their Biglaw shops (i.e., not placed through an agency). Staff attorneys have stable jobs, good benefits, and reasonable hours (at least most of the time; they may have to work overtime if a case is busy).

But there are also disadvantages to being a staff attorney. All that document work can be monotonous, even mind-numbing. Unlike associates, staff attorneys are not on the track towards partnership. They are often the first to be let go during downturns (e.g., at Milbank Tweed; see here and here).

Some staff attorneys claim they are treated like second-class citizens. Back in March, over at the Huffington Post, Yolanda Young — a former staff attorney at Covington & Burling — decried what she described as the firm’s “staff attorney ghetto,” noting the high proportion of minorities among the staff attorney ranks (and the low percentage of minorities among the ranks of partnership-track associates).

If it is a “ghetto,” however, it’s a rather well-paid one. From one tipster:

I’m a Paul Weiss staff attorney. [ATL] has a loyal following among us.

I’d be interested in seeing a post on SA salaries. I wonder how much they differ from firm to firm here in NYC, or in other cities.

I’m sure such a post would get hammered with comments from BigLaw associates. But it would be widely read, and interesting to the growing ranks of the staff attorney underclass.

We’re happy to oblige. Here is the requested post.

Find out how much Paul Weiss pays its staff attorneys in New York — and, if you’re a staff attorney at another firm or in another city, dish about how much you make — after the jump.

May 2008 is almost over, and it’s a month that Bingham McCutchen will probably be happy to put in the past. The month kicked off with Roofiegate. Then came this benchslap, reported by Legal Pad (in a post titled “Bingham Busted By Its Own Website”):

Almost every big law firm uses its website to tout its commitment to diversity and its global reach. For Bingham McCutchen, it may have cost the firm a bid for sanctions.

A Bingham employment law team including partner Wendy Lazerson and associates Jacqueline Bronson and Kristen Pezone was set to take a deposition in the wrongful termination case of Kim v. Poonsang Microtec Corp. on April 17. The day before the deposition, plaintiff’s attorney Frank Mayo of Los Altos served additional discovery, including some documents that were in Korean.

Bingham’s team insisted on postponing the deposition, saying they could not get the Korean documents translated in time. Mayo objected, saying his client had already flown up from Southern California. Things turned nasty and both sides moved for sanctions.

In a tentative order filed Thursday (see Page 31 of this pdf) , Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Socrates “Pete” Manoukian rejected both sides’ request for sanctions.

“This court finds it difficult to believe that no one in the office of [Bingham] is able to speak Korean, given that the Bingham web[site] has many referrals to its commitment to diversity and its ability to service, among others, Korean clients,” Manoukian wrote. [See, e.g., here (PDF).]

Ouch. As our tipster snarkily observed, “Live by the sword, die by the sword. For a firm that runs as much as this one does on pure PR, this is quite fitting.”

Funny — but fair? We contacted Bingham — which we’re not sure Legal Pad did, despite being an MSM blog — and received this statement, from firm spokesperson Claire Papanastasiou:

To use this tentative ruling to question Bingham’s commitment to diversity is misleading and false. Bingham has continuously been recognized as a leader in championing diversity in the workforce. More than 440 people at Bingham speak 51 foreign languages (including Korean), but this was not a simple matter of getting documents translated. This case involved the authentication of documents — which would have required a court-certified translator — and with a 16-hour time difference, the Bingham legal team wanted to confer with the client, who was in Korea, to determine the documents’ authenticity and discuss next steps. Bingham informed opposing counsel of the decision not to go forward as a courtesy. And finally, Bingham offered to take the deposition in Orange County and ended up with an order that simply provides what our lawyers were already willing to do. Efforts to transform this relatively minor discovery dispute into something more profound simply are unjustified.

Interesting. As noted by a Legal Pad commenter, the ruling “[s]eems more like a political dig against diversity efforts by Judge Manoukian.”

Speaking of diversity, Bingham has been honored as one of the best law firms for gays and lesbians, by Human Rights Campaign (Aaron Charney, holla); for Asian American lawyers, by Multicultural Law (Shinyung Oh, holla); and women, by Working Mother (pre-Roofiegate).

Alas, even if Korean Translation-gate was overblown, it wasn’t the end of Bingham’s unflattering media mentions in the month of May. Check out this National Law Journal article, which depicts Bingham as hemorrhaging talent and “troubled.”

Was this piece evenhanded journalism? Bingham thinks not. They’ve issued a lengthy and detailed response, blasting reporter Sheri Qualters’s article as “outrageous,” “poorly reported,” and “factually inaccurate by any objective measure.”

