Congratulations to the “Minority 40 Under 40.” This is a distinguished group of 40 minority lawyers, all under the age of 40, who have just been honored by the National Law Journal for their accomplishments within the legal profession.
Let’s learn more about them. Maybe you have friends or colleagues on the list?
Continue reading “Congratulations to the Minority 40 Under 40″
* LSAC might start auditing the LSAT scores and GPAs that law schools report to the ABA. Now, which agency is going to handle their too good to be true employment stats? [National Law Journal]
* Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s lawyer asked a judge to ban the word “bomb” from his trial. The judge denied it, because, well, he’s called the Underwear Bomber. Duh. [New York Daily News]
* “Don’t sanction me, bro!” Paul Ceglia’s lawyers are begging the court to pass on Gibson Dunn’s request for discovery sanctions after multiple delays. Like. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* In a continuing battle over the market for slutty children’s dolls, Quinn Emanuel may have scored a big one for Barbie with this tentative ruling to toss MGA’s antitrust suit. [Washington Post]
* Apparently it’s unprofessional to put your colleagues on blast for allegedly having “sexual torture chambers” in their basements. Who knew? [Chicago Tribune]
* It’s also unprofessional to slap a man in the face during a deposition. And to think, this came after a confrontation about the impropriety of finger-pointing. [The State]
Being a summer associate isn't a day at the beach, but it's still pretty awesome.
A summer associate program at a top law firm is like sex or pizza: even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.
That seems to be the conclusion of the American Lawyer’s 2011 summer associate survey. Am Law polled 3,656 students at 138 law firms about their summer experiences and used the results to rank 108 summer programs. The lowest-ranked program — that of Chadbourne & Parke, in case you’re wondering — still emerged with a healthy overall satisfaction score of 4.142 (on a 5.0 scale).
If you’re a law student trying to figure out where to spend your summer, you’re probably asking: Which law firms came out with the highest scores?
Continue reading “Very Happy Campers: The Top 10 Summer Associate Programs”
Luis Mijangos: Sextortionist Extraordinaire
* According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 100 new jobs were added to the legal industry last month. About 40,000 students graduated from law school this spring. You do the math. [Am Law Daily]
* This Maryland law school dean thinks that the U.S. News rankings “generalize about things that are not generalizable.” Come on, lady, don’t bite the hand that feeds you. [College Inc. / Washington Post]
* Did you get an email from Paul Ceglia about enlarging your penis? If so, it’s because lawyers at Gibson Dunn exposed the fraudster’s passwords in a court filing last week. Oops. [Bloomberg]
* A computer hacker in California got six years for sextortion and cyberterrorism. Ladies, this is just another reason to save your nude pictures on your flash drive, not your hard drive. [CNN Justice]
* An Ohio man who stopped paying into the office lottery pool is suing for a share of his co-workers’ $99M jackpot. You get what you pay for, and in this case, it should be nothing. [Fox News]
* You don’t have the right to get half naked in an airport to protest the TSA’s policies. Aaron Tobey’s lawsuit has been stripped of its Fourth Amendment claims following a dismissal. [Washington Post]
* Paul Ceglia has to give Facebook every email he’s exchanged since 2003. If Ceglia’s like most men, lawyers at Gibson Dunn will get an interesting peek at his private life. [Wall Street Journal]
* An HIV/AIDS group has been charged with improperly spending federal funds. They were supposed to open a job training center. They allegedly opened a strip club. Problem? [Washington Examiner]
* Pit bulls are cute until they bite your face off (but they do get a bad rap because of bad owners). This ADA lawsuit may help overturn residential dog breed restrictions in Colorado. [ABA Journal]
* In a case of a playboy getting hustled, a man is suing over a $28,109.60 bar tab charged on his credit card at the Hustler Club. Talk about going tit for tat. [New York Post]
It’s hard to say which of these (non-lawyer) wedding write-ups is more cliché-ridden: the one about the two lesbian PE teachers, or the one about the peace activists who keep their income below a taxable level so they don’t give money to the Pentagon. The latter pair are way too busy rummaging through dumpsters to read the Internet, so we feel zero guilt about exposing them to ridicule in the comments. There’s certainly a lot of ridiculous material there.
