Meet the new Biglaw. Same as the old Biglaw.
As we mentioned in Morning Docket, the Wall Street Journal has a good article about how various recession-era cutbacks have become entrenched in Biglaw. If you have been paying attention or are a current law student, you know the issues: smaller entry-level classes, stagnant salaries, and a partnership track long enough to make a first-year Ph.D. student laugh.
Basically, if you were already a Biglaw partner when the recession hit, you are likely to say, “What recession?” Your profits per partner have probably gone up, despite the general economy’s woes. Other industries use economic downturns to retool their business models and develop new ways to compete. Not Biglaw. It appears that Biglaw has used the recession to fire a bunch of people, exclude new partners, and keep associate salaries and bonuses at recessionary levels. They haven’t developed a new business model; they’ve just found a way to reduce the costs of the old business model.
Biglaw partner: It’s great work if you can get it. The WSJ even found one partner who was so busy loving himself and his life that he appears to be totally oblivious to the struggles of everybody else…
Continue reading “Biglaw’s New Normal Isn’t Great For New Talent”
Today we conclude our coverage of the top New York partners to work for, as selected by our readers (see earlier coverage here and here).
These seven partners are proof that you can be a good partner who is good to associates while working at premier Biglaw firms like Chadbourne & Parke, Cadwalader, White & Case, DLA Piper, Baker Hostetler, Weil Gotshal, and Cravath.
Let’s find out how they do it….
Continue reading “Career Center Survey Results: Top Partners to Work For – New York (Part 3)”
An old white male and his younger diverse peeps.
Law firm diversity matters. It matters to corporate clients, many of them public companies that want to demonstrate their commitment to diversity through their selection of vendors and service providers — which is what law firms are, at the end of the day. It matters to the law students and lawyers that firms are trying to recruit — which is the premise behind the data collection conducted by Building A Better Legal Profession.
So there should be keen interest in the latest edition of the American Lawyer’s Diversity Scorecard 2011, which the magazine just released. As Am Law explains, the Scorecard constitutes its annual ranking of large law firms by their percentage of minority attorneys and minority partners.
Let’s take a look at the top firms for diversity. Did your firm make the list?
Continue reading “Which Law Firms Are Most Diverse? Let’s Look at the Rankings”
Let’s all take a deep breath. Associate bonus season, which usually wraps up sometime in January, looks like it’s been extended well into April. This is just more proof that Biglaw firms don’t actually collude. No rational business person would want to be making decisions in April 2011 about how much to pay employees for 2010 performance.
For those trying to keep score, there seem to be the following categories of firms (roughly using a letter-grade system):
A – Firms that are paying Cravath-level spring bonuses in all offices. (Example: Cravath.) [FN1]
B – Firms that are paying Sullivan & Cromwell-level spring bonuses in all offices. (Example: S&C.)
C – Firms that are paying spring bonuses in New York but not elsewhere, like California or D.C.. (Example: Read more below.)
D – Firms that are not paying spring bonuses because their year-end bonuses beat the Cravath year-end bonuses, and they’re hoping their associates can’t add. (Example: CHECK YOU QUINN EMANUEL.)
F – Firms that are not paying spring bonuses and invite disgruntled associates to S some D if they don’t like it. (Example: Jones “We can still hear all the poors who live inside your black box” Day.)
Right now, we want to focus on Group C. Group B gets a pass because they started the spring bonus phenomenon and goddamnit we’re going to respect that. Partners at firms in Groups D & F will have to examine their own motives for why they want their associates to secretly hate them.
But Group C is weird. Why create inter-office jealousy and rage when most top firms are paying spring bonuses in all of their offices? Why look that desperate to save a little bit of money?
And you can’t spell “Weird Cost-Cutting” without White & Case…
Continue reading “Associate Bonus Watch: Which Firms Are Springing Only in New York?”
Two months ago, when spring bonuses were new and fresh and exciting, we reported on spring bonus deliberations at Cadwalader (which eventually matched the market). At the time, I wrote: “If Cadwalader jumps into the spring bonus pool, we’re going to have to start asking questions about Paul Weiss, Willkie Farr, White & Case (don’t laugh), and other well-known New York City firms.”