It’s kinda delicious. Read the whole thing, after the jump.

On Tuesday, we wrote about staff attorney layoffs at Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy. As a commenter on our post noted, yesterday the firm sent around an email disputing our account:

From: David R. Gelfand
Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2008 3:20 PM
To: #Litigation Non Partner Attorneys US; #Litigation Partners US
Cc: Sikora, Michael; Green, Valerie
Subject: Discovery Attorney Program

Several of you have asked about rumors that we have disbanded our Discovery Attorney Program. The rumors are absolutely not true.

If you need assistance from our Discovery Attorneys, please contact [xxxx].

Thanks.

David

We would have appreciated it if Milbank had responded to the multiple inquiries we made of them prior to running the post, instead of responding indirectly and after-the-fact. But it’s not the first time we’ve seen passive-aggressive behavior on the part of a law firm.

(We often reach out to law firms about rumors we hear — and we often kill stories when firms explain how and why they’re inaccurate. This happens almost every day around here. But if firms don’t avail themselves of the opportunity to comment on a reasonably credible rumor, then we view it as fair game.)

Anyway, we ran David Gelfand’s email by our original source, who responded:

“Milbank let go of all of the permanent discovery attorneys except for two. They kept on temporary discovery attorneys — those who are working through staffing agencies and not on Milbank’s payroll.”

“Notice in Milbank’s response [how they say] they did not dissolve the Discovery Attorney Program. That’s very different from saying that they did not fire all or nearly all of the attorneys in that program.”

Our earlier report, in stating that all the permanent discovery attorneys were laid off, was erroneous, since two were spared. We regret the error (and have appended a correction to the original post).

Could this latest report be erroneous as well? Quite possibly; we’re honest about our fallibility. But we once again reached out to Milbank, yesterday and today, and neither David Gelfand nor a firm spokesperson responded to our inquiries.

If you have knowledge of what’s really going on over there, feel free to drop us a line. Thanks.

Earlier: Nationwide Layoff Watch: Milbank Cans Staff Attorneys

Last month, we informed you about positive developments at Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy. These included enhanced parental leave and a promise of no associate layoffs. In a bit of positive publicity for Milbank, whenever a rival firm announces a no-layoffs policy — e.g., Latham — it’s described as making “the Milbank promise.”

But not everything is hunky-dory over at Milbank. We hear that, earlier this month, the firm laid off the entire group of staff attorneys. It appears that the “Milbank promise” protects partnership-track associates, but does not extend to staff lawyers. (Shhh, don’t tell Yolanda Young….)

We wondered whether perhaps it was just a case of contract lawyers whose project was finished being dismissed because their work was done. But a source explained this was not the case:

Milbank has a staff attorney program, much like Skadden or Simpson, where they have a group of permanent employees engaged in e-discovery, doc review, etc for the litigation department. Staff attorneys are not hired to work on a specific case like a contract attorney. They get assigned to various matters, and once they finish, get assigned to new ones, much like associates.

In other Milbank news, we hear that their summer program has been capped at 12 weeks. But considering that there are only so many weeks in a summer, and that some firms — e.g., Pillsbury Winthrop — are going as low as 10 weeks for summer 2008, this doesn’t seem like a big deal.

A Milbank spokesperson did not respond to multiple inquiries about either the staff attorney or summer program news.

Update / Correction: This post is the subject of a correction. Please see here.

Earlier: What’s Up at Milbank Tweed?

Or a richness of embarrassment. Today we’re going to name not one, but seven Lawyers of the Day.

Our first Lawyer of the Day is Mark Mersel (formerly of Morrison & Foerster, now at Bryan Cave). In case you missed the shout-out in Morning Docket, here’s a bit more, from the WSJ Law Blog:

It’s a litigator’s worst dream — costing your client serious money by missing a filing deadline.

That nightmare was a reality for MoFo, which appears to have cost its client Toshiba America $1 million when it was one-minute late — 1 minute! — in filing a motion for attorneys fees.

For the exciting details — which involve a courier zooming through traffic on a motorcycle, and an unfortunately timed train — read the full post.

The other six Lawyers of the Day are no strangers to these pages. Let’s call them the Qualcomm Six. From the Recorder:

Six attorneys in the Qualcomm Inc. discovery fiasco were sanctioned Monday for “monumental” discovery violations and referred to the State Bar of California for possible discipline.

Day Casebeer Madrid & Batchelder attorneys James Batchelder, Adam Bier, Kevin Leung, Christian Mammen and Lee Patch, and Heller Ehrman’s Stanley Young were sanctioned and harshly criticized by U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara Major in a 42-page order. The ruling follows a patent infringement trial Qualcomm had brought against Broadcom Corp.

