Fact: Spring bonuses have been announced at Cravath, Sullivan & Cromwell, Simpson Thacher, and Cleary Gottlieb.
Fact: It’s February 7th.
Fact: Skadden, Davis Polk, Weil, and Debevoise should be ashamed of themselves.
Honestly, I don’t know what the top-tier firms that haven’t announced spring bonuses think they’re doing. Do they hope that no one is watching? Everybody is watching.
You want proof? Last week, at a “state of the firm” meeting, Cadwalader announced that it is considering spring bonuses. If Cadwalader goes with spring bonuses, it puts a whole host of other firms in play for the big payout…
Sometimes lawyers at Cadwalader are the victims of theft. And sometimes they’re the ones doing the stealing.
Here’s the promised follow-up to yesterday’s post about Cadwalader’s successful raid on the energy law practice of McDermott Will & Emery. It’s big news in Biglaw. As of now, nine partners are moving — Paul Pantano, Karen Dewis, Greg Lawrence, Greg Mocek, Tony Mansfield, Ken Irvin, Rob Stephens, Daryl Rice and Doron Ezickson — but if they’re followed by associates, a few dozen lawyers could be involved.
In an email sent out on Wednesday by MWE leaders Jeff Stone and Peter Sacripanti, reprinted in full after the jump, McDermott tried to minimize the losses. Stone and Sacripanti pointed out that “[t]his group of partners focused mainly on one aspect of our overall energy practice, which was commodities and derivatives trading for financial clients,” and that “the departing partners’ total collections in 2010 amounted to about three percent of overall firm revenue.”
Still, three percent of total MWE revenue is nothing to scoff at. In 2009, McDermott had total revenue of $829 million, according to the American Lawyer. Assuming that 2010 revenue is similar (the Am Law numbers aren’t out yet), three percent amounts to $24.87 million. Dividing that out over nine partners yields revenue per partner of about $2.8 million — not a bad book of business.
Just like last year, we’re late in covering the bonus announcement of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, which apparently happened a few days after the Cravath announcement. But just like last year, the Cadwalader bonus news is nothing to write home about.
We haven’t seen the memo — please feel free to send it our way — but multiple sources advise us that Cadwalader basically matched Cravath. We say “basically” because there was an hours requirement, which we understand was essentially the same as last year’s (i.e., around 2000 hours, 1900 of them billable).
If you have additional information or background about bonuses at CWT this year, we’re all ears.
The unannounced departure took place July 1, Link, 55, said Thursday. Link, the firm’s former chairman and managing partner, left Cadwalader after being replaced as chairman in 2008 and later being left off of the firm’s management committee.
Speaking from one of his homes in Vermont, Link said the retirement was his choice. He said he has no plans to return to the practice of law, though he may take a job in the public interest arena.
“I don’t have to work if I don’t want to,” Link said. “But I will.”
Link made enough money for Cadwalader that many of his former partners don’t have to work if they don’t want to. Remember his fabulous $6 million Hamptons house? Now he has more time to enjoy it.
But Link also leaves behind a legacy that put many associates out of work…
Here at Above the Law, we like to know what’s going to happen, before it happens. We therefore pay special attention to Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. The firm is a trendsetter of sorts — at least for things that are bad. Few remember, but Cadwalader faced down a bed bug epidemic back in 2007, long before every New Yorker lived in fear of the critters.
More people know that Cadwalader was one of the early adopters of massive associate layoffs, with the first sizable round all the way back in January 2008 — well before the fall of Lehman and the true start of the financial crisis. CWT was kicking people to the curb before it was cool.
Nobody knows why Cadwalader seemingly has this mystical power to experience calamities before they happen elsewhere, but one doesn’t have to be able to explain every thing that happens to be true. So ignore the following email sent around the New York offices of Cadwalader at your own risk — but don’t say that CWT didn’t warn you…
Every now and then, we like to offer our readers some career alternatives — things you can do with your law degree and legal training that don’t involve, say, working in a large law firm or as a contract lawyer. We’ve profiled a wide range of individuals, from lawyers who have left the law for everything from football coaching to CEO-ing to therapy (giving, not receiving).
Today we continue down the path of attorneys who have gone from representing companies to launching them. Our latest interviewee has started a company, Urban Interns, that might be of interest to any ATL readers who are looking to hire interns — or any ATL readers who are looking for internships, which can provide valuable experience and/or a paycheck (of great value during these times of still-high unemployment).
Earlier this month, we broke the news of three prominent Proskauer partners — Louis Solomon, Hal Shaftel, and Colin Underwood — jumping ship to Cadwalader. In addition, Michael Lazaroff, who has been senior counsel at Proskauer, will join Cadwalader as special counsel (as noted in the New York Law Journal).
In its press release, Cadwalader touted their arrival as a coup. And that’s generally how the news was covered (which is so often the case with law firm moves).
But covering every move by partners from Firm A to Firm B as a triumph for Firm B, the receiving firm, isn’t always accurate. Sometimes Firm A is perfectly happy to see lawyers leave. Sometimes firms even squeeze out departing partners — a trend that has been on the upswing during the recession.
With respect to the Proskauer-to-Cadwalader moves, is there perhaps more to this than meets the eye?
Time for a belated bonus announcement. A few weeks ago, associate bonuses were announced at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft.
The bonuses were basically on the Cravath scale, provided you meet “the bonus criteria set forth in the bonus policy.” We’re advised that the bonus criteria focus for the most part on hours, with bonuses triggered at around 2000 hours (1900 billable).
In other CWT news, we hear that two real estate partners — Alan Lawrence and John Busillo — are leaving the firm for Arnold & Porter. Sources describe them as “heavy hitters” who “still have some business.”
Last week, we brought you the story of a former Mayer Brown associate who is suing the firm. We have some more back story on the plaintiff, Venus Yvette Springs, and she certainly sounds like a colorful person.
Before joining Mayer Brown, Springs worked at Cadwalader. According to our tipsters, she left CWT in an interesting fashion:
In her departure email from Cadwalader, she quoted all sorts of religious passages and talked about how she wanted to devote her life to pro bono.
Shortly thereafter, she wound up at Mayer Brown — one of the largest and most profitable law firms on the planet.
In her complaint against Mayer Brown, Springs alleged that the firm did not count her pro bono hours as it had promised. Of course, working in the real estate department at a major firm hardly sounds like a life “devoted to pro bono.” She wants to work with clients who can’t pay, but wants to make sure she gets a plump pay check anyway.
But maybe she needed to support her family. Unconfirmed reports say that her husband is Jules Springs. Jules Springs recently pleaded guilty to mortgage fraud. No word on whether or not Mr. Springs was an equal opportunity defrauder.
After the jump, Venus Springs compares her plight at Mayer Brown to the Holocaust. I wish I were making that up.
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.
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.
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Fact: Spring bonuses have been announced at Cravath, Sullivan & Cromwell, Simpson Thacher, and Cleary Gottlieb.
