[M]ale lawyers do not want to travel with, have lunch with, or mentor women lawyers because they fear someone will mistake their intentions and accuse them of sexual harassment.
— law firm consultant Cynthia Calvert, in a blog post entitled Male Partners: Help Your Firm by Connecting with Women Lawyers.
Fashion don'ts
Last week the Chicago Bar Association held a What Not To Wear Fashion Show [PDF]. The announcement for the event essentially promised a Project Runway for law students, with “guest judges and fashion industry experts” to critique law students selections for “professional attire.”
We imagined 1L women teetering down the walkway in Victoria’s Secret skirt suits and hooker heels, and 2L men sporting scruff and pinstripes, and the judges snarkily lecturing them on proper Esquire attire.
So we rounded up two legal bloggers in the Chicago area and asked them to attend and report back. We sent Legally Fabulous — a 3L who “often dies a little on the inside at the things she sees her classmates wearing for interviews” — and Attractive Nuisance, a Chicago associate who writes for ExitStrategy.
Attractive Nuisance called the event “How To Dress Like A Lawyer As Told By Some Women Haters, Old Men And Random Law Students.” Legally Fabulous was most impressed by the advice from Professor Maureen Collins of John Marshall Law School:
[She] had some of the best quotes of the night, including:
- “The interview world is no place for a cheap, ugly tie.”
- “I shouldn’t know anything about your underwear… bra straps are meant to be hidden”
- “Khakis were invented for men who can’t match clothes”
- “Maybe you bought your suit at Express or somewhere… and you bent over to get a Danish and I can see your tramp stamp.”
It’s hard for us to imagine a law professor uttering the words tramp stamp — a derogatory term for a tattoo on a woman’s mid-lower back. But after hearing Clarence Thomas say “TTT,” we suppose anything is possible.
After high school, one should throw out all clothes purchased at Express. Other tips for the fashion clueless, after the jump.
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:
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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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