Sullivan & Cromwell

Summer Associate of the Day: Kaavya Viswanathan (Aka the Alleged Harvard Plagiarist)

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Remember Kaavya Viswanathan? She’s the Harvard graduate who, while still in high school, landed a two-book deal worth a reported $500,000. The first book, a young adult / chick-lit novel entitled How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, was published in April 2006, during Viswanathan’s sophomore year at Harvard.

And then things fell apart. To quote the blog Sepia Mutiny, “Kaavya Viswanathan got rich, got caught, and got ruined.” Shortly after the publication of Opal Mehta, the Harvard Crimson reported that various passages in the book appeared “strikingly similar” to portions of two young adult novels by Megan McCafferty.

Viswanathan was widely accused of plagiarizing — not just from McCafferty, but from Sophie Kinsella, Meg Cabot and Salman Rushdie. Her subsequent fall from grace, including the cancellation of her book and movie deals, made national and even international headlines (due to coverage back in her native India). She claimed that the similarities between her book and prior published works were unintentional, but given the number and extent of the apparently borrowed passages, some were incredulous. (For samples, see Wikipedia.)

After graduating from Harvard College in 2008, she went on to Georgetown Law, where she’s a member of the GULC class of 2011. Her arrival at Georgetown made Newsweek in February 2009:

Viswanathan is a first-year law student at Georgetown University, where Stephen Glass earned a J.D. after being fired from The New Republic for fabricating a series of articles….

How’d she manage to get accepted? Applicants can submit supplemental essays to explain themselves to the admissions committee, says Dean of Admissions Andrew Cornblatt. “It’s impossible to get amnesia about what we may have heard,” he says. “But in all cases we treat them just like any other applicant.”

It seems Georgetown isn’t the only institution treating Viswanathan “just like any other applicant.” Despite the tough fall recruiting season and her controversial past, Viswanathan, who just finished her 2L year, has landed a coveted summer associate position at a top law firm — one of Biglaw’s biggest and best names, in fact….

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The Am Law 100 for 2010: ‘It Could Have Been Worse’

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Today is an exciting day. As we noted earlier, the Am Law 100 rankings for 2010 have been announced. This is a big deal — the Biglaw version of the U.S. News law school rankings.

You can access the various charts via this portal page. Aric Press and Greg Mulligan summarize the results:

It could have been worse. That’s the best that can be said for the performance last year of The Am Law 100, the top-grossing law firms in the nation. Three of the four key categories we’ve measured for 25 years — gross revenue, head count, and revenue per lawyer — fell, while profits per equity partner (PPP) barely increased by 0.3 percent, or $3,463, to $1.26 million.

So PPP was basically stable in 2009 — not a bad result given the continuing economic weakness last year. Perhaps law firm partners are better business managers than they get credit for?

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Quote of the Day: Is Rodge Cohen Comparing His Clients to Coke Addicts?

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The cocaine analogy is quite a good one. Because this stuff was addictive. A lot of people couldn’t resist.


– H. Rodgin Cohen — former chairman of Sullivan & Cromwell, and counsel to many of the nation’s biggest banks — discussing subprime mortgage debt.

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In-House Counseling: Fighting Back from a Bad Review

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Lawyer boxer.jpgEd. note: This post is written by Will Meyerhofer, a Biglaw attorney turned psychotherapist, whom we profiled. A former Sullivan & Cromwell associate, he holds degrees from Harvard, NYU Law, and The Hunter College School of Social Work. He blogs at The People’s Therapist.
My patient, a senior associate doing IP litigation at a downtown firm, brought me the bad news.
“I got a terrible review last week.”
She seemed calm about it, considering. That’s because she knows how law firms work.
“I’m expensive, and they’re preparing for lay-offs. So they told me I’m terrible. It was ridiculous. They made stuff up off the top of their heads.”
I had to hand it to her. I wish I could have been so cool when the same thing happened to me.

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In-House Counseling: When the Emptiness Swallows You Whole

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Ed. note: This post is written by Will Meyerhofer, a Biglaw attorney turned psychotherapist, whom we profiled last week. A former Sullivan & Cromwell associate, he holds degrees from Harvard, NYU Law, and The Hunter College School of Social Work. He blogs at The People’s Therapist.
loneliness suicide lawyer.jpgLast October, a law school placement director friend of mine forwarded me an email with a juicy piece of big law gossip. A former associate at Sullivan & Cromwell had offed himself. He was 39.
The body was discovered beneath a highway bridge in Toronto. A few days earlier, it was revealed that since the mid-90′s, he and a co-conspirator made ten million dollars on an insider trading scheme. He’d stolen insider information from S&C, arriving early in the morning to dig through waste baskets, rifle through partners’ desks, and employ temporary word-processor codes to break into the computer system.
“You can’t make this shit up,” was my friend’s comment. “Wasn’t he from around your time?”
It took a minute to locate the face. Gil Cornblum. Jewish, a bit pudgy, with big round glasses. Gil, in that ridiculous little office two doors down from mine.
What was Gil like? Mild-mannered, pleasant, always smiling.
I should have known something was wrong.

