Last night, when we reported the news of secretarial staff layoffs at Dewey & LeBoeuf, we mentioned a prediction of additional layoffs today — i.e., Tuesday — or later in the week. That prediction has already come to pass — like so many predictions about Dewey, sadly.
Last night, they came for the secretaries. This time, they’ve come for the associates….
Continue reading “Dewey Know When LeBoeuf Is Cooked? When Associates Are Laid Off En Masse”
The U.S. employees of Dewey & LeBoeuf received a letter today that many of them have been expecting for a long time.
It was a note warning people to prepare for the worst. It was a letter finally admitting to firm employees that “it is possible that adverse developments could ultimately result in the closure of the firm.”
So, now we’re on notice…
Dude. CHILL OUT.
Earlier this week, we learned about an epic departure memo sent to an allegedly terrible boss (or a great boss, depending on who you ask).
Well, it is turning out to be a bad week for all kinds of terrible bosses. On Wednesday, a senior in-house attorney at a global financial services firm was sued by his former secretary for gender discrimination and creating a hostile work environment. Or in layman’s terms, allegedly being an über-jerk, and then some. We have snippets from the suit after the jump, but first, quiz time:
According to the lawsuit, this in-house boss from hell allegedly flung which of the following at his hapless former secretary:
A) a cup of hot tea
B) yogurt
C) degrading verbal insults
D) all of the above
Answers, as well as some expletive-laden invective from the lawsuit, below….
Continue reading “Lawsuit of the Day: This General Counsel Is Allegedly A Teabag-Throwing Terror”
* Of course no one likes the new pro bono requirement for would-be New York lawyers. But is it also an abuse of regulatory discretion? Maaaaybe… [Ricochet]
* Attorneys settle a personal injury case for $350,000, just minutes before the jury returns a $9 million verdict. All hell breaks loose, Satan rides in on a chariot pulled by dragons, all the light bulbs explode, and now they are arguing over whether to retry the case. [The Recorder]
* Texas bar exam results are out! [Texas Board of Law Examiners]
* The jury judge has spoken. Woe and mockery to those in Pennsylvania’s 49th Judicial District who fail to use the Oxford comma. [Constitutional Daily]
* Do robots dream of electric anti-Semitism? A new lawsuit filed by a French anti-discrimination group thinks so. The group is not happy that Google apparently suggests “Jewish” as an autocomplete result if you look up celebrities such as Rupert Murdoch and Jon Hamm. I wonder if Godwin’s Law applies to computers. [Daily Dolt]
* The Ninth Circuit rules that John Yoo must be granted qualified immunity in a lawsuit filed by an American who was allegedly tortured. [Thomson Reuters]
* Interesting employment law tidbit: you might be able to destroy a surprising amount of your employer’s property before you get fired (gavel bang: Amar’e Stoudemire). [Dealbreaker]
* Paul Clement is a beast, is basically what it comes down to. [The Daily Beast]
* This is probably the grossest, most pornographic employment discrimination/sexual harassment/defamation lawsuit I’ve seen. Maybe fans of 50 Shades of Grey (affiliate link) might find it compelling. The writing in the lawsuit is probably better… [Courthouse News]
* Predictive coding is good. Now it’s bad. Now it’s good. Make up your mind! [Law Technology News]
* A touching obituary about a first-year Reed Smith associate who recently took his own life. [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]
* Elie was on Fox News late last night (video embed after the jump). He brought the funny. [Red Eye]
* If you ever get in trouble for tweeting or blogging about jury duty, Davis Oscar Markus is the guy to call. [Miami Herald]
* LexisNexis recently unveiled its new, ginormous legal e-book library. It’s just like a normal law library, except you don’t have to ask the pesky law librarian for help. [LexisNexis]
(Embedded Elie, after the jump.)
It's a terrible thing when you have to wait too long for your chance to rule.
The entitlement reign of the really old will not end soon. With advances in modern medicine, advances that the Supreme Court will tell us how we’re allowed to pay for, today’s old people will live and work longer than any previous generation on Earth.
Or at least take up space.
While a family might be able to shove Grandpa into a nursing home, modern businesses are having a really tough time getting septuagenarian or even octogenarian partners to go away, and leave their clients behind. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that Kelley Drye owes one of its partners over half a million dollars for trying to push him into retirement, and it opens a wide door for old people to hang onto to their offices and their clients well after they can no longer chew the leather.
Maybe it’s the right thing to do, but it’s got to be annoying for the Prince Charles-esque 60-year-old “up and comer”….
Continue reading “Kelley Drye Case Makes It Even Harder to Tell Old People to Go Away”
* Alexander Wang says that he wasn’t running a sweatshop and that the former employee making the allegations was actually mean to all the other indentured servants workers. [Fashionista]
* We’re well into the phase of the Trayvon Martin investigation where people are trying to blame the victim, but until they show me a guy who was killed by a pack of Skittles, I really don’t think we’ve learned anything new. [New York Daily News]
* A sports agent tells all. [Legal Blitz]
* You don’t think your Skype chats at work are private, do you? In fairness, who still thinks anything they do at work is private? If you want to keep your privacy, you best work in disguise. I mean, you don’t really think I’m a large black man who talks about race all the time, do you? [Not-So Private Parts / Forbes]
* Defending child pornographers. Somebody has to do it, and I’m so glad it’s not me. [Underdog]
After the jump, we’ve got some video footage of Lat dancing around like heathen as he throws fresh dirt on Dewey’s grave….
When we last checked in with the support staff at the law firm of Elizabeth R. Wellborn P.A., we discovered that more than a dozen of them had been fired because they wore orange shirts to work. Their excuse: they all wore orange on payday so they’d look like a group when they met for happy hour. Management didn’t buy it — they thought that members of the support staff were protesting something, and fired them on the spot.
As one commenter on our last post on this issue intelligently noted, “CHECK YOU PERCEIVED CONCERTED ACTIVITY.” One week later, it’s been revealed that some of the support staff may have been protesting after all. Almost half of them have lawyered up. But what, exactly, were they protesting?
Continue reading “The Plot Thickens: Some ‘Orange Workers’ May Have Been Protesting After All”
Which t-shirt will get you fired?
Yesterday in Morning Docket, we mentioned that more than a dozen law firm staffers in Florida had been fired because they wore orange shirts to work, but the tips kept rolling in. We’re going to give you what you want. Better late than never, right?
Given that orange is popping this spring in designers’ color palettes, people really want to know more about this apparent fashion “faux pas.” Because if looking like a walking traffic cone is wrong, then some people don’t want to be right.
But if it means that they’re going to get fired, then they might just reconsider staying on trend this season….
Continue reading “Orange: A Color That Can Get You Fired in Florida”
Yolanda Young probably isn't smiling today.
Litigation against law firms: it’s all the rage right now. Earlier this week, Sara Randazzo of Am Law Daily did a round-up of over a dozen lawsuits in which law firms have been named as defendants.
Such lawsuits come, and such lawsuits go. Let’s look at the “going” side of the ledger. A federal judge just dismissed the high-profile lawsuit filed by Yolanda Young — a pundit, published memoirist (affiliate link), and Georgetown-trained lawyer, as noted on her website bio — against the elite D.C. law firm of Covington & Burling….
Continue reading “Covington Prevails in Discrimination Suit Brought by Yolanda Young”
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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.
Also, we have the two below in-house openings:
Keep reading »
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?
Keep reading »
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