The attorneys “assisted Qualcomm in committing this incredible discovery violation by intentionally hiding or recklessly ignoring relevant documents, ignoring or rejecting numerous warning signs that Qualcomm’s document search was inadequate, and blindly accepting Qualcomm’s unsupported assurances that its document search was adequate,” Major wrote.

Document production sucks — or, to put it more nicely, it’s a thankless task. It’s time-intensive, mind-numbingly boring, and a general pain in the a**. If you do it right, you’re just doing your job; but if you screw it up, consider yourself screwed. Monumentally.

Six Lawyers in Qualcomm Case Sanctioned for ‘Monumental’ Discovery Violations [The Recorder via Law.com]
Judge rebukes Qualcomm, its attorneys [San Diego Union-Tribune via Blogonaut]
A Litigator’s Nightmare: Late Filing Costs Client $1 Million [WSJ Law Blog]

McDermott, Will & Emery has come up with a more creative way to deal with soaring associate salaries. The firm has announced that it will be creating a “second tier” of associates to deal solely with low-level tasks like, e.g., document review.

As Cal Law points out, hiring cheaper lawyers to do this type of work is nothing new; this type of stuff is the staple of contract attorneys in most biglaw firms these days. The new part is making these contract attorneys a lower class of associates, essentially making them “permanent contract attorneys”, as Cal Law puts it:

While some firms quietly turn to contract attorneys, or even ship grunt work overseas, McDermott, Will & Emery plans to create a new tier of attorneys — think of them as permanent contract associates — to handle lower-end tasks at lower billing rates.

…

First-year associates at big firms now earn $160,000. Meanwhile, electronic discovery has dramatically increased the amount of basic work that usually goes to those high-priced associates.

“This is a topic of great importance, since the cost of document review has become intolerable for everyone,” said David Balabanian, the head of Bingham McCutchen’s litigation group.

While hiring contract attorneys is nothing new, creating a second class of full-timers is.

[The Recorder via Cal Law]

Is this a good or bad thing? On the one hand, it increases the competition even more for the “real associate” positions and institutionalizes to an even greater extent the law school tier system into biglaw law firms.

On the other hand, it may be beneficial to those attorneys now doing the contract work. It will establish them as associates in the firm, even if not on the same level as the top tier associates. They will likely receive things like benefits. The top tier associates will likely do more substantive work sooner. And the clients won’t find themselves paying top tier prices for stuff like document review, as still occasionally happens.

So what do you guys think? Will other firms adopt this model? Once again, it makes sense to us.

And hey, L2L, maybe you should apply.

Related:
Firm to Fill Cheap Seats [The Recorder via Cal Law]
McDermott To Create a New Class of BigLaw Attorneys [WSJ Law Blog]

Tomorrow is a very big day for almost 20 California lawyers. From Blogonaut:

A federal district court has ordered 14 California lawyers to explain why they should not be sanctioned for their “exceptional misconduct” on behalf of Qualcomm in a lawsuit that the San Diego wireless company lost. All of the lawyers subject to the order were from the Cupertino law firm of Day Casebeer Madrid & Batchelder or the Heller Ehrman law firm’s offices in Menlo Park and San Diego, the San Diego Tribune is reporting.

Five additional lawyers have been drawn into the proceedings since the order was issued, so the fate of 19 attorneys rests on the outcome of an October 12, 2007, 9:30 a.m. hearing before U.S. Magistrate Barbara Major, the newspaper reports.

We previously wrote about the underlying discovery snafu over here.

Both Heller Ehrman and Day Casebeer have been the subject of gossip recently. Last month, Heller Ehrman was rumored to be carrying out staff layoffs in California (believed to affect up to 90 people). If you know anything about this, please email us.

Update: Oops, sorry, don’t know how we missed this article from The Recorder, reporting on Heller axing 65 administrative staff positions nationwide. No attorneys were laid off.

As for Day Casebeer, rumor had it that they were rescinding offers to incoming associates. But it appears that this was inaccurate, as rumors sometimes are. When we contacted the firm, they had this comment:

We are delighted that eight new associates will join us this Fall and that two have already started work. It’s a record class for us. Far from rescinding any offers, we remain very interested in resumes from others interested in joining our practice.

Especially if you’re experienced in electronic data discovery.

Federal Court Brings Written Charges of “Exceptional Misconduct” Against 14 Lawyers [Blogonaut]
19 lawyers face sanction hearing [San Diego Union-Tribune]
Recovered Emails Bedevil Qualcomm in Court [Wall Street Journal]
Heller Says Slowdown Not Behind Layoffs [The Recorder via Law.com]

Earlier: Benchslap of the Day: The Qualcomm Debacle

If so, then Uncle Sam wants you. The feds need your valuable skills — badly.

