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Schoenfeld v. Allen & Oy-vey-ry: We’ve Got Close to Bupkis

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Norman Schoenfeld Allen Overy LLP Above the Law blog.jpgBack in December — around the holidays, so many of you may have missed it — we wrote about Schoenfeld v. Allen & Overy. It’s a lawsuit brought by Norman Schoenfeld, an observant Jewish lawyer who once worked in the New York office of Allen & Overy. Schoenfeld claims, among other things, that A&O discriminated and retaliated against him as a result of his observing the Sabbath.
Since then, we’ve received many requests for updates. This message is representative:

“Is there any news on this lawsuit? As a Sabbath observant 2L, this is of interest to me and many of my friends. A post on ATL providing an update would be appreciated. Love the site. Thanks.”

We’re not aware of any procedural developments in the case. And we sadly didn’t receive much in response to our request for firsthand information about Norman Schoenfeld or Allen & Overy in New York. Here’s the most interesting tip we received — some opinions from an A&O associate:

“That this suit goes on is beyond anyone here at A&O. I did not know this Schoenfeld guy much for the five minutes he worked here and don’t know if his complaint has merit. I will say this though: associates don’t want to work with Mark Wojciechowski and are asking not to work with him.”

“He told A&O he was bringing associates from Mayer Brown; MB associates refused to come work with him. Better to stay on a sinking ship like MB NY than work for a nightmare like Mark Woj….”

“No one can understand how firm management let this happen (rumor is that A&O already fired their first outside counsel). Recruitment of NY lawyers is badly affected and we just wait to see how much this costs the firm in damages (and associates of course since all s**t gets passed down – you know the partners won’t take the hit in their pocket).”

We contacted the firm for comment, but they didn’t have anything to add.
If you have any firsthand information to pass along about the events in question, please email us. Thanks.
Complaint: Norman Schoenfeld v. Allen & Overy (PDF)
Earlier: Lawsuit of the Day: The Jewish Version of Charney v. S&C?

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Associate Bonus Watch: Kaye Scholer Bonus Follow-Up
(And Other Random Tidbits About the Firm)

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associate bonus watch 2007 law firm Above the Law blog.jpgA little follow-up on Kaye Scholer, whose bonus memo we posted back in November. From a source at the firm:

Just found out that despite the memo sent to associates last year, Kaye Scholer has decided to tie the special bonus to hours. Requiring 2200 hours to receive the special bonus.

There was no mention of this hours requirement in the original memo. Of course, it was designed to appear that Kaye Scholer was paying market when they had no intention of doing so.

But in fairness to the firm, they did leave themselves with some wiggle room, stating that special bonuses would be paid on a “discretionary” basis. It just seems that 2200 was the magic number required to trigger the exercise of said discretion.
Some associates aren’t happy about how that requirement was communicated (or not communicated, as the case may be). One associate claims that managing partner Barry Wilner, at a meeting held last year to discuss the bonus situation, did not disclose that 2200 hours would be the cutoff. As a result, “[a]ll the associates had to go on were rumors, which caused many associates to scramble at the last minute to achieve what they thought would be a sufficient amount of hours…. I’m not so much concerned about the amounts involved as much as I am concerned about the lack of information that floats through this firm.”
Two other bizarre bits of news about Kaye Scholer — involving “a giant Care Bear” and a roller derby queen named “She Raw,” which would seem to take the firm to Venable-level heights of weirdness — after the jump.

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(And Other Random Tidbits About the Firm)”

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Sports and the Law: Meet Marc Edelman
(and John Montgomery Ward)

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Sports and the Law Above the Law blog.jpg[Ed. note: As you may recall, last month we solicited applications for the position of ATL's sports columnist. We thank the many fine applicants who threw their hats into the ring.
Today we're pleased to introduce you to this site's new sportswriter: Marc Edelman, a sports lawyer and law professor. You can reach him directly by email (click here). And now, without further ado, we turn the floor over to Professor Edelman.]
As a young boy, I remember sitting with my father watching Super Bowl XXI. In that game, New York Giants quarterback Phil Simms completed 22-of-25 passes for 268 yards, leading my hometown G-Men to a 39-20 victory over John Elway’s Denver Broncos. At that moment, I knew that I would one day work in sports.
Flash forward 21 years. The Giants are back in the Super Bowl. Their then-famous center Bart Oates is now a practicing attorney, and I recently was named as a professor of sports law at New York Law School, Seton Hall University, and Manhattanville College. I am also the new sports columnist at Above the Law.
In the coming weeks, my column Sports and the Law will focus on issues involving the legal aspects of sports, including moral issues, labor policy, and antitrust policy (or lack thereof). This column will also discuss how lawyers can find jobs in the sports field.
Read the first column, after the jump.

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(and John Montgomery Ward)”

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Featured Survey Results: And The Winners Are . . .

