I’d have to say I’m not particularly optimistic that they’re going to get this done.
— Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, discussing whether or not the Senate will vote to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell” before the end of this year.
This legal uncertainty is not going away anytime soon.
— Jeh Johnson, general counsel to the Defense Department (and former Paul Weiss partner), also discussing DADT.
Ed. note: Have a question for next week? Send it in to advice@abovethelaw.com
ATL:
I am a 2L at Columbia and I am deciding amongst Cravath, Davis Polk, Debevoise (Elie should chime in now), Paul Weiss, and Sullivan & Cromwell.
I am getting married in December so I would love to work at a family-friendly firm. Like Elie, I’m a raging liberal, and I heard Paul Weiss seems to fit that bill. On the other hand, I want to be at a firm with plenty of lovely women. I am bi and my soon-to-be hubby doesn’t mind if I taste a woman’s sweet nectar. Plus I simply cannot live without a pair of supple breasts in my life. (My man is ripped so no manboobs for me.) I met many cute associates at Davis Polk too and I remember an ATL article that mentions the great number of hotties at DPW.
So many choices! Can you help me out?
– Paradox of Choice
Dear Paradox of Choice,
Nice try, but this question’s a flame because nobody uses the term “sweet nectar” unless they’re (1) referring to the drink Odysseus used to get the Cyclops drunk and poke his eye out, or (2) a copywriter at Cosmo. Nevertheless, we’ll answer it because it’s slim pickings around here this week, and it’s better than another snooze-alert “should I quit law school?” question. Of course you should quit law school. Don’t be ridiculous.
Let’s break down these firms…
Continue reading “Pls Hndle Thx: Family Friendly, Lesbian, Liberal – Is There a Firm for That?”
Back in June, we bestowed Lawyer of the Day honors upon two of the nation’s top litigators: Ted Wells and Martin Flumenbaum, the co-chair and former chair, respectively, of the renowned litigation department at Paul Weiss. Given the sterling reputations of the two lawyers and their firm, it was a surprising development.
We recognized Messrs. Wells and Flumenbaum after a New Jersey judge sanctioned Paul Weiss and its co-counsel — Lowenstein Sandler, one of the Garden State’s leading law firms, and Wells’s former home (before he jumped across the Hudson) — for pursuing a “frivolous” and “ridiculous” legal claim on behalf of billionaire Ronald Perelman against his ex-father-in-law, Robert Cohen.
In June, Judge Ellen Koblitz ordered Paul Weiss and Lowenstein Sandler to pay Cohen’s fees and costs for opposing the claim; she scheduled a hearing to determine the amount. The hearing took place last month, and now we know the amount.
It’s nothing to sneeze at, even for firms as well-heeled as Paul Weiss and Lowenstein. And to add insult to (financial) injury, Judge Koblitz got super-snarky in the opinion setting forth her reasoning….
Continue reading “A Jersey Judge Benchslaps Paul Weiss and Lowenstein Sandler — Hard”
The 2011 Vault prestige rankings are out, giving meaning and purpose to those whose firms ranked in the top 20, and giving those further down the list inferiority complexes. (We’re talking to you, #21-formerly-#18.)
This thread covers the firms ranked #11 through #20. This is your chance to discuss these firms — their upsides and downsides and whether Vault got their rankings right. The Vault site has entries for each firm, similar to the Firm Snapshots in our own Career Center.
The “downers” category for most firms tends to be rather general: they treat me like a number, “long hours,” “unfun,” etc. But someone at #20-ranked White & Case had a very specific complaint about the firm’s lack of tech savvy: “The technology is very outdated. We still run Outlook 2003 and are not allowed to use iPhones. The blackberries we are given are over 2 years old and do not work well at times. The firm is not receptive to these issues.”
Little known White & Case perk: every new associate gets their own Commodore 64 for home use.
What are the reviews for the other firms in this bracket?
Continue reading “Fall Recruiting Open Threads: Vault 11 – 20 (2011)”
Most weeks nowadays, the New York Times weddings announcements — and our coverage of same — focus quite properly on the newlyweds and their impressive accomplishments. But occasionally, a few announcements hearken back to a simpler day, when nobody cared much about the bride and groom, because the game of social one-upmanship was played on the parental level.
This is one of those weeks. Our featured newlyweds are impressive, but some of their parents are even more so. The finalists:
1. Tenley Laserson and Geoffrey Chepiga
2. Charlotte Anne Levy and David Gudis
More on these couples and their illustrious parents, after the jump.
Continue reading “Legal Eagle Wedding Watch June 2010: Board-dom”
Our typical Lawyer of the Day is an attorney you’ve never heard of, from a firm you’ve never heard of. It’s highly unusual for LOTD honors to go to a pair of legal titans, two of the nation’s leading litigators: Ted Wells (pictured) and Marty Flumenbaum, the co-chair and former chair, respectively, of the celebrated litigation department at Paul Weiss.
