Gawker reports that Incisive Media — the legal media giant behind the American Lawyer magazine, Law.com, and many other excellent and influential print and online publications — is taking back its old name: American Lawyer Media (ALM).

ALM adopted the Incisive moniker back in 2007, after being acquired by Incisive Media for $630 million. Incisive itself was acquired in 2006 by Apax Partners, a private equity firm.

The full memo about the ALM rebranding appears after the jump. Here’s the most interesting part:

While we will continue to be majority-owned by funds advised by Apax Partners, our lender, Royal Bank of Scotland, will swap a portion of its existing ALM debt for a 49% equity stake in the company and become a minority owner of ALM.

Turning over almost half of the equity in the company to a lender — that doesn’t sound good, does it?

But there’s more to the story here.

As some of you have noticed, we have an article in today’s New York Times, in the DealBook Special Section. It’s about fee arrangements in the (highly lucrative) context of mergers-and-acquisitions work. Here’s a teaser:

For some firms, billable hours are just the beginning. As the boom rolled on, law firms specializing in mergers and acquisitions increasingly engaged in premium billing, charging fees in excess of their total hourly billings. Think of it as a tip for good work. Whether a client pays a premium depends upon its satisfaction with the result, the size and complexity of the transaction, and the nature and length of the attorney-client relationship.

But since the credit market began to tighten this summer, an event that brought new deals to a crawl and has upset several old ones, many lawyers have been wondering whether the premium party is over…

And here’s one of the more juicy portions:

One firm, though, has moved beyond billable hours to the flat fee preferred by bankers: Wachtell, Lipton. A former Wachtell lawyer described a typical bill as follows: “There’s a paragraph stating something like, ‘For legal services rendered in connection with Transaction X,’ then a dot leader, then a number followed by six zeros.” He said he worked on some deals where Wachtell was paid more than the bankers.

Wachtell charged a flat fee when it advised the Bancroft family, which controlled Dow Jones & Company, during the $5 billion bid by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation For its work on the deal, Wachtell first submitted a bill for $10 million.

You can read the full piece here (or here). Feel free to email it liberally to friends and family. Thanks!

When $1,000 an Hour Is Not Enough [Dealbook / NYT]

That seems to be the theme of this very interesting article, by Ben Hallman and Aruna Viswanatha, in the current issue of the American Lawyer. It echoes the problems we discussed back in this post, concerning the $70 million malpractice suit filed against Cadwalader, in connection with the firm’s mortgage-backed securities practice.

Here’s an excerpt from the American Lawyer piece:

Even scarier for Debevoise, and for all firms with big private equity practices, was the fact that no new deals were popping up to take the place of those that were stuck. Those fears are shared by lawyers who work on mortgage-backed securities, a market that has completely shut down.

The fears are well justified for both groups, and for any lawyer whose business is linked to the availability of easy credit. In June there were nearly $100 billion worth of private-label mortgage securitization issuances. The next month, they were half that. “There’s always an element of cyclicality,” says Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison structured finance partner Jordan Yarett, “but the implosion of credit is somewhat shocking.”

Indeed. More depressing discussion, after the jump.

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.

Here’s the latest Job of the Week from Lateral Link, ATL’s career partner:

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.

More details, after the jump.

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.

Remember when D.C. bar president James Sandman, of Arnold & Porter, posed this question?

“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.”

Well, there’s your answer, Mr. Sandman. Simpson isn’t competing with you and other non-NYC firms; it’s competing with private equity and investment banks. And your profits per partner are just collateral damage.

More Law Firms Crowd into Private Equity Deals [DealBook]
Corporate Scorecard: Gargantuans at the Gate [American Lawyer]