But on to the lawyer weddings: still ridiculous, but in a different way. Your finalist couples:
Kathleen Cassidy and Ian Shapiro
Emily Feinstein and Eric Olney
This is a summer mega-LEWW, with five finalists and a loooooong list of also-rans at the end. Read on for a virtual nuptial feast….
Continue reading “Legal Eagle Wedding Watch: Hero and Heroin”
Welcome to our latest round-up of summer associate offer rate news. This post contains the latest list of law firms and offices with 100 percent offer rates. In future posts, we’re going to shift gears and focus on firms with lower-than-average offer rates.
An offer rate that’s lower than 100 percent is not necessarily newsworthy. The fall recruiting process by which summer associates are selected isn’t perfect. Sometimes candidates look great on paper and do well during interviews, but then do something during the summer — turning in disappointing work product, getting drunk and acting inappropriately — that causes them to get no-offered. And sometimes people get no-offered for reasons that aren’t their fault — office politics, discrimination. Stuff happens.
We’re not expecting 100 percent offer rates all around. At the same time, there is such a thing as an unusually low offer rate. If you know of an office with an unusually low offer rate — which we will arbitrarily define here as something under 66 percent, or two-thirds — please email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Offer Rate”).
Now, on to the updated list of firms and offices with 100 percent offer rates….
Mon dieu, je déteste mon propriétaire.
* Led by Cleary and Wachtell, five Biglaw firms were involved in the $12.5B Google/Motorola deal. Talk about a total prestige orgy. [Am Law Daily]
* Casey Anthony will be appealing her check fraud probation order in Florida. WHERE’S THE JUSTICE FOR THAT GIRL’S CHECKING ACCOUNT!!?!? [CNN]
* Those pushing for a law school at Indiana Tech admit the state doesn’t need another law school, but “another kind.” The kind that doesn’t exist, amirite? [Chesterton Tribune]
* Your pets don’t need millions from your estate after you go to the big dog park in the sky. But if you feel so inclined, Fifi will probably use the money to dye her hair back. Pink is so not her color. [Reuters]
* For some young lawyers in Nevada, passing the bar is easier than getting a job. Meh, I guess I should’ve considered moving to Nevada. [Fox News]
* Lawyers in Texas are excited about a Twitter Brief Competition. All filings should be under 140 characters. Just imagine: @Appellant Ur lawyer sucks, ttyl #affirm [Tex Parte Blog / Texas Lawyer]
Smile if you received an offer!
Since our initial call for information about summer associate offer rates at major law firms, a number of people have contacted us with reports. As it turns out, there’s a lot of good news floating around out there for summer associates.
This leads us to two conclusions:
Honestly, listening to your summer stories is like looking at the Facebook photos of a Mormon school group’s vacation to Amish country. We know that people are worried about getting offers in this tough market, but the risk-aversion of the summers this year borders on cowardice.
Live a little, have a drink, ask her for her number. It’s a job interview, not an audience with the Pope.
In any event, 100% offer rates abound. Let’s round them up….
Summer offer rates are back and better than ever.
Last week, summer associate programs began to draw to a close. After a summer of fun extravagance work, summer associates are eager to find out if they’ll be getting offers of full-time employment.
We expect the answer to be yes at most places. Sure, during the height of the recession, no offer rates spiked. But Biglaw firms seem to have corrected that problem. As almost any jobless 3L can tell you, firms simply started hiring fewer people to be summer associates in the first place.
What’s bad news for many 3Ls is good news for those who were lucky enough to snag summer associate positions. You know what they say: getting in is the hardest part. Right?
Above the Law has received various reports from summer associates at Biglaw firms, crowing about 100 percent offer rates….
Continue reading “Summer Associate Offer Rates: Open Thread”
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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.
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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