On Friday, we showed you what might very well be the best law firm website photo of all time. It came to us from the other side of the pond (where it had been noticed by RollOnFriday).
We solicited possible captions, with preference given to ones that would constitute alternative bios for the lawyer in question. You gave us a few good ones, so we decided to turn them into a caption contest….
Continue reading “Best Law Firm Website Photo: Caption Contest”
Say Cheese!!!
Yesterday our social media columnist, Adrian Dayton, asked you: What’s wrong with your law firm bio?
One possible answer: your photograph (or lack thereof). As law firm marketing consultant Dion Algeri told Adrian, pictures are “extremely important” to attorney bios on law firm websites. Over at Great Jakes, Algeri analyzes the lawyer photos on the websites of ten different law firms: Axiom, Babcock Partners, Boies Schiller, Cravath, Edelson McGuire, Greenberg Traurig, Linklaters, Proskauer, Walkers, and White & Case. He notes a trend: “[F]irms are now recognizing the importance of these images and are investing in more lush and engaging photos.”
We’ve previously explored the world of law firm website photos in the pages of ATL. We’ve poked gentle fun at the body shots at Ballard Spahr and the action shots at Cox Smith. We’ve marveled at the split personalities of lawyers at the Van Winkle Law Firm. We’ve ogled the hotties on the website of Davis Polk.
But we’ve never come across an attorney profile photo as awesome as this one….
Don’t take it personally. Nobody is perfect, but unfortunately, when it comes to law firm bios — well, most of them stink. They tout the vast accomplishments of the lawyer: where they went to law school, if they graduated with honors, whether they were on law review. Then they often include a laundry list of each and every type of legal matter the attorney has ever dealt with in their life. The main problem is, attorney bios are often created with very little thought into strategy. This is unfortunate, especially considering how important bios are.
Your bio matters to decision makers. Ninety percent of general counsel claim the attorney bios are the most important part of a law firm’s website (2009 Wicker Park Group). Studies have also shown that bios are the most viewed pages on law firm websites, generating over 50% of the page views. If a good bio can help you land one more client this next year, what would that be worth to you? What about five new clients? Perhaps your bio deserves a little more attention than you are giving it.
There are three major problems that plague the bios of law firms, and some of them are pretty easy to fix….
Managing expectations is a very important skill — when it comes to personal relationships, movie enjoyment, and, of course, dealing with your co-workers and clients.
You need to know how to set boundaries. After you’ve pulled two all-nighters in a row, for example, it’s okay to tell the partner you work for that you just can’t do a third. If you give an inch, your colleague or client will take the proverbial mile.
But has one South Carolina law firm taken boundary-setting too far? Check out the Client Expectations section of the Pincus Family Law website (via Jim Calloway, via ABA Journal):
We do not work on the weekends and do not provide emergency numbers for the weekends. There are times we may look at and answer your email over the weekend, but this is generally the exception and not to be relied upon by you that we are accessible on weekends.
And they don’t do windows, either.
Do not think we are perfect. We make mistakes. We are competent attorneys and paralegals, but we make mistakes. We will correct a mistake if we find it or if you point it out. Please do not yell at us, accuse us of not doing our job, or insult us over a mistake.
And please do not sue us for malpractice. We warned you at the outset that “[w]e make mistakes.”
And that’s not all….
Continue reading “Law Firm to Clients: We Don’t Work Weekends”
Back in March, we reported on stealth layoffs at Davis Polk & Wardwell. Stealth layoffs are usually seen as an effort to maintain high attorney utilization rates — and high partner profits. But at genteel, WASPy DPW, long known for its passive-aggressive kinder and gentler firm culture, profits come second to pulchritude.
Everything is beautiful at 450 Lexington — the offices, the stationery, and yes, the attorneys. DPW has long been known for hiring based on beauty as well as brains. So we suspect that their recent stealth layoffs were just an “office beautification” project: lay off the less attractive associates, to increase the average hotness of the remaining lawyers. (Lord only knows what the denizens of the recently closed Frankfurt office looked like.)
A few years ago, we wrote about Davis Polk’s reputation for hiring aesthetically appealing attorneys in the New York Observer:
Bar Belles: According to Rob, a 2L at NYU, one firm that’s in demand this season is Davis Polk & Wardwell. Why? “I’ve heard they have good-looking associates.”
Some things never change. When I interviewed a decade ago, Davis was already known as a bastion of beauty on aesthetically challenged Lexington Avenue. It was the firm of choice for the prom queen and king of my law school class — the editor in chief of the law journal, a luminous doll-like beauty with a vast family fortune, and her Abercrombie-handsome future husband. They were joined at Davis by enough comely Asian females to cast Memoirs of a Geisha.
And hotness matters more at Davis Polk these days, now that their redesigned website features attorney photos (for some, but not all, of the lawyers — perhaps it was an “opt in” regime?). From an observant tipster:
Have you noticed that Davis Polk’s new website has pictures of attorneys? Weren’t they once afraid of stalkers? Glad they’ve gotten over that. Or perhaps their associate corps is simply uglier now.
We think not. If you visit the Davis Polk — er, DavisPolk — website, and surf through the attorney profiles, you’ll still find hotties to spare.
Evidence of hotness, plus additional analysis, after the jump.
Continue reading “Davis Polk’s Website Makeover: Now With 100 Percent Way More Hotties!”
While we anxiously await word of new associate bonus announcements, it is in the meantime a quite slow news day. For those of you tired of talking about the New York Bar Exam Results, here is a brief diversion in the form of full-length attorney bio photos from the firm Fox Rothschild. Our tipster quips:
It’s back-to-school-photo time for law firms. What’s up with this Fox Rothschild’s cruel and unusual full-body photos?
We had a look at a few of the sampling of photos provided by the tipster and we totally get what he’s saying (Samantha Evans, pictured at right, is an exception). Interesting experiment, but stick with the head shots next time guys, alright? You don’t want opposing attorneys sizing you up that much.
Any other firms doing wacky things with attorney photos? Maybe some more artsy-fartsy stuff, a la Gibson Dunn’s Peekaboo? Send us anything strange that you come across.
Links to a few more examples of the full length photos are after the jump.
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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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