It might not look like it, but there is a lot of carnage on this list. Orrick is down four spots. Proskauer is down four spots. King & Spalding is down 3 spots.
And many of the firms here that are marginally up or holding steady still went through significant layoffs.
After the jump, Law Shucks offers some stats.
Do you remember the class of 2009? You know, the kids who should be gearing up to start work in a couple of weeks but are instead sitting around, waiting to get out of purgatory? Don’t look now, but a couple of firms have decided to extend the deferral period for these people, and that can’t be a good thing. Proskauer Rose’s New York office kicked off the round of deferment extensions last week. A tipster from Proskauer in Los Angeles reported the news:
Proskauer just told incoming L.A. associates that [incoming associates] in New York are getting their start dates pushed back again. It’s all the way back to November now. They told us [in L.A.] before they told New York because they didn’t want us to “hear it on Above the Law first.” [Sheesh.]
The letters have now gone out to all the incoming New York associates informing them of the news. The new start date is November 2, 2010.
Proskauer had already pushed back the class of 2009 to March 2010. But Proskauer has also told the class of 2010 that the earliest they will be able to start is “fall” 2010.
So can we assume that rising 2Ls considering interviewing with Proskauer won’t be able to start until late 2012? For that matter, are incoming Proskauer associates confident that they will ever be able to start at the firm? We reached out to Proskauer, but the firm did not respond to our request for comment.
After the jump, Mintz Levin joins the deferment extension party.
* It sounds like very few protesters greeted John Yoo at Berkeley Law School. Only four were tenacious enough to get arrested. [Associated Press]
* Fen-phen lawyers sentenced to 20 and 25 years, respectively. The judge wants their sentences to deter other lawyers tempted to steal from settlement funds. [Bloomberg]
* Proskauer Rose probably likes this headline. [New York Daily News]
* Nino leads one to believe that empathy is not an important quality in a judge. [New York Times via Daily Beast]
* The 5th Circuit agrees with a Texas school district that has banned “shirts with words.” Are shirts with numbers okay? [Courthouse News Service]
* Michael Jackson’s children have lawyered up. [CNN]
* Nationwide salary cut watch: LA County judges. [Los Angeles Times]
* Why has there been no litigation surge in the recession? [National Law Journal]
Based on a Washington Post article profiling the Five O’Clock Club, an outplacement and career coaching company, we constructed a Biglaw blind item:
Which New York law firm, having already completed two rounds of layoffs, has hired the Five O’Clock Club to help it carry out additional layoffs (in August, October, and November)?
After we ran the item, several firms came forward to declare they’re not the firm in question. And now they’re joined by one more: Morgan, Lewis & Bockius.
A spokesperson for Morgan Lewis contacted ATL to say that it isn’t the firm with layoffs in the works. In fact, Morgan Lewis claims that it shouldn’t even be on the shortlist of contenders.
Read why — and check out the list of the Five O’Clock Club’s clients, including some very prestigious law firms that haven’t publicly admitted to layoffs — after the jump.
This couple definitely merits an honorable mention this week. They met a year ago in Vegas and turned a 24-hour hookup into a NYT wedding announcement featuring seersucker, a 6-year age difference, and a JD from Widener. It’s certainly one of the more colorful lawyer wedding announcements we’ve seen in a while (although we concede the bar is fairly low).
We even managed to find a picture for you, seersucker and all. They look like they know how to party, don’t they?
On to our finalists, who are more prestigious — but admittedly a bit less colorful:
Proskauer Rose has joined the growing list of firms to defer current summer associates to 2011. But unlike other firms on that list, the Proskauer deferral pushes the 2010 class to “fall” 2011. Other firms have at least told their summer associates that they could start in January 2011.
Proskauer has already deferred its incoming class of new associates to March 2010, and the firm only gave those new hires a $20,000 stipend for their trouble. And the firm has asked incoming associates to voluntarily defer until January 2011 with a $60,000 stipend. Maybe participation in the voluntary deferral program by the class of 2009 has been so great that the firm felt it had to involuntarily defer its current summers to the fall of 2011?
But at this point, it doesn’t appear that Proskauer is offering any kind of deferral stipend to the class of 2010, and that has some summers grumbling.
