When we speak about work/life balance here in these pages, we don’t tend to talk much about sex. The more important things always seem to come to the forefront of the conversation — things like endless days, sleepless nights, and soul-crushing stress. When that’s what lawyers in Biglaw firms are grappling with on a daily basis, is it really any wonder that no one gives pause to talk about sex (or a general lack thereof)?
Now, we know that lawyers aren’t completely asexual, but perhaps there just isn’t a place to speak about what seems to be a rather impolite topic. So let’s plunge in and assess the situation, complete with a reader poll about whether your jobs are killing your sex lives.
In the wise words of Salt-N-Pepa, let’s talk about sex, baby….
* In response to our contest for the best law firm offices, Vivia Chen proposes a contest for the shabbiest law firm offices — and gets the ball rolling with one nominee. (Hint: CHECK YOU hallways.) [The Careerist]
* And Professor Josh Blackman has some ideas about the identity of the conservative professor discussed in the controversial emails. [Josh Blackman's Blog]
* Villanova hired ESPN’s Andrew Brandt to be the director of the school’s Center for Sports Law. Students would probably be more excited if this meant ESPN was interested in hiring them. [SB Nation Philly]
* Sumner Redstone of Viacom just donated $18 million to Boston University Law. Quick, Boston College, hurry up and find an old rich guy to make a multi-million dollar donation to your school! [Hollywood Reporter]
* Reality TV hottie Reichen Lehmkuhl, perhaps better known for being Lance Bass’s ex-boyfriend, reports that he’s going to law school. He should be required to attend class without his shirt on. [Instinct Magazine]
Lately, it seems that all of the regular legal media outlets have turned an eye toward women and their success in the profession. For example, earlier this week, we discussed whether women will ever be able to close the gender gap in Biglaw equity partnership ranks. Now, we’re faced with another “important” question: can older career women sport longer hairstyles?
According to some, such a look isn’t considered age-appropriate for the office. In fact, you could end up looking “rather sad and dated,” which may have an impact on your legal career. But then again, the National Law Journal’s survey on women who make partner didn’t include a question about the length of partnership candidates’ hair. Because at the end of the day, who cares? If a woman is great at her job, then the length of her hair shouldn’t matter.
Why can’t older women be successful and feminine at the same time?
Major law firms like to tout their dedication to furthering women’s success in the law, but if you look more closely, you’ll find that many Biglaw firm talk a big game, but have little proof back up their words. Take, for example, the fact that according to a recent survey conducted by the National Law Journal, the percentage of women lawyers in partnership positions has increased only 2.8 percent since 2003. In the meantime, the National Association of Women Lawyers says that the percentage of women in equity partnership positions has been “fixed” at just 15 percent for the past 20 years.
Well, whoop-dee-doo at all of these wonderful statistics that we’ve been choking down for the past decade. Women are apparently supposed to be happy about this kind of painfully slow progress. But what about the firms that have actually honored their commitments to women lawyers?
A not-so-little house on the prairie. It looks like a Wright, right?
Are you having a difficult time finding a position in the depressed legal job market? Maybe you need to think about relocating. Have you considered moving to Iowa? As noted by Vivia Chen over at The Careerist, the “Life Changing” state is experiencing a lawyer shortage.
Lawyer jobs and husks of corn aren’t all that Iowa has to offer. The state also has a reasonable cost of living, including some very well-priced real estate.
Take the Iowa home of a former partner Biglaw partner and former general counsel to a major media company. This lovely residence is currently on the market for a surprisingly modest sum….
Or at least that’s what one Biglaw firm seems to think.
Over the weekend, lady lawyers got a serious case of the vapors when word got out that a firm that’s had its fair share of bad press was busy promoting a cooking class for one of its women’s initiatives programs.
Yes, a cooking class — because nothing says “I’m a successful attorney” quite like the ability to serve masterfully prepared hors d’oeuvres (bonus points if the cooking is done while barefoot and/or pregnant).
It’s almost enough to make these women wish they were Lathamed….
