Mickey Mouse, Esquire?
“I’m leaving the legal profession.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to Disney World!”
This is, in a nutshell, the story of the latest lawyer featured in our series on career alternatives for attorneys. But there is a lesson here of broader applicability.
Are you looking to leave the law? Your treasure trove of “useless” knowledge could be a valuable asset….
Continue reading “Career Alternatives for Attorneys: Disney World Guru”
Stanley M. Chesley
Has the “master of disaster” been mastered by disaster? Has a class-action king been stripped of his crown?
It would seem so. One of the nation’s most famous and successful plaintiffs’ lawyers, Stanley M. Chesley, just got disbarred.
Cue the schadenfreude. We heard about the news from numerous tipsters. “Time to downgrade your Maybach and jet,” gloated one.
What makes it even better, of course, is that Stan Chesley is married to a federal judge, the Honorable Susan J. Dlott (S.D. Ohio). What’s that old saying about Caesar’s wife?
So what got this high-flying class-action lawyer grounded? Hint: it’s all about the benjamins….
Continue reading “Lawyer of the Day: Stan Chesley, Disbarred Husband of a Federal Judge”
Tom Wallerstein
A long-distance friend of mine recently emailed me this question:
“I’m interviewing with a small boutique firm that just opened. They actually have a lot in common with your firm in that they have two partners who were at a big firm and left so they could do their own thing. I was wondering if there’s anything that jumps out at you as something you look for in job candidates for your firm that might not have been as important if you were interviewing them for a position in Biglaw?”
I thought that was a great question, and insightful, because there are indeed some very important differences between interviewing with a small firm or boutique and interviewing for an associate position in Biglaw.
This is what I told her.
Continue reading “From Biglaw to Boutique: Small Firm Interviews”
There’s lots of misery in our profession. Much of it occurs because lawyers didn’t realize that the practice is not like some television show glamorizing our daily lives. We are also a miserable bunch because many of us do the same thing every day, we hate what we do every day, and we deem it useless. Even if you’re one of those rare lawyers who loves what they do, you stand the risk of being around the miserable ones.
I love what I do. I don’t love it every day, and like everyone else on the planet, occasionally think about doing something else. There are days when, like everyone else, I have to deliver bad news to a client, or wonder if every conversation I am having is a conspiracy to cause me to jump out a window.
So because I love what I do and love you all so very much, I thought I’d give you some thoughts about how to actually enjoy lawyering….
Continue reading “The Practice: Fun and Happiness in the Practice of Law”
Tom Wallerstein
When I graduated from law school, one of the perceived benefits of working in Biglaw was job security. This manifested itself in various ways.
First, firms rarely, if ever, conducted true “layoffs;” i.e., reductions in force based more on outside economic factors than qualitative assessments of the affected employees. The rate of hiring either accelerated or slowed, but rarely reversed.
The “no layoff” tradition was to some extent rooted in a genteel culture, but more directly based on pure economics. Most Biglaw firms had more available work than they could handle at any given time. If work slowed, partners nonetheless were confident that it would pick back up…
You want to know what the future of law entails for you? Probably not much. You do the same crap everyone else does. You’re some run-of-the-mill commercial litigator, or you write the same wills as every other estate planning lawyer, or you’re an “aggressive” and “caring” and “passionate” criminal-defense lawyer that will “fight for your rights.”
It’s all garbage. You don’t matter. You compete on price and spend your day wondering what works better — pay-per-click, or your Facebook Fan Page. You’ll pay the bills and get a nice case every so often, but you’re just another lawyer wondering why the world hasn’t lined up to hire you.
The future of law is specialization. I’m not just talking about “niche” practices, I’m talking about specialization within your practice. I’m talking about being a resource in your practice area, or knowing more about a specific issue than the others. And yes, I have examples, calm down, I’ll lay this out for you in simple, easy terms that you can understand. Maybe you can even put some of this to work in the middle of contemplating your miserable life as a lawyer….
Tom Wallerstein
I recently attended a reception for prospective students who had been admitted to the University of Pennsylvania Law School. It was a great event which was graciously hosted by superstar Penn Law alum John Wilson of Shearman & Sterling.
I’m a huge fan of Penn Law for too many reasons to list here, and I tried to convey some of my enthusiasm to the prospective students. (Had I known at the time, I would have included Penn’s distinguishing and commendable compliance with ABA transparency standards.)
I remember when I had attended the admitted students reception prior to committing, way back in 1996. At that reception I met then-Dean Colin Diver, who asked me what other schools I was considering. I told him, and added that I had not yet heard back from Stanford, my top choice…
Continue reading “From Biglaw to Boutique: Believing What You’re Selling”
* A full run-down of the suspension of a 7-year-old for brandishing a danish shaped like a gun. He was loaded for bear… claw. [Lowering the Bar, Part I; LTB, Part II]
* U.S. drones are helping out the French in Mali. Jeez, drones are getting used everywhere from here to Timbuktu. [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Do you need to report to the SEC if your company gets hacked? Probably… if you don’t tell them about possible violations how would they ever know? [IT-Lex]
* Someone wants help finding a WordPress theme for their law firm. Totally Best Magazine, bro. That’s hawt. [Yahoo Answers]
* Just a reminder, Ms. JD’s Fellowship applications are due March 8. [Ms. JD]
If you have a mediocre law firm, here’s a new trick — just buy the ad-search rights to the names of better law firms. Every time someone searches for the better firm, a nice big ad for your firm will pop up.
Does that sound dirty? It kind of seems like cashing in on the good will of another firm. Not to mention the personal identities of the lawyers at the better firm.
So, yeah, it sounds dirty and not possibly legal.
Well, a state appeals court decided it was totally legal….
Continue reading “Buying the Names of Your Competitors Is Good Business, Totally Shady”
You and your partner are going separate ways. It sounded like a good idea — you left the same firm together, or quit the prosecutor’s office at the same time. You got a little corner of another firm’s space, a wood sign with silver letters, a nice desk, and those two chairs in front of it that would make the clients believe they were in the right place. You plugged in a new phone system and off you went.
But your partner isn’t bringing in business, or maybe it’s you. Maybe a small law firm isn’t for you and you’re headed back to Biglaw or in-house. Maybe your partner can’t seem to get in before 10 or your contingency cases are way too contingent.
Lawyers split up; they have issues like any other type of relationship. They fight about money, space, others (read: clients) in their lives, and who knows, maybe they even sleep together. Sometimes the split occurs over time, and sometimes it happens suddenly.
Let’s keep some things in mind….
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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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