Folks go out there and say, ‘I’m mad at the plaintiffs,’ and ‘I see the same names,’ and ‘Let’s go bash the plaintiffs’ attorneys.’ I don’t mind that, but the law has been there, don’t kid yourself.
– Martin J. Coleman, defending the barrage of Americans with Disabilities Act suits that he and other plaintiffs’ attorneys have filed in New York City.
(Coleman also had more choice words for his detractors. Check them out, as well as the other side of the ADA suit debate, after the jump.)
It’s been a while since we’ve had a good New York to 190 post. As we’ve discussed before, associate salaries at New York law firms are long overdue for a raise. Starting salaries have stagnated in New York.
What’s worse, total associate compensation has gone down this year from last year, thanks to Cravath’s low bonus and the absence of spring bonuses. The buying power of a New York associate is pathetic.
But one new firm in New York seems poised to change that. The firm isn’t nearly as big as our salary market leaders, but the firm is leaving the stagnated Cravath salary scale in the dust…
Deidre Dare aka Deidre Clark
The high-powered international law firm of Allen & Overy is a member of the Magic Circle. So why can’t they make Deidre Dare disappear?
As longtime readers will recall, Deidre Dare (real name: Deidre Clark) was a Columbia Law School graduate who worked in the Moscow office of Allen & Overy. Everything was going swimmingly, until Clark decided to write some erotic fiction on the side — erotic fiction that may have been based in part on Clark’s experiences working as an expat in Russia. One thing led to another, and Clark’s employment at A&O was terminated.
Clark sued the firm in London, alleging her firing was improper; that suit was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. She then sued in New York, making claims for sexual harassment, sexual discrimination, wrongful termination, and retaliation, among other claims.
When we interviewed her last year, Clark (a member of the New York bar) sounded confident about her chances of success in the Big Apple: “I think NY will take jurisdiction. And thank God for that.”
So, was Clark correct? Will her suit be moving forward in New York?
Continue reading “The Latest Plot Twist in Deidre Dare v. Allen & Overy”
The people building 1 World Trade Center still seem to be having trouble attracting big-time tenants. Especially law firms. Previous reports have indicated that Mayer Brown and Morgan Lewis have backed out of deals to take up residency in the new tower.
The latest law firm deal to fall through appears to be that of Chadbourne & Parke. In January, the New York Times reported with much fanfare that Chadbourne & Parke would be a “prime tenant” a 1 WTC. But this week, the New York Post is reporting that the deal has fallen through.
Chadbourne, currently housed at 30 Rock, doesn’t have to go downtown, but it can’t stay where it is. So where will Chadbourne be going?
Continue reading “Will Chadbourne & Parke Wind Up Homeless?”
845 West End Avenue
In the battle to stay high (or climb higher) in the all-powerful U.S. News law school rankings, law schools compete with each other to woo star faculty. And this makes sense. Because a school’s peer reputation score “appears to explain around 90% of the variation in overall USNWR score,” as noted by Professor Eric Talley over at TaxProf Blog, it pays for a law school to snag top talent.
How does a law school prevail in the battle for superstars? Well, despite their impressive academic pedigrees and their Big Ideas, law professors just like us: they love luxury real estate.
Check out the $3.6 million apartment, located in the magnificent prewar condominium at 845 West End Avenue, that NYU Law School just added to its collection of fabulous faculty housing….
Continue reading “Lawyerly Lairs: NYU Law Buys Another $3 Million Faculty Condo”
First it showed up in the New York Times. Then it appeared on the Today Show. Now the story of law schools allegedly misrepresenting their graduates’ employment outcomes is in every New Yorker’s favorite commuter rag newspaper, Metro New York:
What news development on the law school lawsuit front brought this story to the front page of Metro?
Continue reading “The Latest News in the Law School Lawsuits”
'So then I said to them, 'We have, like, a staggered board AND a poison pill. So suck on that!''
The halls are alive with… the sound of vermin? As we’ve mentioned earlier today, some top law firms (and even one top law school) are experiencing problems with rodents, insects, and other pests.
And, unfortunately, some of these critters have crept into company canteens. Thanks to New York City’s controversial system of rating restaurants, in which establishments receive letter grades based on their health and sanitation violations (or lack thereof), we know which law firm cafeterias are worth patronizing (and which ones are best avoided).
Let’s take a look at which Biglaw behemoths have the best — and the buggiest — dining rooms….
Continue reading “Biglaw’s Best — and Buggiest — Cafeterias”
Where's our spring bonus?
* Lawyers at this Biglaw firm may learn a thing or two about respecting their elders later this week. Kelley Drye is close to settling an age discrimination suit filed by Eugene D’Ablemont, one of its many de-equitized partners. [Wall Street Journal]
* Well, this could definitely be one of the reasons why Cravath hasn’t given out any spring bonuses to associates yet this year. They probably had to spend all of their money to clean up their allegedly fly-infested cafeteria. [Am Law Daily]
* Women in Virginia will now be able to politely decline their pre-abortion transvaginal ultrasounds in favor of abdominal ones. Oh, how nice! Look at that, girls, we totally won the war on women. [CBS News]
* Things Dharun Ravi texted to Tyler Clementi on the night the latter committed suicide? “I’ve known you were gay and I have no problem with it.” Of course you knew, you watched his sexual encounters via webcam. [CNN]
* According to the Massachusetts Appeals Court, this equation makes sense: donor sperm + donor eggs + an estranged wife + consent to post-separation IVF = a child support obligation. [Boston Globe]
As much as some people glorify being a “Jack of all trades,” the truth is that in order to succeed, most professionals have to specialize. After all, the full idiom is actually “Jack of all trades, master of none.”
At a certain point in a person’s career, if he really wants to go somewhere, he must become an expert at something specific and be able to do that one thing better than anyone else. No one wants to get complacent, but at some point work hopefully becomes comfortable.
And that’s what makes Judge Ann Pfau’s story so intriguing and unique. The 64-year-old was, until recently, the chief administrative judge for the State of New York. But late last year, after massive budget cuts, the lifelong administrator ended up as a trial judge, “in the gray courthouse that hulks next to Brooklyn Borough Hall like some weird tribute to bleak Soviet architecture.”
Talk about an unexpected career move…
Continue reading “Confessions of a 64-Year-Old Rookie Trial Judge”
Garden Place: one of the loveliest blocks in Brooklyn (or all of New York City, for that matter). If you have $10 million to spare, you can live here too.
A friend of mine recently made partner at a top New York law firm. A senior partner called to offer congratulations: “Now you can finally move out of Brooklyn!”
But my friend doesn’t want to move out of Brooklyn — and with good reason. Over the past few years, what was once viewed as a dangerous, dirty, and downmarket borough has become hot, happening, and high-end. It’s not for nothing that GQ famously dubbed Brooklyn “the coolest city in the planet.”
Brooklyn may be newly hip (and increasingly expensive), but some people have known about its charms for years. Take this partner at a leading New York law firm, a longtime resident, who has placed his Brooklyn Heights townhouse on the market — for an eight-figure sum….
Continue reading “Lawyerly Lairs: A Partner Sells in Brooklyn”
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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