Continuing our annual tradition honoring March Madness, Above the Law is running a law-related bracket, advancing law firms or law schools based on the outcome of reader polls. If you’ve been around for a while, you know the drill. But remember, I’m the new guy, so I’ve made a couple changes to the format this year.
This year, it’s time to talk about law firms. Specifically, your collective editors pose this question: Which law firm has the brightest future? The economy is still fragile and people are writing books with scary titles like The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis (affiliate link). The firms in our competition may look healthy today, but we all could have said the same thing at one time about Howrey, Brobeck, Heller, or Dewey.
What firm’s future is so bright their senior partners gotta wear shades?
These days, all anyone cares about are employment statistics. Law schools are getting sued over them. Law school rankings are dropping because of them. Law school administrators are losing their jobs over them. It’s at the point where even average joes are aware of the problems law school graduates are having when it comes to getting a job. Dear Lord, when is the madness going to end?!?
Probably as soon as ads like this stop showing up in the most curious of places….
Contrary to popular belief on the blogs, law school is a good investment. That’s right: the media’s “hysteria” over the value proposition of law school has caused many of the best and brightest students in our country to “irrationally” skip out on a degree that could allow them to reap vast monetary rewards. In fact, it’s really quite obvious that the critics’ focus on first jobs out of law school is “misplaced.” Yes, you’ll have a little bit of debt, and that’s a problem, but it’s “extremely shortsighted” to forgo law school entirely just because of it.
Oops, sorry guys, please disregard all of what was just said. I was just repeating some of Dean Lawrence Mitchell’s New York Times op-ed talking points to see how ridiculous they’d sound. Students at Case Western Law, I applaud you for listening to this kind of tripe on a daily basis.
Oh, but speaking of Dean Mitchell, here’s the photo for our latest caption contest….
What would you do if your Biglaw firm wasn’t providing you with the kind of nutritious breakfast foods that you oh so desperately need in order to sit in front of a computer all day and troll the comments on Above the Law draft documents? You’d probably whine and moan about your first-world problems to all of your similarly situated friends before even deigning to consider that you could bring your own damn bananas to work.
That’s exactly what everyone’s bitching about at one Biglaw firm, which to be quite frank, is bananas (B-A-N-A-N-A-S!)….
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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