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Summer Associates: Let Your Voices Be Heard

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We are updating the Career Center and want to know what you think of your summer program.  Are the attorneys at your firm screamers or camp counselors? Are you eating at 5-star restaurants, or splitting meals from the Dollar Menu at McDonalds? Are you working on the next mega-merger, or picking up a partner’s dry cleaning?

Let us know about your firm and its summer associate program by taking the short but substantive Lateral Link Summer Associate Survey. The survey should only take you five minutes and is completely anonymous. Gloat about your experiences or warn law students about the real summer associate life. Your responses will give future summer associates the "I-wish-I-knew-those-answers-before-I-joined" information about the firm that isn’t on the recruiting brochures.

Click here to start the survey.

After you complete the survey, feel free to visit the Career Center and review what the current associates at the nation’s top firms think about their experience.

Wage Gap Persists Among Female Partners: Where’s the Outrage?

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A couple of days ago, a survey came out showing that the wage gap between male and female partners is still very large. The National Law Journal put it this way:

It’s no secret that women earn less than their male colleagues at law firms. The National Association of Women Lawyers concluded last year that female equity partners make an average $66,000 less a year than male equivalents.

This news was met with a tremendous yawn.

Amazing. We’re living in a world where women who rise to the top of their profession still suffer a ridiculous income gap, and nobody seems to care very much. Even my ATL co-editor Kashmir Hill said: “Women get paid less than men. D’uh.” So much for righteous indignation. The suffragettes must be thrilled…

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Lawyer of the Day, or Judge of the Day? We Report, You Decide.

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Hippocrate “Cheecho” Mertsaris: Does he have a weakness for judicial buttocks?

In a few weeks, an interesting trial will be getting underway in Queens Criminal Court here in New York. The underlying incident should provide fodder for either a Lawyer of the Day or a Judge of the Day — but it’s not clear which.

The episode giving rise to the criminal charges was reported back in May by the New York Daily News:

A disabled lawyer accused of touching the rear end of a Taxi and Limousine Commission judge is blaming it on his cerebral palsy. Queens prosecutors have charged Hippocrate Mertsaris, 35, with sexual abuse and sexual harassment for allegedly grabbing the woman’s inner thigh and buttocks during a meeting in her Kew Gardens offices.

Mertsaris’ lawyer, Wyatt Gibbons, admits his client touched the woman but denies it was sexual. “He whacked her in the butt but it wasn’t sexual abuse,” Gibbons said. “He has spastic movements.”

Let’s dig a little deeper….

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Skadden Associate Graces The Cover of In Touch Magazine Thanks to Rumored Relationship with The Bachelorette

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It’s not every day that we see a Biglaw associate on the cover of a celebrity gossip magazine. So we were a bit shocked when a tipster sent along the scanned image (right) of last week’s In Touch magazine, with this message:

The guy identified as “Ali’s new guy” in this week’s Intouch weekly (and pictured on the cover) is a Skadden associate — and I think a fairly well-regarded one at that.

Ali, of course, is the current star of The Bachelorette. Background from our resident celeb gossip expert Marin:

This season stars Bachelorette Ali Fedotowsky, an unemployed 25-year-old who quit her job at Facebook and moved back in with her parents to be on the show. Fans of the series will recall that Ali was a castoff from last season’s Bachelor, where she endeared herself to fans by wearing low-cut dresses, crying frequently, and vaguely resembling a poor man’s Reese Witherspoon as seen in dim light through cataracts. Anyhow, she’s back this season and more determined than ever to find love with one of 25 white bachelors, not including the one Hispanic dude, Roberto.

The Skadden Arps associate is not one of the two lawyers who was competing for her hand on the show. So this story would ruin the season, if true. Who is this associate?

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WilmerHale Brings Clarity to Its Merit-Based Compensation Program

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The heady days of the “mutual assured destruction” approach to associate compensation by Biglaw firms are behind us. But some associates would still like to see how they are doing in comparison to their colleagues at other firms. A tipster recently wrote us:

Can you do a post requesting commenters to post grade schedules a la greedyassociates back in the day showing salary per year. This would make comparisons easier. I’ll start:

Sheppard Mullin
1st year 145K
2nd 160
3rd 170
4th 185
5th 210
6th 225
then it gets vague with a range from 240-265K.

Some of this information is available in the firm profiles on the Above the Law Career Center. But as good greedy Sheppard-ite must know, comparing salaries is much more complicated these days due to some firms instituting merit-based compensation models.

WilmerHale is one of those firms. Yesterday, Wilmer released its projected salary structure for 2011. We’ll see if it’s a merit-based market leader…

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Morning Docket: 07.13.10

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* Debt collection is big business for law firms, and a big annoyance for court systems. [New York Times]

* Former Florida Senator Mel Martinez’s tenure at DLA Piper was fairly brief. [Dealbook/New York Times]

* More law lessons for Lindsay Lohan, from the professor whose law review article she twee-quoted. [ABA Journal]

* John Stamos will now forever be “creepy Uncle” Jesse. [NBC News]

* Blago lawyers want a trial delay. [ABC 7]

* The attorney thorn in the DOJ’s side. [Post and Courier]

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Mel Gibson Can Keep His Life but His Freedom is Probably Going to be Taken Away

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Mel Gibson. (In background is his career going up in flames.)

