In our last post about Winston & Strawn, we covered an “all associates” meeting at which the firm admitted conducting layoffs, but refused to divulge information about their scope. The firm said something along these lines: “Out of respect for the individuals involved, we won’t publicly disclose either future layoffs or past layoff numbers.”

Several commenters questioned that rationale. See, e.g., here:

WTF does that mean?! Are they dead [so] that W&S doesn’t want to speak (ill) of them?

I think I’ll try injecting that into my daily life. “Out of respect for the individuals involved, I won’t publicly disclose either future sexual affairs or past mistress numbers.” I like that… think it’ll work?

Commenters also requested estimates of the size of Winston’s layoffs.

We don’t have hard data ourselves. But we estimate — conservatively, we think — that Winston & Strawn has laid off at least 15 percent of its lawyers in 2009 to date.

So, how did we reach this number?

[Speaking in the voice of the late, great Don LaFontaine] In a world where 2Ls are terrified. In a time when Biglaw openly flouts NALP rules. There was one man who would not take it anymore.

[Cue sweeping and inspiring theme song]

That man was Harvard Law School’s Assistant Dean for Career Services, Mark Weber.

Without the knowledge of the general public, the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell told 2Ls interviewing with the firm that it would disregard the 45 day waiting period for holding open offers. Instead, the firm would expect a decision in just two weeks. Am Law Daily reports:

In late July, S&C called several of the nation’s top law schools and informed career services personnel at those schools that the firm would not be following the 45-day guideline, according to six sources with direct knowledge of the situation. All six spoke only on the condition that they not be identified publicly.

Instead, S&C told the career services personnel, the firm would require prospects to respond yes or no in two weeks.

But S&C wasn’t prepared for Mark Weber.

Click below to continue listening to this trailer.

Last recruiting season, Above the Law was the first publication to warn law students to accept their offers for summer employment as soon as possible.

This year that advice is so obvious that even law school career service professionals are telling students to accept offers quickly. William A. Chamberlain, assistant dean for law career strategy and advancement at Northwestern, wrote an article for the National Law Journal this week, strongly urging students to make decisions rapidly:

Our message to students about how to handle offers has been straightforward — accept your offer quickly. The key is to get a job for next summer. Smart students will not rely on NALP’s 45-day guideline but rather accept their offers as soon as humanly possible. [W]e have dealt with all sorts of reactions by firms to the economy and are urging our students to be risk-averse. Any sense of entitlement will be fatal this fall.

Relying on NALP guidelines = fatal?

You know, when the career services dean is directly warning students not to rely upon the NALP rules, I am forced to ask why students should heed the NALP rule limiting the number of offers students can accept.

Let’s get into it after the jump.

There’s nothing quite like the burning smell of deflation on a Monday morning. NALP has released its associate salary survey. The good news is that the median starting salary for associates is $130,000. The bad news is that there is no way on God’s green earth that the median salary is going to stay that high. The ABA Journal reports this excerpt from the NALP survey:

Salary information for the survey by NALP, an association for legal career professionals, was collected as of April 1, before large law firms paying the prevailing beginning salary of $160,000 began to cut pay. “This year’s report reflects what is likely to be the apogee of large firm salaries for the foreseeable future,” according to a NALP press release.

A cursory glance at Above the Law’s salary cut page will reveal that New York will secede from the Union sooner than New York will go to $190K. But there are other factors in play that will push down future median salary numbers.

More details after the jump.

Yesterday, we mentioned a NALP “glitch” that allowed users to get a sneak peak at the organization’s 2009 statistics about law firms. The problem, whatever it was, was fixed soon after we alerted NALP to the problem. Here’s the quick statement we obtained from NALP:

Legal employers provide this data to NALP each winter. NALP is pleased to be able to publish this free online searchable database each spring once the data submissions are finalized.

Excellent. It’s a great resource.

As promised, today we take a look at some of the overall summer program numbers from the firms that are ranked 11 through 20, according to Vault (check out firms 1 - 10 here).

The moderately surprising fact is that this next batch of firms didn’t decrease their overall summer associate offers as much as the Vault top ten. Looking at the firm’s New York offices, there was a 14% decrease in offers to 2Ls, compared with a nearly 20% decrease in the V10.

But, one firm really does skew those numbers. More details after the jump.

There’s a pretty interesting glitch happening right now over at NALP (here at ATL, we know something about “technical difficulties” — we’re working on ours). Even though the new numbers haven’t been made public yet, if you know what you’re doing you can get a sneak peak at the 2009 NALP numbers.

We’re not going to tell you how to do it, but we’ve done it and we’ve obtained some pretty interesting numbers to report about the New York summer programs at the top 20 firms as ranked by Vault. We’ll give you some numbers about the V10 today. Tomorrow we’ll expand our look to the Vault 20.

Getting an offer at one of the top nine firms in the land (the NALP glitch didn’t work for S&C) was considerably more difficult this year than last year. We compares the number of summer associate offers extended to 2Ls in 2007, with the expected numbers for that same group in 2008. Overall 2Ls offers were down a whopping 20% at the top 10 firms. And you have to wonder what percentage of those summer jobs are going to turn into full-time offers for employment.

For 1Ls, it gets even worse. We explain that and some other highlights, after the jump.