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The time has come, and the crowning of ATL’s Lawyer of the Year and Second Favorite Blog After ATL, both of which are sponsored by ATL and Lateral Link, is at last upon us.
In all, a whopping 4,186 votes were cast, with 2,683 of you voting for Lawyer of the Year and 1,503 weighing in on which blog you like second-most after this one. Find out how it all turned out after the jump.

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Morning Docket: 01.31.08

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* New accounting rules for M&A. [DealBook]
* Lilly contemplates $1 billion payment to settle civil and criminal investigations relating to its marketing of Zyprexa. [New York Times]
* NYPD officer accused of pimping child. [MSNBC]
* Ex-priest jailed for murder via exorcism. [CNN]
* Indiana man arrested for making his own crosswalk. [The Indy Channel]
* Nader takes steps toward another run for the presidency in 2008. [Bloomberg]

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Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch: Justice Breyer’s Final Hire
(And a Digression on Judges Katzmann and Rakoff)

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Brianne Gorod Justice Stephen Breyer Above the Law blog.jpgWe bring you an addendum to Monday’s post about the latest in Supreme Court clerk hiring. And we’re pleasantly surprised to see that we have this news before Wikipedia.
Recently hired to clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer in October Term 2008: Brianne Gorod, currently in the D.C. office of O’Melveny & Myers. Gorod is a 2005 Yale Law grad and a former clerk to the judicial tag team of Jed S. Rakoff (S.D.N.Y.) and Robert A. Katzmann (2d Cir.).
Those who obsessively follows SCOTUS clerk hiring know that Judges Rakoff and Katzmann have jointly sent clerks to the Court before. But contrary to some rumors, they’re not always a “package deal” when it comes to hiring (although there is a significant degree of overlap among their current and former clerks).
Judge Katzmann prefers to hire individuals who have clerked on the district court (or have some other kind of post-law school work experience), so he regularly turns to Judge Rakoff, for whom he has a great deal of respect, as a source of clerkly talent. Judge Katzmann sometimes also helps promising applicants to his own chambers to secure interviews with Judge Rakoff. Conversely, Judge Rakoff also refers and sends clerks to Judge Katzmann, as well as to other Second Circuit judges, and he has also hired some clerks after Second Circuit clerkships. In short, both judges think it’s valuable for people to have both district and circuit clerkship experiences, and they try to help make that happen for their clerks. But they don’t hire 100 percent of their clerks jointly.
The current tally of OT 2008 SCOTUS clerks, with Brianne Gorod added, appears after the jump.

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(And a Digression on Judges Katzmann and Rakoff)”

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Non-Sequiturs: 01.30.08

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* Think of this as a compendium of Lawyers and Judges of the Day. [Legal Blog Watch]
* Speaking of judges who do embarrassing things, a Canadian judge insisted that an HIV-positive witness testify while wearing a mask. The judge also “moved the case to a bigger courtroom in order to create more distance between the witness and the bench.” [Toronto Star]
* D.C. power lawyer Robert Bennett has a new memoir coming out — plus a really cute dog! [Washingtonian]
* News you can use, with Super Bowl parties looming: double-dipping in a communal bowl of dip really is gross. [PrawfsBlawg]
* Federal judges to apply their judicial skills to reviewing submissions in the ACS’s Richard D. Cudahy Writing Competition. Deadline is February 15; contest details here. [ACS Blog]

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Judge of the Day: Richard Kopf

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Any trial judge with the Gall to benchslap the Supreme Court has a serious set of cojones.
Accordingly, Judge Richard Kopf (D. Neb.) — who sent beer to Professor Doug Berman, as recently noted — is our Judge of the Day. See links collected below.
We agree with Tony Mauro: Judge Kopf’s irreverent “top 10″ list of lessons learned from the high court’s sentencing jurisprudence is “a provocative jaw-dropper that may get Kopf scratched off the holiday card list at the Supreme Court.”
Judge Kopf’s “Top Ten” take on SCOTUS sentencing work [Sentencing Law and Policy]
The Top Ten Things I Learned from Apprendi, Blakely, Booker, Rita, Kimbrough, and Gall (PDF) [Sentencing Law and Policy]
Federal Judge’s ‘Top 10′ List Takes On Supreme Court’s Sentencing Decisions [Legal Times]
Richard G. Kopf bio [Federal Judicial Center]

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Pleito del Día: ¿Cómo se dice ‘d-bag’?

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Audi A8 car Tomas Delgado Spain Above the Law blog.jpgThe rain in Spain falls mainly on… a**holes? Well, only if most Spaniards are like Tomas Delgado — and we’re guessing (and hoping) they’re not.
After all, since chutzpah like this doesn’t come along often. Our latest Lawsuit of the Day hails from Spain, via CNN:

A Spanish businessman withdrew a controversial lawsuit Wednesday against the family of a teenage boy he struck and killed while driving a luxury car.