First the Department of Justice produces original documents, instead of copy sets, to Congress. And now, the AP reports on a screw-up by the FTC:

Lawyers for the FTC electronically filed documents as part of [its] court case [challenging the Whole Foods purchase of Wild Oats] yesterday afternoon. Court officials realized the redacted portions of the document could easily be read and blocked it from being downloaded from court computer servers. The Associated Press downloaded the document from the public server before it was replaced by a properly redacted version.

In the original version, the words looked redacted but were actually just electronically shaded black. The words could be searched, copied, pasted and read. The second version of the document was filed using scanned pages of the redacted documents. There is no way to remove the blacked-out portions from the final copy.

In a statement late Tuesday, Whole Foods said it was investigating the “apparent improper release by the Federal Trade Commission of confidential proprietary business information.”

So bite your tongue next time you want to dismiss document production as mindless drudgery. If the DOJ and the FTC can’t get it right, surely there must be SOME skill involved, right?

Error by FTC Reveals Whole Foods’ Trade Secrets [Associated Press]

Earlier: Earth to DOJ: Document Production Isn’t That Hard

We’ve been doing a lot of Biglaw coverage lately. But since Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is being raked over the coals as we type, in an appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, let’s take a timely detour into the U.S. Department of Justice.

The DOJ isn’t looking terribly competent right now. And this latest story won’t burnish their reputation. From a tipster:

As you know, the Justice Department produced a number of documents to Congress, concerning the controversial U.S. Attorney firings. These document productions have not been huge — maybe just a few thousand pages. Nothing like what you see in major commercial litigation.

One such document production showed up on Capitol Hill, in four sets: two sets for the Senate Judiciary Committee (Democrats and Republicans), and two sets for the House Judiciary Committee (Democrats and Republicans). The production arrived on a weekday evening.

A Republican staffer immediately started looking through the production. The staffer noticed that the produced documents didn’t have Bates stamps on them. Oops. Guess the DOJ forgot to have them stamped — a screw-up, although not a cardinal sin.

A few pages later, the staffer noticed something else, on a document with redactions on it. There was redacting tape that was STILL ON THE DOCUMENT. One could access the redacted, privileged material simply by peeling off the tape.

Holy crap. Instead of sending over Bates-stamped photocopies, the DOJ had produced its ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS to the Congress.

Nice. Apparently the Justice Department is less competent than a second-year litigation associate: they can’t do a proper document production.

It gets worse. More after the jump.

More legal troubles for controversial celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton, aka Mario Lavandeira. The latest lawsuit against him, filed by Universal City Studios, asserts copyright infringement, arising out of Lavandeira’s publication of a topless photograph of Jennifer Aniston (taken from allegedly stolen footage from “The Break-Up”).

The complaint is fairly straightforward. The most amusing part of the filing is an exhibit to the complaint: the topless Jennifer Aniston pic, with a strategically situated “Redacted” stamp:

During our time in commercial litigation, we got to know the “Redacted” stamp very well — perhaps too well. But we never saw the “Redacted” stamp used in quite such an interesting way.

We suspect that the Court will order an in camera examination of the unredacted photograph. Especially if the case winds up before Judge Manuel Real.

Lawsuit Over Topless Aniston Photo [The Smoking Gun via Drudge Report]

Not sure how we feel about this development:

For years, outsourcing has been a dirty word inside the world of white-shoe law firms…. A number of large law firms, though, are starting to tiptoe onto far-flung shores.

The latest is Clifford Chance, one of the largest law firms in the world with 29 offices in 20 countries, which will announce plans today to consolidate and move big chunks of its administrative functions like accounting and technological support to an operation in Delhi, India, by next spring.

Ah yes, Clifford Chance — already renowned for its spectacular associate morale.

We’re sure CC associates will love it when their computer freezes up at 2 a.m. the night before a closing, they call the dubiously-named “Help Desk,” and they spend 45 minutes trying to explain the problem to an Indian woman who insists that yes, she really IS named “Rhonda.”

On the other hand, outsourcing all boring tasks could be good for law firm associates over the long term. Can Bangladeshis be trained to conduct due diligence?

Law Firms Are Starting to Adopt Outsourcing [New York Times via How Appealing]
Outsourcing: Everybody’s Doing It, Even Law Firms [WSJ Law Blog]
Clifford Chance LLP: Associates’ Concerns [Internal Memos]