Some summer reactions after the jump.
* Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan is resigning this weekend. Among those gunning for his job are two Foley Hoag partners: Michael B. Keating and Martin Murphy. That’s a little awkward when it comes to intra-firm politics, no? [Boston Globe]
* Easter’s celebration of resurrection has inspired Eliot Spitzer. He’s contemplating another run for Attorney General. [New York Post]
* Earlier this week, a judge ruled that law firms need to make it clear that they are representing the company and not individual employees during the course of their investigations– Irell & Manella was on the short end of that ruling. Stanford Group’s former CIO was likely following that case closely. She has filed a malpractice and conspiracy complaint against Proskauer Rose and others for the same practices. [Courthouse News Service]
* More on the monster $55.1 million Lehman bill submitted in Manhattan bankruptcy court by Weil Gotshal. In addition to over 100,000 billable hours over four months, the bill includes “$200,000 for business meals, $439,000 for computerized and “other” research, [and] $115,000 on local transportation and $287,000 on duplicating charges.” Sigh. Just when Americans were starting to hate bankers more than lawyers. [Wall Street Journal (subscription)]
Last month, we brought you Open Thread: Nationwide Start Date Round-up. After a flood of tips in response to that, we brought you an Expanded Nationwide Start Date Round-up. After that post, we got another deluge of tips. So now we bring you the latest and greatest round-up: more firms, more 2010 start dates, more pro bono deferral opportunities, more great taste, less calories…. whoops, wrong post.
Proskauer Rose announced start dates yesterday. Incoming associates have got some time to kill and some money to spend, says a tipster:
Proskauer [is] pushing their new associates back to March 2010. They’re offering a $20K stipend, or the option to get a public interest job, start Jan. 2011 and get a $60K stipend. They’re also still honoring a $10K salary advance they had previously offered.
Most firms, like Proskauer, have offered baby associates deferral stipends when pushing back start dates. However, a few disgruntled 3Ls have written to ATL saying that stipends are not forthcoming at their firms. Here are reports from tipsters:
Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell not offering any stipends [not even salary advances] to deferred Class of 2009 associates. Deferred Associates are still receiving their graduation bonuses ($1500), I guess that’s supposed to carry them through until January 2010.
You guys got to say something about the fact that Shearman, unlike most of the other firms, isn’t paying any kind of a stipend to those it is deferring until January ’10.
King & Spalding, all offices, has been pushed to January 19, 2010. Incoming associates were informed in late March. No stipend, and the salary advance is also not an option anymore.
Goldberg Kohn gave their incoming associates a $7500 bar stipend (which was reduced from the originally promised $8,000); they paid for Bar Exam fees; and they gave them a hand wave goodbye. As for their reported “pushing back start dates”, Goldberg Kohn has told their incoming associates that their start date was INDEFINITELY deferred. They said that March 2010 was a possibility but that the date was arbitrary and they are making no promises at all….They have offered no deferral stipend.
We would like to note that Shearman is paying a $65,000 stipend to those deferred to September 2010.
We wanted to call this post “The Final Round-up,” but that seemed overly optimistic. Check out the newest additions to the nationwide start date watch, after the jump. This time around, we’ve included firms (that we know of) that have not yet announced start dates.
I really thought we were going to make it through the whole day without any fresh layoff stories. I really did. We were so close.
Sadly, there is an internal memo going around at Proskauer Rose right now. The damage, 23 attorneys. We haven’t gotten our hands on the memo yet, but we understand that the memo makes no mention of any staff cuts.
You’ll remember that back in December, Proskauer laid off 35 associates and 25 staffers. The firm also laid off first years at that time, but that wasn’t in the announcement. Of course, that was back in December when laying off first years looked particularly bad.
No word on whether this round of cuts is also affecting first years.
This second round of cuts shouldn’t be all that surprising. Proskauer profits per partner were down ten percent last year. And we know partnerships don’t like that.
We’ll update you with the full internal memo when we get it.
So close. Maybe tomorrow can be an official “no layoff day?”
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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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.
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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As we finish off the Vault top 50, we look at some firms went through some tough layoffs.