It’s getting hard to keep track of all the partner departures from Dewey & LeBoeuf. Thankfully, over at Am Law Daily, Sara Randazzo and Nate Raymond have this handy round-up. The bottom line is that the firm has 53 fewer partners than it did in January: one retired, one left for personal reasons, one went in-house, and fifty (50!) jumped over to rival law firms. You can review the biggest beneficiaries of Dewey defections over here.
So what Dewey do about the problem of fleeing partners? We get medieval on the cowards….
'Find someone else to draft your asset purchase agreement. I'm too busy smoking this pipe.'
That’s the provocative question bouncing around the legal blogosphere these days. It was raised last week by Vivia Chen of the Careerist, then picked up by Professor William Henderson on the Legal Whiteboard, and now it’s the top story on the ABA Journal.
There’s actually some data driving this discussion. According to Chen, citing research by Professor Henderson, graduates of Loyola University Chicago School of Law are six times more likely to make partner at a major law firm than graduates of the higher-ranked University of Chicago Law School, located just a few miles to the south. It seems that even though Chicago Law grads may have an easier time breaking into Biglaw than their Loyola – Chicago counterparts, the Loyola folks who do make it in the door tend to have longer-lasting law firm careers.
Let’s not pick on U. Chicago. There are other elite law schools with even higher Biglaw “washout” rates….
Kyle McEntee (left) and Patrick Lynch (right), co-founders of Law School Transparency (LST).
Late last year, plaintiffs’ lawyer David Anziska pledged to make 2012 “the year of law school litigation.” Anziska, who’s currently spearheading efforts to sue law schools over allegedly misleading employment statistics, told my colleague Staci Zaretsky that he and his team members “want to sue as many law schools as we can to bring them into the fray.”
That’s all well and good — for plaintiffs’ lawyers, and for news outlets like ours seeking juicy stories to cover. But there are other ways to achieve reform. So here’s another thought: Could 2012 instead be the year of law school transparency? Transparency achieved voluntarily, by law schools coming forward on their own to share comprehensive data about how their graduates are faring in the job market?
In the weeks since we wrote about the University of Chicago Law School providing very detailed employment data about its recent graduating classes, based on our interview with Dean Michael Schill, we’ve heard from deans, professors, alumni and students of other law schools, all with similar messages. They believe that their schools, like Chicago, are also transparent about graduate employment outcomes — and they want to be recognized for it.
This chorus of “me too!” messages raises a promising possibility: Is law school transparency becoming, for lack of a better word, “cool”? Will honesty about employment data become the hot new trend for U.S. legal education?
Perhaps. But there’s still a long way to go, as shown by a report issued this week by Law School Transparency….
As this is the first week after I made my New Year’s resolution, I can happily report that I am on track. Well, I did eat an entire coffee cake on New Year’s Day which probably did not fit within my new diet plan, but otherwise I am still resolute. Other than getting a hot bod for 2012, I have resolved to maintain a healthy work/life balance.
If I listened to the gospel of Facebook C.O.O. Sheryl Sandberg, I would worry that my resolution may stand in my way of attaining a leadership position. As some of you may recall, last January Sandberg identified “premature work-life balance concerns” as one of the three reasons many women fail to occupy the C-suite. As an example, Sandburg discussed a young woman in her office who was already worrying about how to juggle family, love, and work despite the fact that she was single and childless. (Way to kick a girl when she’s down, huh?) Vivia Chen, writing about Sandberg, agreed that there is an “increasing concern (maybe obsession) about the issue” of work/life balance among female lawyers and law students.
Luckily, I am not making this decision based on my concerns over hypothetical family obligations. No, I am just lazy and do not like to work. And I am not alone….
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Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
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.
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When we speak about work/life balance here in these pages, we don’t tend to talk much about sex. The more important things always seem to come to the forefront of the conversation — things like endless days, sleepless nights, and soul-crushing stress. When that’s what lawyers in Biglaw firms are grappling with on a daily basis, is it really any wonder that no one gives pause to talk about sex (or a general lack thereof)?