Sorry, Braveheart fans. You can no longer name this movie as your favorite of all time without making women around you shudder in disgust — thanks to the off-screen actions of the film’s barbaric leading man.

Mel Gibson used to be a perfect man crush: squeaky clean Hollywood blockbusting-star, with a big family and serious passion. But now his major hits tend to be for gossip websites reporting on his misdeeds, first with his anti-Semitic rant while being arrested for drunken driving in 2006 (later expunged from his record), then with the end of his 28-year marriage amid accusations of adultery, and now with the alleged battery of and abusive phone calls to his current Russian-musician girlfriend/baby mama.

Gibson usually plays an affable and inspiring good guy in films. But in real-life phone calls to his girlfriend — check out recordings #1 and #2 (with added death threats and heavy panting!) — it sounds like he’s auditioning for a horror movie, using his mouth as a lethal weapon. Here’s a censored version of one of the calls (so you can listen with your kids), from the AP:

Gibson’s girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, taped the calls after Gibson allegedly punched her in the face and broke a few teeth — all while she was holding their love child. California is a two-party consent state when it comes to taping conversations, with $2,500 fines and jail time for those that break the wiretapping law.

Could Grigorieva get in trouble for recording Mad Mel?

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Non-Sequiturs: 07.12.10

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* Now that Sonia from the Block is on the Court, she should be able to make a little bit of scratch with her memoirs. [New York Times]

* Is your Biglaw job ruining your Sunday even on Sundays you don’t have to go into the office? If so, it might be time to find yourself a new job. [TechnoLawyer]

* David Boies explains how to intimidate homophobes. [The Atlantic]

* Great, the last thing we need is a bunch of CPA’s — people who already have perfectly fine careers — going to law school and contributing to the massive oversupply of lawyers. [Going Concern]

* Just how much talent do you need in order to be able to get away with rape? [Jane Genova]

* A Blawg Review devoted to the Id. [Lawyerist via Blawg Review]

* In other legal wrap-up news, who knew the blawgosphere was so very much like a carnival? [Compliance Building]

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Elizabeth Wurtzel: Not A Fan of the Bar Exam

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The fabulous Elizabeth Wurtzel — the bestselling and critically acclaimed writer, who graduated from Yale Law School and is now a litigatrix at the powerhouse known as Boies Schiller — has a bone to pick with the bar exam. In a recent post on the blog of the Brennan Center — an organization that we won’t try to describe, since some of you objected vigorously to our last attempt — Wurtzel questions the value of the bar exam as a gatekeeping mechanism for lawyers. (Those of you frantically cramming for the test right now might agree with her.)

Wurtzel begins by noting how Kathleen Sullivan — the noted constitutional law scholar, former dean of Stanford Law School, and current name partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan — didn’t pass the California bar.

Wurtzel then argues….

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The Best Midsized Lifeboats Law Firms

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Have you fallen off the Biglaw bandwagon and can’t get up? Were you lucky enough to hang onto your Biglaw job and are just now realizing that the blessing was actually a horrible curse on your lifestyle? Well, then maybe you’re in the mood to downsize to a midsized law firm, but you just don’t know where to look.

If so, the National Law Journal has you covered. It’s hard to distinguish one midsized law firm from another, but the NLJ has compiled a list of the twenty “hottest” midsized law firms.

Don’t everybody send your résumés all at once…

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Quote of the Day: Better Help Wanted.

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Recent graduates do not apply. I know the job market for lawyers is not good, but the sad sorry truth is that law schools do not teach you how to be a lawyer. This job is for someone with experience.

– Koncilja & Associates, P.C. in a Craigslist legal job ad for a “Denver attorney.”

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ATL Summer Associate Event Contest: The Winner!!!

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Times are tough, but firms are still treating their summer associates to some fun, even if it’s cheaper fun than in years past. Last week, we brought you the finalists in our 2010 Summer Associates Event Contest. Some of them are not scrimping:

  • Quinn Emanuel: Firm-sponsored hiking trip up Mount St. Helens. (Bonus: If you make it back down the mountain, you get an offer.)
  • Paul Hastings: Dinner at a partner’s house in a posh neighborhood, with different street food trucks parked in the driveway, dispensing delicacies and blasting music. (Negative: Summer associates aren’t deemed respectable enough to be served dinner inside the house.)
  • Schulte Roth & Zabel: DJ School, where they teach you to mix and be a DJ. (Bonus: If you don’t get an offer, you can work house parties.)
  • Irell & Manella: Firm-sponsored weekend trip to Catalina Island off the southern California coast, including hotel rooms, food, drink, kayaking, biking, glass-bottom boat tours, zip-lining, mini golf, arcade tokens. (Bonus: Some summers scored an invite to a partner’s yacht that he keeps docked near Catalina. Potential Negative: Seeing colleagues in bathing suits.)
  • Davis Polk & Wardwell: Trapeze School and rock climbing. (Hidden agenda: The firm can make sure their prospective associates’ bodies are well-toned and live up to DPW’s hottie standards.)

One commenter suggested that SRZ had another musical event: a luxury suite at a Lady Gaga concert. But even if someone had submitted that event to the contest, it would have been hard to beat our winner.

Which firm had the best summer associate event of 2010?

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