In the comments to Elie’s Sugar Mama post from yesterday, which chronicles the woes of a female Biglaw associate who is being harassed by coworkers for affiancing (KABLAM: Princeton Review Hit Parade) a Starbucks barista “peasant,” Bonobo_Bro wrote:
Not bad big guy (other than the usual typo issues which must be intentional); however, I really think you should’ve handled this pls handle thx style because I’d love to see Marin’s opinion of women with lower income life partners.
Rex and either thirty-six other anonymous internet trolls or one troll logging on from 36 different computers liked this comment. My mandate was clear. The people thirsted for my response…
Ed. note: This is the latest installment of Size Matters, one of Above the Law’s new columns for small-firm lawyers.
Valentine’s Day was yesterday, and everywhere you turned, someone was trying to spread the message of love. Rachel Ray was on Good Morning America, showing us how to cook breakfast in bed. Every grocery store was hawking roses. There was a marathon of Millionaire Matchmaker on Bravo all weekend.
But the most interesting way to say “I love you” is the Pajamagram. While watching Patti Stanger yell at some wealthy old man trying to date a woman who is way too young for him, I saw the Pajamagram commercial. The commercial featured an attractive woman emerging from her bathroom in a “sexy” pair of pajama pants and a tank top covered in hearts. And, according to the Pajamagram people, if you really want to show her you care, then get her a Hoodie-Footie. Apparently, nothing says you are in for a romantic evening like a giant pink-velour onesie. If watching multiple episodes of Millionaire Matchmaker was not enough, seeing these commercials has convinced me that no one is feeling the love this year.
The ABA Journal disagrees. The February 2011 edition is devoted to discussing how lawyers can find happiness — even love — in their legal careers. In Why I Love Being A Lawyer (Seriously), several practitioners share the reasons that they love being a lawyer. Most of the quotes refer to the lawyer’s ability to make the world better or the freedom that comes with practicing law (for those who own their own firms). Unfortunately, I could not relate to any of those happy lawyers.
There was another article in the Journal that struck a little closer to home. In Hunting Happy, Becky Beaupre Gillespie and Hollee Schwartz Temple chronicle the happiness movement in law — specifically, how lawyers can be happier. The article discusses The Happy Lawyer, a book by Professors Douglas O. Linder and Nancy Levit of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, in which they conclude that the path to happiness comes from working at a small firm.
Or, at least, the path to being happier than people at big law firms….
* The anatomy of Courtship Connections. Kash explains why it’s so difficult to set lawyers up with each other. [Forbes]
* Alan Dershowitz and Julian Assange make a love connection. [Politico]
* Does compassion really have any place in the law? [Underdog]
* Many of the lonely among you will be drinking heavily tonight. That’s okay. We’ll deal with your alcoholism once Hallmark leaves you alone. [Lawyerist]
* Let’s hope ABA President-Elect Nominee Laurel Bellows shows law students some love. [ABA Journal]
This is a very modern Valentine’s Day story, and one that is only possible in the prestige-obsessed world of Biglaw and a few other similar professions.
A woman is an associate at a law firm. She’s probably an associate at a Biglaw firm, since she claims to earn a six-figure salary. She’s engaged to a man who works as a barista at a coffee shop. The coffee place is frequented by some of the lawyers at her firm.
Apparently her co-workers have been taunting her over their relationship. Incredibly, these colleagues have also taunted him over the engagement, assuring this random coffee shop guy that she will leave him because of his low income.
Now if the man was earning the big bucks while the woman was working at a coffee shop, nobody would say anything about it. But since the woman is the bread winner, it’s a big deal to some people.
I know a lot of Biglaw ladies who are in the position of out-earning their men. Well, I’ve had quite a bit of (ahem) “experience” at being the man who doesn’t make as much as his woman. Let me tell the ladies what your man needs from you (if you don’t already know), and assure you that your friends who are talking s**t are just full of it….
Only one person had a good time on this date. (Stock photo.)
With Valentine’s Day swiftly approaching, now seems like a great to time to relaunch ATL’s Courtship Connection — our well-intentioned but only sporadically successful program for hooking up our single legal-eagle readers.
Like the Real World, the series is back and in a new city. Judging from the date we’ll now recount, our matchmaking adventures in D.C may be as disappointing as the eight strangers MTV picked to live in a Dupont Circle house last year. (But hey, dating through Above The Law has got to turn out better than dating through Craigslist in D.C.)
