During the Great Recession, it felt like associates were being laid off in droves. In the past year or so, the big trend has been staff layoffs (often fueled by sending staff functions to an outside service provider).
Associates, staff — what about partners? Well, it seems that their time has come, at least according to some new surveys….
Continue reading “Nationwide Layoff Watch: Partners in Peril”
Judge Sam Sparks
* Remember the “kindergarten party” that Judge Sam Sparks (W.D. Tex.) was planning to hold? His Honor has canceled the festivities. [WSJ Law Blog]
* John Althouse Cohen — yes, son of La Althouse — discusses one way in which Texas might be emulating… Europe? [Jaltcoh]
* Professor Paul Campos opens up a can of whoop-ass on people who say students go to law school — and take on six figures of debt — “for the chance to make a difference.” [Inside the Law School Scam]
* Musical Chairs: Mr. Quinn Goes To Washington (with the help of three Alston & Bird partners). [ABA Journal]
* The latest news on Stephen McDaniel / Lauren Giddings: if the blue gloves don’t fit, you must acquit? [Macon Telegraph]
* Above the Law — of animal cruelty? Steven Seagal, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a dead dog, and a rooster massacre. [TPM Muckraker]
Steven Seagal
* After a judge shot down the effort by NBA star Gilbert Arenas to stop “Basketball Wives: Los Angeles” from airing, Arenas’s ex-fiancee, Laura Govan, was allowed to strut her stuff on television — and it wasn’t pretty. [Sister2Sister]
* Congratulations to super-mensch Stanley Levy, senior counsel at Manatt, on winning Am Law’s Lifetime Achievement Award for 2011. [American Lawyer]
* And congrats to Masimba Mutamba, a 3L at Miami Law, who has just been awarded an apprenticeship with Waller Lansden’s innovative Schola2Juris program. [University of Miami School of Law]
* Some West Village pet stores won’t let you buy a puppy if you are drunk. I don’t know if this fact represents a high point in intelligent rulemaking or a reason to bomb a place like the West Village that makes a law like this necessary. [Village Voice]
* People under 30 are most satisfied with their standard of living. I think that’s because people under 30 assume things will get better for them one day, so I’m not sure they’re “satisfied” so much as “delusional about a future that will be hotter, wetter, and has already been sold to the Chinese.” [Huffington Post]
* The only thing worse than an unaccountable judiciary is an underpaid, disgruntled, unaccountable judiciary. [Faculty Lounge]
* Embattled Widener Law Professor Lawrence Connell is now suing students? Be careful man, “embattled” is usually the stage where the wheels start coming off. [FIRE]
* You can once again purchase “Raging Bitch” beer in Michigan. See, now that we know Jim Tressel bought his dominance over Michigan, I think the whole state will lighten up a bit. [Legal Blog Watch]
* Before rising 3Ls realize nobody is coming to interview them, maybe we should point them towards the Schola2Juris program of Waller Lansden one more time? [Schola2Juris]
Ladies: if you're in NYC, it's okay to go around like this.
* An update to an item from yesterday’s Non-Sequiturs — or, “a domestic dispute version of Spy vs. Spy.” [Not-So Private Parts / Forbes]
* And a response to yesterday’s controversial post about paralegals (and the educational credentials required for the position). [A Paralegal's Life]
* Are you a rising 3L looking for post-graduate employment at a law firm? Check out Waller Lansden’s innovative Schola2Juris program. [Schola2Juris via Am Law Daily]
* Here’s a subject that never gets old (we’ve discussed it before, and we’ll discuss it again): what not to wear as a summer associate. [Corporette]
* Ah, screw it — if you’re here in New York, ladies, just go topless. It’s legal! [Runnin' Scared / Village Voice]
45 Star Island Drive
* Billable Hours: The Movie. “This comedy follows one young lawyer as she is slowly driven crazy by monotonous work, obnoxious colleagues, and the constant buzzing of her BlackBerry.” [Billable Hours]
* Lawyerly Lairs: Roy Black, the high-profile Miami criminal defense attorney, buys a $7.1 million mansion. How many square feet does $7.1 million buy on Star Island? [Todd M. Glaser]
* Advice for PR folks: put some thought into addressing your bulk emails. Also, if you’re pitching us, read this tweet. [Constitutional Daily]
Back in February of this year, the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) announced a minor change to its recruiting guidelines. I was underwhelmed. New associates are graduating law school in a terrible job market, firms are sick of being forced to hire people two years before they know their staffing needs, and NALP is fiddling around with the open offer period? Make sure those deck chairs are properly arranged before we all drown!
A wise man once said: “This town needs an enema.”
Back in February I called for a complete overhaul of the fall recruiting process, and only the crickets heard me cry myself to sleep that night.
But today we’ve received word that a firm most of you have never heard of, and a school more known for its women’s basketball team than its law school, are teaming up to come up with a truly new approach to hiring law school graduates. Will it work? Will it catch on? At this point, who cares?
It’s a new idea — not some twice-baked, refried, reheated idea that wasn’t all that good the first time around….
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.
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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