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Biglaw Attorney Turned Psychotherapist Analyzes the Legal Profession

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therapist couch lawyers psychotherapy.jpgWill Meyerhofer was your typical high-achieving Biglaw associate. He went to law school because he didn’t know what else to do with his Harvard English degree. He graduated from NYU Law in 1997 and went to work for Sullivan & Cromwell in New York.

“I did my part in destroying the nation’s economy,” he told us. After two years doing securities and M&A work — working for clients like AIG and Goldman — he decided to leave Biglaw, and become a psychotherapist. “Law fundamentally shaped me. It made me ask important questions that led me to therapy.”

He’s certainly not the first Biglaw attorney forced into therapy…

It wasn’t a huge leap for him. His mother and brother are social workers, and his dad was a therapist — he died when Meyerhofer was a teenager. His life insurance policy paid for law school, leaving Meyerhofer blessed with no law school debt, though “he would have preferred to have had Dad.” After a brief detour into business, working as a marketing executive at BarnesandNoble.com, he started taking classes in social work, getting his MSW from Hunter College in 2004.

Even at Sullivan & Cromwell, he had become an unofficial therapist. When working late on deals, colleagues would come into his office, close the door, and seek advice for stress, difficult relationships, and strained marriages. These days, his sessions are somewhat more formal. He has over 60 patients who come to individual and group sessions at his Financial District apartment, A Quiet Room. He has a sliding scale for payment, ranging from $10/hour for a 19-year-old to $200/hour for Wall Street types. “Therapy should be there when you need it, not when you can afford it,” he said.
He blogs about his work at The People’s Therapist, though he goes to great lengths to disguise the identities of his clients, obscuring details and switching their gender and sexual orientations.

Given his insight into the world of law and lawyers, we asked him to psychoanalyze you. Find out why lawyers are bad at therapy, why law firms are toxic environments, and why our comments section can be such a nasty place, after the jump.

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Legal Eagle Wedding Watch 1.10: Headbangers

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champagne glasses small.jpgAt the end of a wild week that included Blue Monday, terrible (or terrific) Tuesday, and corporate-overlord Thursday (sponsored by Justice Anthony Kennedy), we bring you an unusually strong January edition of LEWW.
It features six lawyers in a wide range of practices: public sector, teaching, Biglaw, nonprofit — even personal injury (or “accident law,” as they apparently call it these days). Here are the lucky finalists:

1. Batsheva From and Michael Altman
2. Abigail Gaunt and Gabriel Feldman
3. Erin Roeder and John Spader III

Read all about these lawyer newlyweds, after the jump.

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The Post-Rodge Regime at Sullivan & Cromwell:
Meet Joseph Shenker, S&C’s New Managing Partner

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Joe Shenker Sullivan Managing Partner.JPGToday H. Rodgin Cohen officially moves his Subaru into the right-hand lane, making way for Joseph C. Shenker to take the pole position as Sullivan & Cromwell’s new managing partner. Rodge will still be around, but leadership of the firm shifts to Shenker. Both the New York Times and Am Law Daily have marked this momentous occasion with write-ups on Shenker today.
Reading about Shenker reveals that there are three kinds of people in life: people who work for Goldman Sachs, people who work with Goldman Sachs, and people who lose:

Mr. Shenker, whose practice ranges from mergers and acquisitions to real estate to tax and estate planning, may not be the highly connected banking lawyer that Mr. Cohen is. But he maintains a sterling reputation of his own, maintaining close relationships with real estate magnates and one of the firm’s most significant clients: Goldman Sachs.

It appears that becoming managing partner of S&C is just the latest in a long list of accomplishments in Shenker’s career.

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Meet Joseph Shenker, S&C’s New Managing Partner”

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Why Did John O’Brien Leave Sullivan & Cromwell?

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John OBrien John J OBrien headshot Sullcrom Sullivan Cromwell partner.jpgBack in April, we wondered about the departure from Sullivan & Cromwell of John O’Brien, a highly regarded and well-liked corporate partner who focused on M&A work. This development captured our interest because it’s unusual for lawyers to leave the (highly lucrative) partnership of a top firm like S&C.

When partners leave a place like Sullivan & Cromwell, there’s often a story behind the departure. E.g., Carlos Spinelli-Noseda (partner left S&C after billing clients and firm for more than $500,000 in fraudulent travel and entertainment expenses).

In addition, word on the street was that O’Brien was escorted from the building by security personnel. Partners are being asked to leave their firms with increasing frequency during the recession — but they’re not usually walked out by muscle.

So we decided to do a little digging.

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Does Cravath Need to Match Sullivan & Cromwell?

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2009 Associate bonus watch above the law.JPGA funny thing happened on the way to Cravath setting the 2009 Biglaw associate bonus. They didn’t. When Cleary matched Cravath’s bonus, 83% of Above the Law readers said that all other large New York firms would follow Cravath. But 83% of our readers were wrong.
Sullivan & Cromwell topped Cravath’s bonus by $5,000 for senior associates (class of 2002). Sure, it’s only $5,000. But that is $5,000 more than senior associates get for staying at Cravath. Call it a $5,000 retention bonus.
Does Cravath — and all the firms that rushed to follow Cravath — need to go back in and up the bonus payout to its senior people?
More discussion after the jump.

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