It’s August. The dog days. The beginning of the end of the summer. Summer associate programs at Biglaw firms are starting to wrap up. So it’s time for us to seek submissions for the best summer associate event of the season.
Biglaw summer programs are smaller and less opulent than they used to be. But they’re not as bad as they were during the darkest days of the recession. Summer associates are getting offers. And having lesbian sex. It’s not all bad.
There have to be some summer events worth nominating this year. Hell, at this point we’d settle for a summer event that didn’t require medical attention after it finished….
We’ve mentioned this before, but it definitely bears repeating: fashion law is a fast-growing specialty practice area, a place where IP and corporate junkies alike can spread their wings and fly while taking a tour of the wonderful world of haute couture law. Thinking about joining the party?
If you’d like some additional details on this $250 billion dollar industry before becoming an insider in this stylish subset of law, check out our handy-dandy Infographic of the Day….
Have you ever visited a political campaign website that greets you with the dulcet tones of “I’m sexy and I know it?”
Well, now you have. You can die in peace.
Candidate Mindy Meyer — slogan “I’m Senator and I Know It,” in diamond bedazzling — is running for New York State Senate, on both the Republican and Conservative Party lines. Meyer is a former judicial intern for the Honorable Judge Rivera in the Kings County Supreme Court and currently attends the Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center in Central Islip, New York. If elected, she pledges to transfer to Albany to continue her studies. Fair enough. It’s not like the New York legislature does enough work to interfere with a full-time law school credit load….
There are many ways that lawyers can advertise their services to the general public, such as television commercials and print ads in the telephone book. But entertaining lawyer billboards are a favorite of ours; they have generated excellent material for some of Above the Law’s own caption contests.
Apparently they’re also great fodder for marriage proposals, as one Texan proved this past weekend….
In recent months, we’ve covered quite a few stories about attorneys from Texas with a certain je ne sais quoi — we’ll call it “flair.” Today, we’ve got some positive news from the Lone Star State, straight out of Texas Tech University School of Law, an institution known for “keepin’ it real.”
Although the school is ranked at No. 101 by U.S. News, just on the cusp of the traditional second and third tier, a tipster notes that “one tiara is better than any tier.” In exciting news, over the weekend, a beautiful rising 3L at Texas Tech Law was crowned as the new Miss Texas 2012.
We know, we know: pics or it didn’t happen.
We aim to please, so of course we’ve got the pictures — yes, the pageant included a swimsuit competition — as well as an interview with this law student turned beauty queen.
Let’s check out the new Miss Texas 2012, shall we?
Did you know that for years, the U.S. Patent and Trademark has operated almost entirely out of one location in northern Virginia? Kind of odd, seeing as out in California we’ve got that whole Silicon Valley thing going on. And Virginia is kind of far away.
But, no longer. The PTO announced that it is opening several new offices across the country. Can you guess where?
Contrary to popular belief, many lawyers who toil in Biglaw actually enjoy what they do. This is especially true of partners (as opposed to associates who just pass through on their way to in-house or government opportunities). Some partners enjoy their work so much that they’d do it for free — or at least for much less than the millions they typically receive.
Of course, even if you find fulfillment in the work you do as a law firm partner, you can’t deny that the other benefits are nice. Being a Biglaw partner certainly allows you to provide an upscale lifestyle for your family. And it might permit you to enjoy an early retirement for yourself.
When you earn millions of dollars a year in partner profits, with lucrative retirement benefits on top of that (assuming your firm doesn’t do a Dewey), you don’t need to work until you’re 65 or 70. Instead, you can get an early start on your golden years, pursuing all of the hobbies and interests that you never had the chance to explore while billing 2000-plus hours a year.
That’s exactly what a retired Skadden corporate partner, James Freund, has been doing. Freund, who is now 77, retired from SASMF back in 1996, around the age of 61 (a little early, but not hugely so).
A few years ago, Freund scaled back his lifestyle. He traded in his $5 million townhouse for an apartment — one that cost a mere $3 million. Being a retired Skadden M&A partner is a tough life, but somebody’s got to live it….
We’ll start with some analysis of the October Term 2012 law clerks, now that we know who they are, and then show you the updated law clerk lists for OT 2012 and OT 2013….
And why are SCOTUS clerks in the limelight? One reason is that they are privy to some serious secrets. The entire nation is eagerly anticipating the Obamacare decision — and they know how it’s going to come out.
No wonder a “no guests” policy has been instituted at the SCOTUS clerk happy hours. The pressure to keep the Obamacare secret — but also to spill it! — must be mind-blowing.
Some of the current clerks are married; do you think they’ve been able to resist telling their spouses? If a clerk goes out for drinks with friends and gets a little tipsy, might he spill the beans? If a clerk has brunch with her parents on Sunday for Father’s Day, and Dad speculates about how the case will come out, could the clerk’s telling facial expression reveal the ruling? [FN1]
If I were one of the Elect this Term, I’d never leave my apartment except to go to work, and I’d set my email auto-reply and voicemail greetings to say the following: “Please be advised that I will be completely unavailable — for in-person meetings, telephone conversations, or any other type of contact — until June 25, 2012. Thank you for your understanding.”
This brings us to today’s topic: the latest news in Supreme Court clerk hiring. Which lucky (and brilliant) young lawyers will find themselves at One First Street for October Term 2012?
It must be tough to leave an apartment like this one, with great views of Central Park, to go work in a drab federal office building.
Being a federal prosecutor is an amazing legal job, but it doesn’t pay particularly well. When I worked in theU.S. Attorney’s Office, I earned well under six figures. An assistant U.S. attorney can break the $100,000 mark after a sufficient number of years in practice, but AUSAs generally don’t earn Biglaw money.
(People who work as special AUSAs on secondment from better-paying parts of the federal government, such as Main Justice or the SEC, earn significantly more than regular AUSAs on the “AD” — Administratively Determined, aka Awfully Depressing — pay scale. But even these SAUSAs, not to be confused with the completely unpaid SAUSAs, make less than they would in comparable private practice positions.)
This brings us to the question du jour: how can a federal prosecutor afford to live in an apartment that is worth more than twice as much as the most expensive lawyer home in Washington, D.C.? We’re talking about a $25 million apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, in one of Fifth Avenue’s finest prewar buildings, with amazing views of Central Park.
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.
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
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