It appears, however, that the honors are deserved. The New York Law Journal reports:
A New Jersey judge has sanctioned two firms, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and Lowenstein Sandler, for pursuing a “frivolous” and “ridiculous” legal claim on behalf of billionaire Ronald Perelman against his 85-year-old ex-father-in-law [Robert Cohen]….
Superior Court Judge Ellen L. Koblitz ruled that Perelman’s attorneys should have known that the claim was unsupportable. “No competent attorney could have missed the frivolous nature of this promise claim once the unhelpful testamentary documents were received,” Koblitz said in ordering the sanctions last Wednesday. “There was no legal or factual basis for the plaintiffs to proceed with their amended complaint given the evidence they had and the state of the law in New Jersey.”
Ouch — quite the stinging benchslap. The Garden State hasn’t seen such a slugging since the first season of Jersey Shore.
And other marquee names got dragged into this mess — a pair of high-powered lady lawyers, in fact….
Continue reading “Lawyers of the Day: Ted Wells and Marty Flumenbaum?”
That’s the question essentially posed in a barn-burning op-ed piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, written by Debra Burlingame and Thomas Joscelyn. Burlingame is the sister of Charles Burlingame III, pilot of the American Airlines plane that was crashed at the Pentagon on September 11; Joscelyn is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Burlingame and Joscelyn begin their opinion piece, Gitmo’s Indefensible Lawyers, by discussing Paul Weiss partner Julia Tarver Mason (who, by the way, is rather attractive; she looks like a cross between Kristin Davis, aka Charlotte from Sex and the City, and Andie MacDowell). The WSJ op-ed writers claim that Mason improperly used “legal mail” — “privileged lawyer-client communications that are exempt from screening by security personnel” — to provide one of her clients, a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, with inflammatory propaganda from Amnesty International (a brochure, written in Arabic, depicting alleged abuse against Arabs and Muslims by Americans).
Writes one of several ATL readers who brought this article to our attention:
Wow. I didn’t know that Paul Weiss was involved in such potentially dubious acts.
But did Paul Weiss actually do anything wrong? Let’s discuss….
Occasionally, I am guilty of overselling my point. That slight personality flaw means that I have at least one thing in common with Brad Karp, chairman of Paul Weiss. American Lawyer reports that 2009 was the most profitable year ever for Paul Weiss (more on that later). The article contains an interesting turn of phrase:
Though the firm’s gross revenue slipped by 3.8 percent, from $692 million in 2008 to $665.5 million in 2009, profits per equity partner (PPP) hit $2.69 million, up from $2.65 million in 2008. Notably, the firm achieved its results without resorting to layoffs. In fact, lawyer head count at the firm increased slightly from 647 to 653.
No layoffs you say? None? Zero? Well allow this tipster to retort:
PW’s Load of S***.
I was among the one third of PW’s staff attorney program that was axed. I also know that more senior associates were given the “talk” about how they have no future at PW, so they better get their shit together to leave. One of them left into the “wild blue yonder” because he had no place to go.
They welcomed the first year class of 100, that is why it appeared that their numbers went up slightly without layoffs.
I can’t speak to secret talks that lead to mysterious disappearances, but we were all over the staff attorney layoffs at Paul Weiss, just a couple of months ago. Details after the jump.
At the end of a wild week that included Blue Monday, terrible (or terrific) Tuesday, and corporate-overlord Thursday (sponsored by Justice Anthony Kennedy), we bring you an unusually strong January edition of LEWW.
It features six lawyers in a wide range of practices: public sector, teaching, Biglaw, nonprofit — even personal injury (or “accident law,” as they apparently call it these days). Here are the lucky finalists:
1. Batsheva From and Michael Altman
2. Abigail Gaunt and Gabriel Feldman
3. Erin Roeder and John Spader III
Read all about these lawyer newlyweds, after the jump.
Continue reading “Legal Eagle Wedding Watch 1.10: Headbangers”
On Wednesday, we commended the firm of Paul Hastings for moving so quickly to support Haiti earthquake relief efforts. Since then, a number of other top law firms have pledged their support to this worthy cause.
(Okay, Rush Limbaugh questions the worthiness of the cause. But we suspect that Limbaugh’s position — like that of Pat Robertson, who blames the earthquake on Haiti’s supposed pact with the devil — is a minority view.)
The WSJ Law Blog and Am Law Daily have gathered information about what various law firms are doing to help Haiti. We’ve combined their reports with information we’ve received from our own sources, to create a more comprehensive list.
Check it out, after the jump.
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 »
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
Keep reading »
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