After making our way across the country, which included stops in New York, Washington, D.C., and California, the final leg of this Career Center series on the Top Partners to Work For will cover some of the smaller legal markets.
Today we head back to the east coast to focus on Boston’s best Biglaw partners who work at the following top firms: Foley Hoag, Proskauer Rose, Skadden, Mintz Levin, Cooley, Greenberg Traurig, and Ropes & Gray.
Let’s see which partners made the cut….
A few years ago, the law firm of Nixon Peabody came up with a catchy jingle to celebrate its own fabulosity. You can listen to the song here, in case you’ve never heard it. The chorus went as follows: “Everyone’s a winner at Nixon Peabody!”
Alas, a recent lawsuit filed against Nixon Peabody by a former partner at the firm, David Tamman, does not put the firm in a very winning light. Instead, it just makes everyone look bad.
The allegations are seamy. What does Tamman allege?
Continue reading “Lawsuit of the Day: Everyone’s A Loser in Tamman v. Nixon Peabody”
Angelina Pivarnick
* The Westboro Baptist Church has announced — on an iPhone — that it will be picketing Steve Jobs’s funeral. And now I have an Alanis Morissette song stuck in my head. [Los Angeles Times]
* Price check on aisle seven. Price check on aisle seven for a divorce train wreck. People over in England need to be prepared for this now that supermarkets can sell legal services. [BBC News]
* Crowell & Moring has been slapped with an ethics complaint for suggesting that Appalachians suffer birth defects because they have family circles instead of family trees. [Am Law Daily]
* Se habla Español? Necesita un trabajo? Greenberg Traurig is expanding its ginormas practice with its 33rd office located in Mexico City. [Sacramento Bee]
* Doctors in Kentucky delivered a decapitated baby, but apparently did “nothing wrong.” [Insert completely inappropriate dead baby joke here.] [Courier-Journal]
* A former Jersey Shore star is suing over an alleged attack at a Hot Topic last year. This is only acceptable if the “dirty little hamster” was there to look for a Halloween costume. [New York Post]
* With yesterday’s decision from Pennsylvania, the game is now tied for Obamacare at the federal district court level. Come on, SCOTUS, just grant someone certiorari already. [Bloomberg]
* Keep this in mind if you’re applying to law school this year: if you’re white, it ain’t aight. Who knew that there could be “anti-white bias” in a place where everyone’s white, like Wisconsin? [National Law Journal]
* Mark McCombs, the ex-Greenberg Traurig partner who overbilled for prestige, was sentenced to six years. Not a good way to thank your town for naming a street after you. [Am Law Daily]
* An Indian restaurant is accused of forcing Indian customers to give 18% tips. Here’s a tip: don’t punch customers in the face, and maybe they’ll give you a tip on their own. [New York Daily News]
* No soup (or supplements) for you! Curtis Allgier, a Utah prisoner awaiting his murder trial, wants seconds during dinner so he can get back to his fighting killing weight. [Boston Globe]
Dennis Block
Big news out of New York today: Dennis Block, a leading mergers and acquisitions attorney, is on the move. Known for being extremely successful — but notoriously difficult to work with — Block is stepping away from Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft and bringing his huge book of business to Greenberg Traurig.
This Brooklyn Law School graduate proves that you don’t need to go to a T-14 school to have a great career. Block has served as counsel on several big time affairs, including Pfizer’s $68 billion Wyeth takeover, and JPMorgan’s Bear Stearns buyout.
Let’s learn more about Block’s past, and see what Cadwalader has to say about this partner’s defection….
Continue reading “Musical Chairs: Greenberg Traurig Snags a Major Player from Cadwalader”
Snoopy works from home instead of going to the MetLife Building.
This morning we reported on bedbugs at Winston & Strawn’s New York office. Alas, the problem might be much larger than we initially anticipated.
That’s because Winston & Strawn is located in the iconic MetLife building, at 200 Park Avenue in Manhattan. After this morning’s post went up, a spokesperson from Winston told us that all inquires about the bed bugs were being referred to the building’s landlord, real estate giant Tishman Speyer.
Are bedbugs crawling around the whole MetLife building? We don’t know yet; Tishman Speyer hasn’t returned our phone calls.
But if bed bugs are a threat to all the tenants of the MetLife building, there are three other law firms that could be getting very itchy…
Continue reading “MetLife Building Under Attack From Bedbugs: Four Law Firms Potentially Affected”
With fall recruiting gearing up, and the lateral market warming up, we continue our annual series of open threads about the law firms featured in the Vault prestige rankings. These threads provide ATL readers with a forum to discuss the different firms and their various strengths and weaknesses.
The end of the Vault 100 is in sight. We’re covering the firms in batches of 20 now. Here are the firms ranked #61 to #80, which will provide today’s discussion fodder:
61. Greenberg Traurig, LLP
62. Holland & Knight LLP
63. Fish & Richardson P.C.
64. Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP
65. Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP
66. Foley & Lardner LLP
67. Perkins Coie LLP
68. Nixon Peabody LLP
69. Patton Boggs LLP
70. Kaye Scholer LLP
71. Hunton & Williams LLP
72. Reed Smith LLP
73. Steptoe & Johnson LLP
74. Chadbourne & Parke LLP
75. Howrey LLP
76. Bryan Cave LLP
77. Lovells (US) [now part of Hogan Lovells]
78. Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP
79. Crowell & Moring LLP
80. Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP
This is a very eclectic group, including a few New York-centric firms, some D.C.-dominated places, and a bunch of national and even international giants.
Let’s take a closer look at some of these shops….
Continue reading “Fall Recruiting Open Threads: Vault 61 – 80 (2011)”
* Unhappy investors in Arizona go after the law firm that drafted papers for the company that allegedly swindled them. Greenberg Traurig is hit with a $52 million lawsuit for allegedly aiding a mortgage fund in a $1 billion fraud. [Courthouse News Service]
* Elena Kagan and Antonin Scalia’s secret love. [Washington Post]
* A one-year lapse in the estate law means $9 billion is being passed down to heirs in Texas sans taxes. [New York Times]
* Are lawyers happy about the oil spill in the Gulf? [CNN]
* New York Law School professor realizes he is dyslexic. [Huffington Post via ABA Journal]
* A Philadelphia man goes Rocky on his lawyer. Again. [NJ.com]
* David Souter wants America to grow up. [Slate]
* Blind law students sue law schools over their online applications. But not applying to these schools may be for the best. [Chronicle of Higher Education]
Prestige has a price. Former Greenberg Traurig partner Mark McCombs found a sucker to foot the bill for him. As we reported earlier this month, he was the village attorney to Calumet Park, Illinois. He was charged with bilking the village of over one million dollars — money he allegedly sought not for personal gain, but to impress his Chicago partners with his book of business.
Greenberg Traurig has reviewed his overbilling and discovered that it was actually in the multi-millions. The Southtown Star reports that the firm has reviewed McCombs’s billing of Calumet Park dating back to 2002, when he joined the firm, and will be returning $3.2 million to the village of Calumet Park. That takes a chunk out of Greenberg’s PPP this year.
Village records show McCombs billed the village for tens of thousands of dollars each month for work that apparently never was done. He helped himself to property tax revenue that flowed into accounts of Calumet Park’s five tax increment financing districts.
After the jump, Greenberg Traurig managing shareholder Paul Fox says there is an upside to all this, and we have an UPDATE from the firm…
Continue reading “Mark McCombs’s Overbilling Costs Greenberg Traurig $3.2 Million”
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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.
Also, we have the two below in-house openings:
Keep reading »
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
Keep reading »
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