This was an East Coast (him) meets West Coast (her) match. Both were of the politically-liberal persuasion. I matched these two top law grads in the 25-35 age range in part because I thought they would look good together. Both are hotties. When asked to describe themselves in three words, neither could stick to the word limit. He said he was a “brainy, preppy reformed frat-guy” and she said she was “disarmingly feisty and unabashedly vivacious.”
I should not have been so superficial. While he enjoyed her vivacity, she enjoyed… writing up a feisty recap of the date….
Might we be seeing a new trend, namely, federal prosecutors moonlighting as novelists?
Last year, as part of Above the Law’s Career Alternatives series, we profiled Allison Leotta, an assistant U.S. attorney in D.C. who wrote a well-received thriller, Law of Attraction. Today we introduce you to Natalie Lee — an assistant U.S. attorney in Savannah, former associate at Alston & Bird, and author of a new novel, Save as Draft. (When looking up the book, please note that Natalie writes under a pen name, “Cavanaugh Lee.”)
Like Law of Attraction, Save as Draft has garnered some nice reviews. A post on Chick Lit Reviews, for example, praises the book as a “fantastic read that all of us technology addicted Chick Lit fans will absolutely fall in love with, a must read!”
The reference to technology addiction relates to the novel’s ingenious premise. I discussed that premise — along with other topics, such as the inspiration for the book’s law firm partner / villainess, a products-liability litigatrix named Rose — in a recent interview with Natalie Lee….
The accusations against disbarred New Jersey lawyer Kenneth Denti — who allegedly falsified time sheets, slept with a client he was representing in her divorce, and got reimbursed by his firm for dinner dates with women he met on the internet — have been covered extensively throughout the legal blogosphere. We previously linked to a post on the Legal Profession Blog about Denti, and his story was also written up in the ABA Journal and the WSJ Law Blog.
But the 94-page decision of the New Jersey Supreme Court’s Disciplinary Review Board contains some juicy tidbits — about money, sex, and other good stuff — that haven’t been mentioned in prior coverage.
When we launched the ATL Courtship Connection in New York, we received a number of plaintive emails from lawyers in other cities asking us to give matchmaking a whirl in their towns. Judging from these emails, Chicago, L.A. and D.C. are all cities with numerous single lawyers desperate enough adventurous enough to turn their love lives over to Above the Law.
Loyal Courtship readers know that we had a mixed track record setting up legal types in the Big Apple. There were a few duds, a couple of studs, one make-out session, and one utter FAIL. To our knowledge, though, there were no LTRs (or STDs) as a result of our playing Cupid.
We’ve decided we might have better luck in another city, so we are bidding Manhattan and its surrounding boroughs farewell for now, and taking this matchmaking service down I-95 to Washington, D.C., a.k.a. the best city in which to be a lawyer.
I’m an associate at a small firm with a very specialized practice area. My firm shares a client with a Biglaw firm that handles most of the client’s litigation and other work. As such, there are a couple of partners at the Biglaw firm that I work with fairly frequently, when my little niche overlaps with matters they’re handling for our mutual client.
I like these partners – they seem like nice guys – and I think they like me too; at any rate, we have a good working relationship and they seem to respect my work. One of their associates recently left and I’d love to jump into his place. I haven’t seen a posted opening anywhere, so I don’t feel like I can just send them my resume out of the blue, saying “in case you need someone to fill Departed Associate’s position…” – or can I? What’s the best way to go about this?
Also: Departed Associate left without having another job lined up, saying it just “wasn’t the right fit” for him. I know: huge red flag that possibly these partners aren’t the nice guys they appear to be. But not necessarily – right? It would be different for me, right??
– I Want That Job
Dear I Want That Job,
When someone leaves a law firm job without something lined up in this still-shitty economy, there are only three possibilities…
This is probably a joke. In fact, I’m almost sure this is a joke. Law school women don’t really talk like this, not on Craigslist. And law school guys are more than capable of satisfying their female classmates.
Wait a minute, that last line is false — almost entirely false. Crap, does that make this Craigslist ad real?
I don’t know. There’s a Craigslist ad, purportedly from a Seton Hall law student, that’s making the rounds among people who check out things on Craigslist and then email Above the Law.
Give it a look, then give me your true/false sensibility…
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.
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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In the comments to Elie’s Sugar Mama post from yesterday, which chronicles the woes of a female Biglaw associate who is being harassed by coworkers for affiancing (KABLAM: Princeton Review Hit Parade) a Starbucks barista “peasant,” Bonobo_Bro wrote:
