So far, no firm has stepped up and paid out bonuses early to help people struggling with Hurricane Sandy. Given the Nor’easter, associates might just burn the money to stay warm.
But at least one firm is being proactive about adjusting expectations because of the crazy weather patterns. Sandy essentially took a week away from billables, and so the firm is knocking a week off the minimum hour requirement….
Continue reading “Associate Bonus Watch: Are Hours Requirements Getting Blown Back?”
Did Sandy’s thumb tip the scales in favor of Obama? Yesterday, we asked you, the ATL readers, and the answer was an emphatic no. For just last week, you predicted a comfortable reelection, despite the contemporaneous claims of a dead heat. And you were right. So, apart from the election, where the Superstorm seems to have been of little account, we wondered how Sandy (ed. note: are we still talking about the damn storm?) was, in your view, handled by your employers and schools.
Responses to our ATL Insider Survey tell us that, generally speaking, lawyers rate their employers highly in more abstract areas (e.g., “satisfaction” and “culture”) and lower in more concrete categories (e.g., “compensation” and “training”). Last week, we in the Northeast megalopolis all faced the very concrete challenge of Superstorm Sandy. Since then, we’ve covered how many firms have acquitted themselves admirably in the wake of the storm, with pro bono efforts and charitable contributions to support relief and recovery efforts.
But how about during the run-up to Sandy? Yesterday, we asked our readers who live and work in Sandy-impacted areas to assess the performance of their schools or employers in the face of the storm: how prepared were they? Was sufficient technology in place to continue operations? And how are things going now, a week later? This, in addition to a question about how the storm might have affected the outcome of yesterday’s election. Read on for the results….
Continue reading “ATL Readers Totally Called It (and Rate Their Firms’ Performances Pre-Sandy)”
* “We know in our hearts that for the United States of America, the best is yet to come.” Barack Obama was re-elected as president. Bring on the hope and change! No, seriously. [New York Times]
* In news that shouldn’t come as a surprise, regardless of who won the presidential race, there are still post-election voting issues that will likely be resolved in the courts. [Blog of Legal Times]
* But what we really want to know is who will be our country’s next attorney general. Because if anyone can fill Eric Holder’s shoes, it’s Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the S.D.N.Y. [WSJ Law Blog]
* In other important news, several states approved gay marriage ballot initiatives, and others legalized marijuana. But hopefully you don’t have a case of the munchies yet — federal law still says it’s illegal. [CNN]
* They helped American citizens “ba-rock” the vote: hundreds of law students from around the country rallied around the craziness of Election Day to volunteer their assistance to worthy causes. [National Law Journal]
* Biglaw firms in NYC are still reeling after Hurricane Sandy. While WilmerHale set up temporary offices last week, both SullCrom and Fried Frank could be out of commission for weeks. [Reuters; New York Times]
* At this point, in-house counsel are kind of like the McKayla Maroneys of the legal profession, because they are seriously unimpressed with outside counsel’s efforts to improve services and fees. [Corporate Counsel]
* Judge Theodore Jones, associate judge of the New York Court of Appeals, RIP. [New York Law Journal]
An awning taken down by Sandy.
Hurricane Sandy hit the legal world hard, as we’ve chronicled in these pages. And many lawyers and legal employers are still feeling its effects — quite literally. If you work at one prominent downtown law firm, for example, we hope you’re wearing thermal underwear.
As we mentioned on Friday, some individuals have been exploiting the Superstorm Sandy crisis to take advantage of others. The Justice Department and the SEC have issued warnings about various “Sandy scams.”
On the opposite end of the decency spectrum, some lawyers and law firms are stepping up to the plate and supporting Hurricane Sandy relief and recovery efforts. Let’s see what they’re doing — and give them some well-deserved kudos for their work….
Continue reading “Lawyers and Law Firms Contribute To Hurricane Sandy Relief and Recovery Efforts”
* Stop drinking the FCPA Kool-Aid. Kool-Aid doesn’t even taste good anyway. Unless you add booze. But I digress. [FCPA Professor]
* Is it illegal to lie on Twitter? Some thoughts from Professor Eugene Volokh. [Volokh Conspiracy]
* So you wanna get published in a law review, huh? Well, check this out, young padawan. [Prawfsblog]
* Who are the top employment lawyers in America? [eBossWatch]
* The ABA and New York Law School are butting heads on how to deal with time lost due to Sandy. [Legal As She Is Spoke via Constitutional Daily]
* Lat is giving a talk at Vanderbilt Law School tomorrow. It’s open to the public and free, just like the pizza (but if you take the pizza, you have to stay for the event). [Vanderbilt Law School]
Manhattan is going back to work today. The power is on, pretty much. The subways are running, basically. And, well hell there’s money to be made, so get your asses to your desks.
While Staten Island is still a soggy disaster, Emperor Bloomberg has gotten the corporate centers of wealth generation back online in his “luxury city.” And so the city that never sleeps is waking up.
But just because we have power doesn’t mean there is heat. Yeah, the power is back on in SoPo, but in many places the heat isn’t yet working. (This is the case in Lat’s apartment; luckily he’s already in Nashville for an event tomorrow at Vanderbilt Law.)
So, I guess you need to be able to type with gloves on? A tipster at one Biglaw firm tells us a chilling story….
Continue reading “You’re Back At Work, But Do You Have Heat?”
Beat up your copier, not your clients.
* As a tipster wrote, “This judge done lost her mind.” We don’t know about that, but something is clearly wrong here. [Chicago Sun-Times]
* Another brutal — yet disarmingly tender — takedown of the bros who run IsAnybodyDown. [Popehat]
* Robert Morton Duncan, the first black justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, RIP. [Times Union]
* Yes, clients can be royal pains in the behind. But you still can’t hit an obnoxious client over the head with a baseball bat. [Charleston Gazette]
* Major Kudos to McGuireWoods for the firm’s support of Hurricane Sandy relief efforts. We encourage other firms (and individuals) to do the same. [American Red Cross]
* “As American as the modern prison system” doesn’t have the same ring as “apple pie.” For better or worse, though, it’s equally true. [Cruel and Unusual]
* LawDingo is a new company that connects potential clients with lawyers — all from the convenience of home. It’s the way of the future! [Dow Jones]
On any list of “scum of the Earth,” people who profiteer off of disaster victims have to make the list. Jesus, it’d be worth Hell existing just so there would be a place for people who take advantage of disasters to loot electronics or valuables (food, if you’re hungry and nobody is home, is fair game I guess). I think there are reasonable people on both sides of the New York City marathon debate, but the thought of any police not stopping a looter to deal with the marathon makes me think they should cancel this year’s event.
Of course, looters aren’t the only kinds of criminals trying to take advantage of the hurricane. The Department of Justice is warning people to be on the lookout for Sandy scams…
Continue reading “In The Aftermath Of Disaster, The Scam Artists Come Out”
We’ve previously discussed how Mid-Atlantic law schools are having to shuffle their class schedules because of Hurricane Sandy.
Cancelling classes is the easy part. It’s not clear that current students are even capable of taking notes in class without power.
But classes cancelled this week need to be made up next week. Not because the extra teaching is all that crucial, but because the ABA and various state bars mandate a certain number of classroom hours for law students. It’s regulation at its worst: they can’t directly measure what matters (are kids getting a quality education), so they mandate an arbitrary figure that at best means nothing.
At worst, it forces schools to jump through hoops to meet the requirements even during times of hardship. At Rutgers Law-Newark, they’re looking to have finals right up until the holidays. At NYU Law, their best solution is just to make classes excruciatingly long to make up the hours…
Continue reading “NYU Law Students Can Blame Sandy (And The ABA) For Their Super-Long Classes”
Glamor girl.
* The media doesn’t have a liberal bias or a conservative bias, it has a sadness bias. If it’s negative, it’s on. [Talking Points Memo]
* New York suspends the statute of limitations in the wake of the hurricane. [New York Personal Injury Law Blog]
* I’m getting robocalls and I live on the upper east side of Manhattan. Why? Obama, you’re good up here. Romney, there’s no point. PLEASE STOP CALLING NOW. [National Law Journal]
* Glamour magazine names Ruth Bader Ginsburg one of their women of the year. I didn’t know Glamour made a necrophiliacs issue. [ABA Journal]
* Pro Bono storm chasers. [New York Law Journal]
* Judicial elections may be stupid, but “sham” judicial elections are probably illegal. [Wall Street Journal]
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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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