Tomas Delgado had filed a suit asking the dead boy’s parents to pay him €20,000 ($29,400) on the grounds that the collision that killed their teenage son also damaged his Audi A-8.

After public outrage ensued, Delgado dropped the suit — but was none too happy about it:

The businessman had insisted in a recent television interview that he was a victim, too. He was not present for a court hearing Wednesday. His lawyer told the court that Delgado felt that the extensive publicity amounted to a public lynching.

A high-tech lynch mob for an uppity Audi driver. Who was reportedly driving 107 miles per hour in an area where the speed limit is 55 miles per hour. Who hit the boy from behind, according to the boy’s father, and “dragged [him] 106 meters (347 feet) along a rural highway.”
Read more in the full article (which includes an interesting digression about how quickly you need to file your notice of appeal in Spanish courts; their appeal periods make ours look like an eternity).
Driver drops bid to sue family of boy he killed [CNN]

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Associate Bonus Watch: Wilson Sonsini, Akin Gump (DC), Quinn Emanuel

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associate bonus watch 2007 law firm Above the Law blog.jpgHere are a few quick updates on the associate bonus front:
1. Wilson Sonsini: On Monday night, the firm issued a long and complicated memo, which we’ve posted in all its glory after the jump. Since we haven’t taken math since high school calculus, it went a bit over our head.
General reaction to the WSGR bonus news was less than positive. From one tipster: “My friends there are pretty pissed in light of Latham’s bonuses.” From another:

“Some constituent groups (those with low hours) are happy. Other groups (people who work for a living) are less happy. All associates outside of New York are upset that New York special bonuses were paid without a minimum hours requirement.”

Under the WSGR bonus system, in certain class years, a lawyer in New York who billed 500 hours less than her counterpart outside New York could wind up with a bigger bonus.
2. Akin Gump (Washington, DC): On rather short notice — the email went out at around 1 p.m., announcing a meeting at 5 p.m. — a meeting to talk about bonuses was held on Monday in the D.C. office of Akin Gump. Here’s the bottom line:

[T]he gist was that bonuses “ranged from $1,000 to 75,000,” which basically means that if you are a first year (or any associate who started in the fall) you got $1,000, and the most senior associates who are most valued got $75,000. Associates were also told that the average was $25,000. This was not broken down by class year, hours, or any other details that may tell you whether you’ll be compensated well or terribly.

Lovely. Guess they think transparency is overrated
3. Quinn Emanuel: At Quinn Emanuel, in contrast, management is fairly transparent, and communication is relatively open (at least by Biglaw standards). How many senior partners of major law firms write open letters to ATL, as John Quinn did recently?
Anyway, two pieces of news. First, yesterday QE gave supplemental bonuses today to laterals, recalculating how they pro-rated (a subject of prior controversy). Second, they provided some information — albeit not terribly specific information — about billable hours and 2008 bonuses. Memo after the jump.

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Wherein We Gloat Over Vindication of Our Prior Harvard Law Review Coverage

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Harvard Law Review small Andrew Crespo Above the Law blog.jpgLast year, we ran a popular series of posts on the Harvard Law Review (click here and scroll down, to the posts marked with a mushroom cloud over Gannett House). The gist of the coverage, as described by one of our sources, was that the Review’s new, left-leaning leadership “is running the journal into the ground with a cabal of radical ideologues, making the outgoing editors nervous about the future reputation of the journal.”
We got some flak for our HLR coverage. But in view of what the Review is publishing these days, as discussed extensively in the blogosphere last week — see, e.g., the Volokh Conspiracy and PrawfsBlawg — we can’t help gloating. Just a little.
Harvard Law Review on Punitive Damages and the 14th Amendment [Volokh Conspiracy]
Cruel and Unusual? On the Harvard Law Review’s Case Comment on Philip Morris [PrawfsBlawg]
Earlier: Prior ATL coverage of the Harvard Law Review

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Lawyer of the Day, People’s Choice: Beth Modica

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Beth Modica Elizabeth Modica prosecutor sex teenage boys Above the Law blog.jpgFor Monday’s Lawyer of the Day, we faced an embarrassment of riches — of embarrassment. So we nominated a quintet of contenders: a North Carolina lawyer caught reading Maxim in court, a former prosecutor who allegedly had sex with two teenage boys, an AUSA arrested on DUI charges, a Canadian lawyer/politician who allegedly overbilled an order of nuns, and a Chicago lawyer who keyed a Marine’s car. Then we had you vote on who should take the honors.
Participation was enthusiastic, with almost 1,300 votes cast. Two contenders emerged early in the voting: Beth Modica, the allegedly predatory prosecutrix, and Jay Grodner, who pleaded guilty to keying the Marine’s vehicle. Competition was fierce. But in the end, Mrs. Modica came out on top.
So congratulations, Beth Modica. You take the prize as Monday’s Lawyer of the Day!
Read more about her alleged misadventures, after the jump.

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