Do you have an eye for design? Do you know how to make a room really pop? Did you hate it when the people on TLC’s Trading Spaces upholstered the walls with tacky-looking fabric? If you’re still practicing law, then maybe you’re in the wrong field. Perhaps you should consider taking a cue from the subject of our latest foray into career alternatives for attorneys and become an interior designer.
Because helping people make their houses feel like homes is just as heartwarming as it sounds….
Bonus news is out at Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle. Basically the firm matched the Cravath scale. “Totally expected and acceptable,” said a contented Curtis associate, “since hours aren’t terrible and people (generally) don’t hate their lives.”
It was “basically” a Cravath match, because even Curtis — which only has around 200 lawyers, and which “tends to round out the bottom of the Am Law 200,” in the words of a Curtis source — was slightly more generous than Cravath and all the CSM followers, at least to certain top performers….
Loren Friedman earned Lawyer of the Day honors here back in 2008, when the then-Curtis Mallet associate was busted for doctoring his law school grades from the University of Chicago, by changing Cs into Bs and As.
Almost two years after the ethics complaint against Friedman was filed, the Illinois Review Board has rendered its verdict.
(We’re a little late in bringing you the news; the Legal Profession Blog noted the judgment last week.)
Good news for the unethical. Fudging your grades will get you gigs at Skadden Arps and Sidley Austin, but won’t get you disbarred. At least not in Illinois. Instead, the Board proposed an 18-month suspension, reduced from the three year sentence previously recommended.
UPDATE / CLARIFICATION: As noted by a commenter, Friedman won’t automatically be reinstated after 18 months. Rather, because the suspension is 18 months “and until further order of the court” (UFO), he will have to “satisfy his obligation of establishing his character and fitness before resuming practice.”
No big deal. Friedman has other things to occupy his time these days….
Despite last week’s welcome reprieve from Biglaw layoffs, it looks like some firms didn’t get the memo. Above the Law has learned that Curtis Mallet conducted layoffs early this week. We believe that 10% – 15% of its corporate associates have been let go. Multiple class years were affected, but it appears that first years were spared.
Curtis Mallet would not respond to our multiple requests for comment
Perhaps the firm is embarrassed to be laying off associates on the heels of last year’s strong profit numbers. In February, Am Law Daily reported:
Bucking the trend among New York law firms, Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle reports a 13.5 percent surge in revenue to $125 million. Curtis Mallet has chosen the worst business year in memory to cross the million-dollar profits per equity partner mark, with PPP up 11 percent to $1 million. Revenue per lawyer for the firm’s 225 lawyers, scattered among 14 offices worldwide, nudged up 3.5 percent to $570,000….
Firm chairman George Kahale, who was profiled in The American Lawyer last year, says that Curtis Mallet has the right mix of groups for the current economic climate.
So you see, laid off associates should be proud that they helped the partners make a million dollars before being shown the door.
After the jump, we learn that the work of soon-to-be-former Curtis Mallet associates is not quite done.
As the temperature rises, so does the desire to embrace informal summer fashions. Women are breaking out their strapless dresses and short skirts, and men are starting to sport shorts. While casual summer wear is fine on the weekends, don’t yield to the temptation to wear your flip flops to your white shoe firm.
Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle conveyed that message to its New York office with a memo sent out last week. In its e-mail making the case for “business casual,” the firm reminded associates that pecs are not to be admitted into evidence:
By all means resist the urge to acquaint us with your chest hair. If you think it necessary to impress the ladies with your efforts at the gym over the winter, think again – we are not a particularly good demographic for that.
After that, the memo’s author reminds the gents that loose-fitting suits can help hide pounds. We’re not sure what that has to do with business casual exactly, and suspect the firm just wanted to try to give equal attention to men and women so as not to appear to be solely lecturing females guilty of summer-slutty fashion sense. (As the Seventh Circuit did last month.)
After the jump, we bring you the full memo, which advises the ladies to “save it for the clubs or the beach.” According to the tipster who sent this along, the advice “wasn’t well received.”
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Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
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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Do you have an eye for design? Do you know how to make a room really pop? Did you hate it when the people on TLC’s Trading Spaces upholstered the walls with tacky-looking fabric? If you’re still practicing law, then maybe you’re in the wrong field. Perhaps you should consider taking a cue from the subject of our latest foray into career alternatives for attorneys and become an interior designer.
