Legal blogs and trade publications have been writing about “The Death of Big Law” for months. But now it’s official. The patient has been pronounced dead by no less an authority than the New York Times. Who needs the fat lady to sing when the Gray Lady has spoken?

First, a quick caveat. Obviously Biglaw hasn’t “died”; large law firms continue to exist, and they continue to be very profitable. They may have to evolve with changing times, but they are still with us, and they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. What has died, rather, is a certain version of Biglaw, full of fabulosity, fun and frothiness — think Biglaw, circa 2007. May it rest in peace.

So, on to the article. It appeared in print in yesterday’s Sunday Styles — yes, the Style section, normally the home of wedding announcements and trendspotting pieces (sometimes of questionable validity). Despite its location in a guilty pleasure of a section, however, it’s a solid and hard-hitting piece.

The reporter, Alex Williams, begins by discussing The Deep End, the new ABC show set in a law firm (and previously mocked by Elie). It features associates having tons o’ fun — which makes it ridiculously outdated (assuming it ever was accurate). Williams writes:

“The Deep End” was conceived in 2007, that halcyon era of $160,000 starting salaries and full employment even for law grads who had scored in the 150s on their LSAT’s.

Those days are over. As the profession lurches through its worst slump in decades, with jobs and bonuses cut and internal pressures to perform rising, associates do not just feel as if they are diving into the deep end, but rather, drowning.

As you can tell from this excerpt, the article is stylishly written and fun to read. Although it might not tell regular ATL readers much that will surprise them, it’s a well-reported wrap-up of where things stand now, sure to be appreciated by a general audience. (It’s also much better than the Times’s last major effort to tackle Biglaw as a topic.)

The piece has been at or near the top of the NYT’s “Most E-Mailed” list for a few days now (since it first appeared online well before it showed up yesterday in print). Help it stay on the list by emailing the article to your parents or friends. Or do a good deed, and email it to that cousin of yours who is thinking about going to law school. She’ll thank you later.

Okay, that was a cheap shot — there are legitimate reasons to go to law school. But there are also things about the law, as a profession and as a business, that potential law students ought to know.

Let’s dig deeper into the piece….

The most recent New Yorker features a profile of the newest resident of the High Court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Given the tone of the piece, you might think One First Street is turning into Melrose Place. Journalist Lauren Collins describes Sotomayor as “the first celebrity Justice”: a “diabetic, a divorcée, a dental-bill debtor, a person who, the night before her investiture ceremony, belted out “We Are Family” in a karaoke bar at a Red Roof Inn.”

The profile covers some familiar territory, highlighting attacks on Sotomayor’s intellect during the confirmation process and indignation over her aggressive questioning during oral arguments since taking a seat on the High bench.

Overall, though, it’s more favorable in tone than the profile of John Roberts in the magazine last year. As the WSJ Law Blog notes, Sotomayor comes across as “eminently personable” and as a “stickler for preparation.”

Tina Brown of the Daily Beast, a former editor of the New Yorker, is a bit more graphic in her reaction to the piece for NPR:

Brown says the justice comes across as an “up-from-the-bootstraps woman who loves to bust out a poker game and knock back a scotch.” But, Brown adds, she also comes across as meticulous, rigorous and heavily influenced by her mother, a nurse, who emphasized education above all else…

“Sotomayor is not a great prose styler, not a fancy-flourish merchant,” says Brown. “She’s not a person who’s going to reinvent the philosophical approach to law, but she does believe that the law is to be understood by the common man in the street. And I think that there’s a lot to be said for that, actually.”

We concur with Brown’s ruling on the piece. We’ve excerpted our favorite anecdote from the profile after the jump. Clerking for Sotomayor sounds fun….

If you happen to be on the frigid East Coast today, currently experiencing the coldest temperatures of the season, grab yourself a cup of cocoa and a copy of the Sunday New York Times. The NYT often has articles of interest to a legal audience, but this weekend’s edition has an especially high number of stories either by or about the boldface names of the legal profession. To wit:

1. Power of Attorney: Questions for John Yoo. Deborah Solomon interviews John Yoo, the Berkeley law professor perhaps most well-known for his authorship of the so-called “torture memos.” Considering her liberal politics and modus operandi as an interviewer — we’ve previously described her as “snarky, cranky, exceedingly direct” — we were expecting her to go to town on Yoo.

