On multiple days over the past week or so, one of the top ten search terms bringing visitors to Above the Law has been K&L Gates. For whatever reason, people seem keenly interested in what’s going on right now at this major international law firm.
(But maybe we shouldn’t read too much into such queries. Also in the top ten search engine terms: “pictures of tacos.”)
So what is going on at K&L Gates? A significant amount of partner attrition, as various news outlets have recently pointed out….
Earlier this week, we reported that salary cuts have spread to the Pacific Northwest. Now it appears that the salary cutting craze has migrated to the Southwest. Surely, our territories in Guam will be next.
The Phoenix based firm Snell & Wilmer has cut associate salaries by 10%. Above the Law received this statement from the firm:
We held meetings with our associates in each of our offices on Tuesday, June 16, announced the following, and answered associates’ questions:
* Associates’ salaries will be reduced 10% across the board, effective with associates’ July 15, 2009, paychecks; and
* Snell & Wilmer will be paying performance-based bonuses later this year.
It is worth noting that Snell & Wilmer did not freeze associate salaries at 2008, as many other firms have done. So while the cut takes a bite out of the 2009 pay raise, it’s not the double hit some associates are experiencing.
I hear land is still pretty cheap out in the Mojave. Water? That’s a different story.
Earlier: Nationwide Salary Cut Watch: Firms in the Pacific Northwest Also Feel Gloomy
Prior ATL coverage of salary cuts
We have obtained a letter that Snell & Wilmer partner Tracy Fowler sent to Judge Dale Kimball (D. Utah) concerning Timestampgate.
Our source for the letter expressed the following opinion (opinion! opinion! no verifiable statement of fact!):
Attached is a letter Tracy Fowler sent to Judge Kimball explaining that he is “shocked and embarrassed” that his firm was caught for the SECOND time [allegedly] trying to deceive the court. Not surprisingly, Fowler claims to have no knowledge of what transpired and assures the court that Snell & Wilmer is undertaking a thorough investigation.
The fact that the letter came from Fowler, the partner on the case in question, rather than the managing partner of Snell & Wilmer is kind of like the fox assuring the farmer that he will conduct a thorough investigation into the hens missing from the hen house.
We hope you noticed the colorful rhetoric and hyperbole employed by our source’s “hen house” comparison — which, as noted, is merely opinion (opinion! opinion! no verifiable statement of fact!).
One could hold a very different opinion based on the same facts. For example, one could argue that it was most logical for the letter to come from Tracy Fowler, rather than some other Snell & Wilmer partner, because Fowler is lead counsel in this case.
Okay, enough preliminaries. The letter appears after the jump.
Continue reading “Timestampgate: Snell & Wilmer’s Letter to Judge Dale Kimball”
Last week, we did an item on Judge Dale Kimball (D. Utah) benchslapping some Snell & Wilmer lawyers for allegedly engaging in questionable conduct involving the court’s time stamp machine and outside drop box.
Yesterday the WSJ Law Blog put up a post on the controversy. Most of their post will be familiar to readers of our earlier item. But here’s a new tidbit they unearthed:
The Law Blog spoke with Alan Sullivan, managing partner of Snell & Wilmer’s Salt Lake City office, who said that his law firm took responsibility for the improperly dated court filings. He also confirmed said that a Snell & Wilmer associate staffed on the Yamaha matter resigned from the law firm on Friday.
A question: Was the associate in question entirely responsible for the alleged conduct? Or did partner Tracy Fowler, who remains at Snell & Wilmer, know anything about it?
In case you’re curious, we believe that this individual is the associate who resigned last week. Her bio on the Snell & Wilmer website was functional as of Friday, but it has since been taken down. If you go to where her bio used to be, you’re informed that “the current record has been deleted.”
Thank God for Google Cache and Archive.org. For those of you who are curious — nobody’s forcing you to look at it — a screenshot of this associate’s bio appears after the jump.
Continue reading “Timestampgate: Snell & Wilmer Associate Resigns”
From a correspondent in the Beehive State:
Dying for just a few extra days on that brief? Ever thought about trying to game that little date stamp machine outside the court house?
The attached order has been causing some buzz here in Salt Lake City. Judge Dale Kimball is not exactly a divo, but I love this order, not only for the slimy behavior of the Snell & Wilmer attorneys that got totally busted (check the docket for the exact attorney names), but also for the clever detective work by the court staff.
This is a good lesson. And a great example of an attorney getting benchslapped!
Here’s the first page of the order:
And now it’s time for this court to rip counsel a new one. The rest of order follows after the jump.
Continue reading “Benchslapped: Don’t F**k with Time Stamps, You WILL Get Busted”
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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