Here’s a sign of changing times: lawyers are picking up luxury real estate holdings that hedge fund guys can’t afford to keep.
From the Daily Business Review:
A high profile Miami litigator is expanding his real estate holdings on Key Biscayne.
Attorney Eugene E. Stearns and his wife, Diana, purchased a two-story home at 250 Cape Florida Drive for $8 million Aug. 31 from United Real Estate Ventures owned by trader D. John Devaney.
The 7,852-square-foot house has eight bathrooms, six bedrooms and a first-floor master suite. The house built in 1985 features cathedral ceilings.
Who says the Miami real estate market is dead? A thousand bucks a square foot, for a single-family house not on the island of Manhattan, doesn’t sound half-bad.
Discussion continues after the jump.
Title: Attorney In Charge Of Firmwide Private Equity Knowledge Management
Location: Chicago
Description: This position is a combination business and legal position at a top international law firm, with no billable hours and no client development expectations. The position is full-time, affording the attorney holding the position the ability to remain deeply involved in private equity law with a more regular and predictable schedule than most private equity attorneys experience.
The attorney would have responsibilities in a number of areas related to the firm’s highly regarded private equity practice — precedent, training, publications and knowledge development, among other things. This firm offers a highly competitive salary and bonus eligibility, which is expected to be comparable to the salary and bonus eligibility of an attorney at a similar level of experience. This position is ideal for a private equity attorney seeking to scale back their practice and increase their role in business development, marketing and management.
If you look up the term “private equity” in Black’s Law Dictionary, the entry reads: “Lucky bastards who make three times as much as you do, even though you graduated from college at the same time.”
But perhaps lawyers should think warm-and-fuzzy thoughts, as opposed to envious and resentful ones, about private equity types. Today’s DealBook has an interesting item about how private equity deals are keeping law firms busy — including a number of shops outside the private equity “Holy Trinity” of Simpson Thacher, Cleary Gottlieb, and Ropes & Gray.
The DealBook item is based on an article in the current issue of the American Lawyer, which contains this tidbit about lateral moves from Simpson:
An unintended consequence of our level of market share in private equity is that as private equity firms have grown, they’ve all developed in-house legal staffs, starting from zero, five years ago,” says Simpson partner Alan Klein. “They’re trying to populate those staffs with our associates.”
Seven lawyers left Simpson for private equity shops last year, according to Corporate Counsel, a sibling publication of The American Lawyer. Partly to stem defections, Simpson raised associate salaries in January, prompting a raise-a-thon among its competitors.
“I don’t understand what causes a firm be the first to increase the salary of a brand-new lawyer from an already eye-popping $145,000 to $160,000. There is no competitive advantage in doing so. Other firms will surely follow suit, and the firm that led the market will quickly be indistinguishable from the rest of the pack.”
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Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
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.
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Here’s a sign of changing times: lawyers are picking up luxury real estate holdings that hedge fund guys can’t afford to keep.