But Professor Yoo actually comes across very well in the short Q-and-A (and is looking newly svelte in the accompanying photo). He’s smart, funny, and charming — not a surprise to us, based on our personal interactions with him, but perhaps a surprise to some who know only the cartoon villain depicted by the mainstream media.

2. The 30-Minute Interview: Jonathan L. Mechanic. An interesting interview with real estate super-lawyer Jonathan Mechanic, chairman of the real estate department of Fried Frank (and previously profiled here). We learn that Mechanic, in addition to being a top real estate attorney, is also a real estate investor: he owns retail and commercial properties in Bergen County, NJ (where we grew up).

Three more stories, after the jump.

Greetings, Above the Law readers. We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you an announcement relating to our parent company, Breaking Media.

From our press release:

Jonah Bloom, currently editor of Crain Communications’ Advertising Age, will be joining Breaking Media, the B2B digital blog network that publishes the popular sites Above The Law, DealBreaker, Going Concern and Fashionista, as Chief Executive Officer and Editor in Chief. In addition, Breaking Media announces that Matt Creamer, senior editor at Advertising Age, will be joining the company as Executive Editor. They begin January 4.

Bloom and Creamer bring to Breaking Media extensive experience in B2B news and information. During their tenure, Bloom and Creamer helped lead the transformation of Ad Age into multiplatform information brand, greatly expanding its audience and its digital presence with newsletters and blogs and evolving the content to serve the media and marketing business with intelligence that went well beyond breaking news.

At Breaking Media, Bloom and Creamer, along with Publisher-Chief Operating Officer David Minkin, will be charged with the continued growth of the company’s existing stable of websites and with leading expansion into new coverage areas.

What does this mean for ATL on a day-to-day basis? Well, your above-signed writer will be returning his full-time focus to writing and editing posts on Above the Law. Observant commenters have noticed our byline appearing with increased frequency over the past few weeks; now you know why.

UPDATE: In response to some of your comments, we’re happy to report that the rest of Team ATL — Elie, Kash, and all the columnists — will remain in place.

FURTHER UPDATE: To the extent that this is a “demotion” for us, it was one that we requested (and that the company accommodated). Above the Law is our baby, and given our “control freak” tendencies, we wanted maximum involvement with it.

Full press release, after the jump.

Over the weekend, we had the pleasure of attending the Federalist Society’s 2009 National Lawyers Convention, down in Washington, D.C. As in past years, conservative and libertarian legal luminaries were plentiful, and the panel discussions and other events were excellent.

Some folks — e.g., Josh Blackman — were liveblogging the proceedings. We’re only writing up the conference now, so you can call this “lateblogging” (both because we’re late in blogging about the conference, and blogging late at night; hey, better late than never).

This year, sadly, we missed most of the Thursday events (because of a speaking engagement at the ABA’s Law Firm Marketing Strategies Conference). The first Fed Soc panel we caught was on Friday afternoon:

Free Speech: The Fairness Doctrine

In today’s Morning Docket, we mentioned the recent benchslap administered to Sidley Austin by Judge Diane Cannon (pictured), an Illinois state court judge. Lynne Marek of the NLJ reports:

A court hearing on Tuesday in Chicago at which former Northwestern University journalism students planned to fight a subpoena for their records and grades turned into a judicial lambasting of their Sidley Austin lawyers.

It started when Judge Diane Gordon Cannon of the Cook County Circuit Court called the lawyers, partner Richard O’Brien and associate Linda Friedlieb, to the bench before prosecutors from the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office had even arrived. She asked who had written the brief she was holding. O’Brien and Friedlieb responded that they had submitted the reply supporting the motion to quash the subpoena.

Judge Cannon was, suffice it to say, not happy about the Sidley Austin brief.

Her Honor’s complaints — plus discussion of whether they were justified, and a reader poll — after the jump.

Yesterday’s Lawsuit of the Day — Jones v. Minkin, a $44 million lawsuit against yours truly, Above the Law publisher David Minkin, and Dead Horse Media (now known as Breaking Media) — has been voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiff, University of Miami law professor Donald Jones.

Pursuant to Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i)(B), the dismissal is without prejudice. If Professor Jones wants to refile, he should note the statute of limitations (which had already run as to most of our posts about him by the time his complaint was filed).

There was NO SETTLEMENT in this case. Above the Law has made no changes to our prior posts, and we have paid no money to Professor Jones. The case was dismissed by the plaintiff without anything from our side, except a letter from our lawyer.

UPDATE (3:35 PM): We have offered Professor Jones a guest post on Above the Law in which to provide his side of the story, about either the lawsuit or the underlying facts. We have offered to keep the comments on that post closed or open, depending on his preference. (And we would have done this in the first place, had he made such a request.)

A huge thanks to our counsel, Marc Randazza.

Comment from Randazza, plus links to the notice of voluntary dismissal and other news outlets and blogs — we will UPDATE continually, so do check back for fresh links — after the jump.

For the first time in over three years of operation, Above the Law has been sued. We feel the lawsuit has no merit, but we will not comment further on this ongoing litigation. To access the pro se complaint, coverage by other news outlets and blogs, and ATL’s prior posts about Professor Donald Jones, click on the links collected after the jump.

Please note that we have closed comments on this post, out of respect for the judicial process. Thank you.

UPDATE: We will be continually updating this post with links to news and blogosphere coverage. We have already added new links from the ABA Journal, the WSJ Law Blog, and the Volokh Conspiracy, among other sources.

The fresh links will appear AFTER THE JUMP, so check them out there. Thanks.

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has a comically predictable pattern for his columns. He usually starts with a little anecdote from his humdrum life and then launches into a ground-shaking, earth-shattering revelation about global politics.

Sometimes we wonder if Friedman has created a custom Madlib for crafting his columns. This week, he opines on our poor education system being the reason for the Great Recession. In a spot in the column that called for a ‘noun for lawyers’, he decided to throw in “untouchables.”

No, he’s not talking about contract attorneys. See Friedman’s explanation for lawyer layoffs after the jump.

One of our favorite legal affairs journalists is switching networks. As first reported by Mediabistro, the fabulous (and fabulously talented) Jan Crawford Greenburg is leaving ABC News for CBS News. Greenburg, author of the excellent and bestselling Supreme Conflict (2007), will become Chief Legal Correspondent at CBS, as of January 4, 2010. Meanwhile, back at ABC, her Supreme Court beat will be picked up by Terry Moran.

Greenburg’s move to CBS is something of a homecoming, since she worked at the Tiffany Network prior to her three-year stint at ABC. At CBS she’ll work once again with Bob Schieffer, described by Fishbowl DC as her longtime friend and mentor.

Congratulations and good luck at your new (old) home, Jan!

JCG’s farewell email to her colleagues at ABC, plus the press release announcing her hire at CBS, after the jump.

According to CNN Money, being a lawyer is one of the Best Jobs in America. Attorneys rank eighteenth on CNN’s list, just behind IT business analysts, and just ahead of doctors.

Congratulations?

If you look at the list, you can make a very cogent argument that lawyers should have ranked much higher. Some of the jobs that did better than lawyers are: CPA (more at Going Concern), nurse, and something called physician assistant, which sounds a lot like doing routine medical work with none of the glory (or pay) of specialists.

Ranked below lawyers (but still in the top 50) are such plum jobs as: human resource manager, hotel general manager, and corporate paralegal.

You know, when you put it like that, maybe we are not “devoting too many of our very best minds” to the practice of law. No offense to hoteliers and all of the challenging work they do, but it’s not like we need more snooty concierges.

All that said, I’m not entirely sure CNN Money knows a whole lot about what it is like to be a lawyer these days.

Let’s take a look at the profile after the jump.

Last week we wrote about the move of prominent D.C. lawyers Lanny Davis and Eileen O’Connor from Orrick to McDermott Will & Emery. Am Law Daily described the jump as follows: “Lanny Davis, a longtime Washington, D.C., lawyer who supported Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid and was a fraternity brother of George W. Bush, is taking his unique practice from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe to McDermott, Will & Emery.”

It’s not the case, however, that the entire practice moved. As noted by one commenter, the rest of the legal strategic and crisis management practice remained with Orrick. Consistent with this, an Orrick spokesperson issued the following statement to ATL:

We wish Lanny and Eileen well, but Orrick’s law, policy, media, and crisis management practice remains vibrant and strong with continuing plans for expansion and will keep delivering its unique blend of legal, public relations and government affairs counsel to our clients around the world.

Remaining at Orrick are partners Adam Goldberg, who was co-chair of the practice with Davis, and Joshua Galper. Goldberg and Galper will head the practice going forward. In addition, the associates who work in and with the law, policy and media group are staying at Orrick.

As for clients, it’s not yet clear which ones will stay with Orrick and which will move to McDermott. “Thankfully, this is a practice where we’ve always had plenty of work, so that’s not an issue,” Galper said. (We’d guess, however, that certain clients closely tied to Davis — like CEAL, the Honduras business group supporting the coup in that country — will travel with him.)

Get to know Messrs. Galper and Goldberg, and read more about Orrick’s very interesting and unusual practice area, after the jump.

Last year, we wrote about retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor entering a new field: video game development. She’s spearheading a project called Our Courts, which seeks to improve civic education in middle schools. The Our Courts website officially launched in January of this year.

The first two games, “Supreme Decision” and “Do I Have A Right?”, went live this summer. The Washington Post contacted us and asked us to review them. We played Nintendo, Oregon Trail, and Carmen Sandiego growing up, and we spent a recent Friday night at Elie’s playing Rock Band, so we were willing to give the Our Courts game a go.

Check out our review of the games, along with additional reflections on civic education and public access to the courts, in this Washington Post piece: Educational? You Be the Judge.

While Lat was in D.C., he swung by the Washington Post’s offices to talk about the games. Check out his star turn in the video after the jump.

Last week we participated in a panel discussion at Georgetown Law that was skillfully moderated by Eileen O’Connor, the Emmy-nominated journalist turned high-powered lawyer. After the talk, we tried to play the “name game” with O’Connor regarding colleagues of hers over at Orrick. But O’Connor seemed strangely uneasy about Orrick, and she quickly changed the subject.

Could this have been why? From Am Law Daily:

Lanny Davis, a longtime Washington, D.C., lawyer who supported Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid and was a fraternity brother of George W. Bush, is taking his unique practice from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe to McDermott, Will & Emery.

Davis, who previously moved to Orrick in 2003 from Patton Boggs, will bring counsel Eileen O’Connor, a former ABC News and CNN reporter, with him.

Beltway dwellers know that Lanny Davis is a big deal. He served as White House Special Counsel during the Clinton Administration, but he has friends on both sides of the aisle. As Bobby Burchfield, cohead of McDermott’s Washington office, told Zach Lowe of Am Law Daily, “Lanny is the only person I know who considers both Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush good friends.”

In addition to practicing law, Davis writes for the Washington Times and for The Hill. In one recent column, he scolded bloggers for inadequate fact-checking. If anything in this post is inaccurate, Mr. Davis, please email us and we’ll fix it ASAP.

Press release after the jump. Good luck to Davis and O’Connor in their new professional home.

As previously mentioned in these pages, your above-signed scribe has been named a Legal Rebel — one of “50 leading innovators” in the legal profession, as selected by the ABA Journal.

The profile, written by Rachel Zahorsky, appears here. For more background on the Legal Rebels project, see our prior post, or the Legal Rebels website.

Through the Legal Rebels team, we were given the opportunity to meet and interview a longtime idol of ours: Steven Brill, founder of the American Lawyer and Court TV (and a fellow Yale Law School graduate). Brill’s latest project is Journalism Online, which “is pioneering the effort to make the transition to a paid online model successful for publishers and easy for readers.”

You can check out the video of our interview with Steve Brill here, or read about it at the ABA Journal.

David Lat: Gossip at Law [Legal Rebels / ABA Journal]
David Lat Interviews Steve Brill [Legal Rebels / ABA Journal]
Ever the Tough Editor, Am Law Founder Hits Publication’s Websites [ABA Journal]

P.S. Elsewhere in shameless plugs: if you’re in D.C. and don’t have anything more exciting to do tonight, head over to Georgetown Law for a discussion of new media and the law. The panel will feature yours truly, Tony Mauro from the National Law Journal, and Matt Welch from Reason Magazine. Eileen O’Connor, former reporter and bureau chief at CNN, will moderate.

Earlier: Maverick Law: The ABA Journal’s ‘Legal Rebels’
Mr. Lat Goes to Washington

We mentioned this in passing yesterday, but in case you missed it, please take note of this event in D.C. next week:

On Wednesday, September 23, the Georgetown Federalist Society will be hosting a panel event on New Media & The Law at 7 PM in Hart Auditorium [at Georgetown University Law Center, 600 New Jersey Ave. N.W., Washington, DC].

The panel will feature David Lat from Above the Law, Tony Mauro from the National Law Journal, and Matt Welch from Reason Magazine. Eileen O’Connor, adjunct professor at Georgetown and former reporter and bureau chief at CNN, will moderate.

The event will be followed by a reception.

The event is sponsored by the Georgetown Federalist Society. Hope to see you there!

New Media & The Law Event at GULC [Georgetown Federalist Society Blog]

Gawker reports that Incisive Media — the legal media giant behind the American Lawyer magazine, Law.com, and many other excellent and influential print and online publications — is taking back its old name: American Lawyer Media (ALM).

ALM adopted the Incisive moniker back in 2007, after being acquired by Incisive Media for $630 million. Incisive itself was acquired in 2006 by Apax Partners, a private equity firm.

The full memo about the ALM rebranding appears after the jump. Here’s the most interesting part:

While we will continue to be majority-owned by funds advised by Apax Partners, our lender, Royal Bank of Scotland, will swap a portion of its existing ALM debt for a 49% equity stake in the company and become a minority owner of ALM.

Turning over almost half of the equity in the company to a lender — that doesn’t sound good, does it?

But there’s more to the story here.

We thought something was off about the discussion of the recruiting situation at Yale Law School in last week’s big New York Times article about the tough legal job market.

It turns out we were right. Check out this correction, which appeared in yesterday’s paper:

An article on Wednesday about a cutback in hiring by law firms misstated several firms’ recruitment decisions involving Yale Law School. Two firms — Baker & McKenzie and Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy — did not register for the program in 2009; another, White & Case, registered but dropped its registration before scheduling any interviews. None of the firms “canceled interviews in New Haven.”

The errors were brought to the attention of the Times by a YLS spokesperson, who explained that the school was never contacted by the reporter and had no idea as to where he obtained his information.

“No students were ‘stunned’ by the canceling of any interviews,” the spokesperson explained to ATL. “That just simply did not happen.”

Downturn Dims Prospects Even at Top Law Schools [New York Times]

Earlier: All the News That’s Fit to Recycle

The ABA Journal is kicking off a series on legal rebels. It’s not an oxymoronic phrase; there are innovators and mavericks all throughout our risk averse profession. Here’s what the publication is looking for:

Over the next three months, the Journal will profile 50 of the profession’s leading innovators on www.LegalRebels.com, with at least three profiles added every week. Each profile will include multimedia features like video interviews, audio podcasts, photo slideshows and live chats.

[T]he recession is totally changing the practice of law, and the Legal Rebels project is documenting the individual lawyers who are leading the changes.

But you don’t have to be featured by the ABA Journal to be a legal rebel. Check out the rebel manifesto, after the jump.

Check out this article, wherein the New York Times tells you what you already knew. We’ve been covering these developments for weeks here at Above the Law.

To all the mainstream media reporters who complain about blogs repackaging their content without adequate attribution, we say: it looks recycling is a two-way street.

In fairness to the NYT, they’re writing for a general audience. Some of their readers might actually find it newsworthy that (1) legal employment is down during this recession, (2) people often have to go into debt to attend law school, and (3) some of these people are having a hard time finding jobs now.

Regular visitors to ATL will find the Times piece more boring than incorrect. But one paragraph was wildly off the mark.