Cops learn to hate people. Basically everyone they encounter is a criminal, so cops soon come to believe that everyone is a criminal.
Litigators — or perhaps litigators who are repeat players in a particular field — learn to hate people. Personal injury insurance defense counsel come to believe that all plaintiffs are lying fakers. Personal injury plaintiffs’ lawyers come to believe that all insurance defense counsel are tightfisted jerks who never pay a claim.
Maybe this is natural. If you spend eight hours every day repeatedly doing the same thing over the course of many years, you become what you do. It’s hard to break out of your role.
But this can cause trouble for in-houselitigators. If you become what you do, consider who in-house litigators learn to hate . . .
If you haven’t yet read the long piece in Fortune magazine about the rise and fall of Jeff Kindler as the CEO of Pfizer, you really should. The story may or may not be true — I have no idea — but it would be interesting reading even if it were a work of fiction about corporate political intrigue.
I’ve never met Jeff Kindler. I do know several people who are close friends of his, and I’ve watched his career from a distance as he moved from Williams & Connolly to GE to the general counsel of McDonald’s to the general counsel of Pfizer and then, startlingly, to the CEO of Pfizer. The Fortune piece traces this whole career in detail and then describes why and how Kindler resigned from the CEO spot after serving only very briefly.
Why mention that article here? First, I’m doing you a favor; if you hadn’t previously heard about the piece, now you have a link.
Second, the article said two things about in-house counsel that rang true with me — whether or not these things actually occurred at Pfizer….
This item, from yesterday’s WSJ Law Blog, caught our eye:
As the 11th Vioxx trial got underway yesterday in federal court in New Orleans, Merck disclosed in an SEC filing that it’s giving its general counsel Kenneth Frazier a raise and a promotion, effective Nov. 1. The GC who will forever be associated with the Vioxx litigation and the company’s decision to try and battle one case at a time will now have a base salary of $780,000, a plummy 13% jump up from his former base pay of $689,000.
Last year, with cash, bonus and stock, Frazier reportedly took home $1.64 million. In other big pharma GC salaries, Pfizer general counsel Jeff Kindler, promoted to CEO earlier this year, was ranked 18th and earned $1.9 million last year. Robert Armitage, in-house counsel at Eli Lilly ranked 51st and earned $1.17 million.
Serving as a general counsel to Big Pharma: Nice work if you can get it.
This brings us to our next theme for Skaddenfreude, ATL’s ongoing survey of salaries within the legal profession. We’d like to turn our attention to the incomes of in-house lawyers.
If you’re employed as in-house counsel for some corporation, we’d like to learn how much you earn. We will then share it with our readers, as a public service to them — but keeping you and your employer anonymous, as always. We’re especially interested in lawyers below the general counsel level — e.g., associate, assistant, or deputy general counsels — whose salaries are not already matters of public record.
So please, in-house lawyers, help us out. Send us your salary information, by email (subject line: “Skaddenfreude”). Examples of “anonymized” entries, and guidelines for submitting your salary info to ATL, appear here. Thanks!
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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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.
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?
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Cops learn to hate people. Basically everyone they encounter is a criminal, so cops soon come to believe that everyone is a criminal.
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