Last week, we asked readers to submit possible captions for this photo:
On Monday, you voted on the finalists, and now it’s time to announce the winner of our caption contest….
Continue reading “Caption Contest Winner: For Want of a Biglaw Banana”
‘Best court-ordered pajama party ever! Yay!’
* Our own Elie Mystal isn’t the only one who’s capable of fanning the flames of race baiting — it seems that Supreme Court justices can do it, too! We’ll probably have more on Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s benchslap later today. [The Two-Way / NPR]
* Patience is obviously one of this judge’s virtues, because this took a looooong time. After waiting more than a year for people to put their petty political pandering aside, the Senate confirmed Robert Bacharach to the Tenth Circuit. [Blog of Legal Times]
* Mary Jo White, the nominee to lead the SEC, will probably face her confirmation hearing in March. Her legal wranglings at Debevoise may be of interest to some, but really, who cares? She’s so cute and tiny! [Reuters]
* Mayer Brown and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year: gross revenue is up overall at most Biglaw firms, but not this one. In 2012, Mayer Brown’s revenue dipped 3.7 percent for a six-year low. [Am Law Daily]
* Kirkland & Ellis, now the fifth-largest Biglaw firm in the nation, is leading the market in terms of top dollar merger-and-acquisition deals. Now, if only the firm could get some bananas. [Crain's Chicago Business]
* Orderly liquidation authority may be a legitimate exercise of power under the Bankruptcy Clause, but as far as these states are concerned, it’s just another reason to hate the Dodd-Frank Act. [DealBook / New York Times]
* Remember Peggy Ableman, the judge who ordered lawyers to attend a course on remedial civility in their “jammies”? She’s now at McCarter & English, so mind your manners. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* An “astronomically stupid” legal loophole? Unpossible! Gun trusts are seeing the limelight because Chris Dorner claims he used one to purchase his paraphernalia without a background check. [New York Times]
Last week, we asked readers to submit possible captions for this photo:
Let’s have a look at what our readers came up with, and then vote on the finalists….
Continue reading “Caption Contest Finalists: For Want of a Biglaw Banana”
What would you do if your Biglaw firm wasn’t providing you with the kind of nutritious breakfast foods that you oh so desperately need in order to sit in front of a computer all day and troll the comments on Above the Law draft documents? You’d probably whine and moan about your first-world problems to all of your similarly situated friends before even deigning to consider that you could bring your own damn bananas to work.
That’s exactly what everyone’s bitching about at one Biglaw firm, which to be quite frank, is bananas (B-A-N-A-N-A-S!)….
Continue reading “Caption Contest: For Want of a Biglaw Banana”
Ramiro Ocasio
I don’t even know why I did it, it’s just not me man. I’ve never done anything like this in my life. This is not Ramiro. I’m not a macho guy. I don’t even know how to swim.
– Ramiro Ocasio, a records assistant at Kirkland & Ellis, commenting on his subway heroism. Last week, Ocasio selflessly jumped off the subway platform to come to the aid of an elderly man who had fallen onto the tracks. The Q train arrived less than ten seconds after they were out of harm’s way.
Congratulations! You made it!
Few people are happier about the world’s surviving the Mayan Apocalypse than new partners at top law firms. Can you imagine slaving away in Biglaw for almost (or even over) a decade, finally winning election to the partnership in late 2012, and then having the world end before your hard-won partner status took effect?
Fortunately that didn’t happen. Heck, we didn’t even go over the fiscal cliff. But some people will have to pay higher taxes this year (and for many years to come).
Like these people: the talented and hardworking lawyers who, as of January 1, 2013, became partners of their respective law firms. Let’s find out who they are, so we can congratulate them….
Continue reading “New Partner Watch: Incoming Partner Classes at Ten Top Firms”
It’s a good news, bad news kind of thing for associates at Kirkland & Ellis.
The good news: their bonuses are much better than the “scraps thrown to the troglodytes slaving away at Cravath,” according to one tipster.
The bad news: the bonuses don’t seem to be as generous as last year’s, and some associates made less in real dollars this year than last year, despite billing the same amount of hours and being a year more senior.
So not everybody at Kirkland is happy, which is weird because usually K&E gives its people happy juice before they talk to anybody.
Of course, when your firm uses Cravath as a baseline for your bonuses, happiness is a relative term….
Cravath partners enjoy discounts at Subway, among other perquisites.
It’s rare for partners to leave Cravath, given the prestige, pay, and perks associated with partnership at the firm. And it’s especially rare for a Cravath partner to leave for a rival firm, as opposed to a Wall Street investment bank or major corporation.
Cravath has a very specific system for running itself, and that system has served Cravath very well over the years. As its competitors expend increasing amounts of effort to climb the prestige hierarchy and expand across the globe, Cravath remains at the top, serenely servicing its clients — and printing money for its partners. Part of the reason why Cravath so rarely loses partners to other firms is that it’s so profitable overall that even a partner being paid under Cravath’s lockstep system still does better than a “star” partner at many other firms.
So that’s why today’s news is so notable. A prominent young partner at Cravath has decided to leave Worldwide Plaza and take his talents across town.
Who is the partner in question, and where is he headed?
Continue reading “Musical Chairs: A Promising Young Partner Parts Ways With Cravath”
The news of the K&L Gates / Middletons merger, which looks a lot like the acquisition of Middletons by K&L Gates, got us thinking about the value of law firms. It’s quite apropos given that Middletons is based in Australia, home of the world’s first publicly traded law firm.
As we mentioned in yesterday’s Morning Docket, the American Lawyer recently set out to determine the world’s most valuable law firms. How did Am Law go about doing this, and which leading law firms sit atop their rankings?
Continue reading “The World’s Most Valuable Law Firms: Rankings!”
Shakira, Shakira!
* When it comes to the art of law firm valuation, you may be surprised when you find out which Biglaw firm is worth the most. Here are a few hints: it’s not Baker & McKenzie, and it’s not DLA Piper or Skadden, either. [American Lawyer]
* Remember back in July when this Judge of the Day was busy clicking on hardcore porn sites while in chambers? As it turns out, now he’s busy crying in court while battling to keep his judicial career intact. [Chicago Sun-Times]
* Evening students are capable of doing more than ruining your class rank. Jacob Lew, once a night student at Georgetown Law, is now the White House chief of staff assisting with fiscal cliff negotiations. [New York Times]
* For now, the only thing that’s keeping Florida from gaining another law school is a lack of square footage in the real estate rodeo. But that’s probably a good thing, because adding a twelfth law school would be more than a little ridiculous. [Daytona Beach News-Journal]
* Samsung’s trying to get out of paying $1.05B to Apple, and their lawyers are trying to pin knowledge of the jury foreman’s misrepresentations on their technological nemesis to get the verdict thrown out. [Bloomberg]
* Shakira’s hips don’t lie, but her contracts allegedly do. The sexy singer’s ex-business partner (who’s also her ex-boyfriend) is suing her for $100M to “recover his share of past and future partnership profits.” [Billboard]
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 »
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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