Well, I’m not here to say “I told you so.” I’m here to say “I was wrong.” It turns out that you are most certainly allowed to laugh. Because White & Case wants to jump into the spring bonus pool without actually telling people if it is matching the spring bonus market. The White & Case “spring bonus” could be a goddamn unlimited MetroCard for all we know. Do the managers at White & Case think they can appear to be paying market compensation without actually paying market compensation?
That’s funny….
Continue reading “Associate Bonus Watch: White & Case’s Mystery Spring Bonuses”
500 West End Avenue: former home of Tina Fey, until she sold - to a law firm partner.
After suffering through a brutal recession that was fueled, in part, by the collapse of the real estate market, you’d think that nobody would want to read about real estate ever again. But that’s not what’s happening in the blogosphere, where real estate is hotter than ever.
For example, consider Lockhart Steele’s Curbed, an excellent network of sites focused on real estate and interior design. Curbed is thriving, and it recently launched a national edition.
Above the Law readers are similarly obsessed with real estate. Is it because everyone had to take Property as 1Ls? For whatever reason, Lawyerly Lairs is one of our most popular and well-trafficked features. The last installment, a visit to the $4.7 million Chicago townhouse of outgoing Northwestern Law dean David Van Zandt, continues to be a top post (even though it dates back to before Thanksgiving).
So let’s give you more of the real estate porn you want and deserve. In today’s Lawyerly Lairs, focused on ATL’s home city of New York, we look at the recently acquired, envy-inducing residences of partners at three leading law firms: White & Case, Sullivan & Cromwell, and Linklaters.
The first featured residence even has a celebrity connection: the seller was Tina Fey, fabulous television and movie star (and Sarah Palin impersonator)….
Continue reading “Lawyerly Lairs: Three Partners’ Palatial Pads”
The 2011 Vault prestige rankings are out, giving meaning and purpose to those whose firms ranked in the top 20, and giving those further down the list inferiority complexes. (We’re talking to you, #21-formerly-#18.)
This thread covers the firms ranked #11 through #20. This is your chance to discuss these firms — their upsides and downsides and whether Vault got their rankings right. The Vault site has entries for each firm, similar to the Firm Snapshots in our own Career Center.
The “downers” category for most firms tends to be rather general: they treat me like a number, “long hours,” “unfun,” etc. But someone at #20-ranked White & Case had a very specific complaint about the firm’s lack of tech savvy: “The technology is very outdated. We still run Outlook 2003 and are not allowed to use iPhones. The blackberries we are given are over 2 years old and do not work well at times. The firm is not receptive to these issues.”
Little known White & Case perk: every new associate gets their own Commodore 64 for home use.
What are the reviews for the other firms in this bracket?
Continue reading “Fall Recruiting Open Threads: Vault 11 – 20 (2011)”
As we’ve covered in these pages, a fair amount of talent has departed from White & Case in the past few months. The latest to leave: Kathleen Pakenham, a leading litigatrix in tax, who has moved over to Cooley as a partner.
Is this part of a larger trend? And will it continue?
“In under a year, White & Case has lost nearly 40 partners, most of whom have the largest books of business in the firm,” according to one source. “Many of the partner departures have been widely covered by the media — e.g., the 13 departures to Latham in London — but many more have been under the radar screen.”
We’ve received divergent opinions, however, on the extent and significance of the partner losses. Some say that many of the partners who left are not major names and have limited books of business, and that 40 is far too high for the number of departures in the past year. According to the Lawshucks Lateral Tracker, at least 28 attorneys have left W&C since October 2009, but we don’t know the number for the trailing 12 months.
Who are some of the other White & Case lawyers that have left for other firms? What are the broader implications of these departures? And what does the firm have to say about all of this?
Continue reading “A Partner Exodus from White & Case?”
On Sex and the City, Samantha was never seen scrolling through comments on news blogs to make sure her clients’ reputations weren’t being maligned. Instead, she attended fancy New York parties and talked up her roster of good-looking clients.
But SATC is dated. The work of public relations professionals has been made harder (and less glamorous) by the explosion of online news sources. We know that law firm PR folks spend a healthy amount of time monitoring the legal blogosphere to do damage control for their firms. Another place they need to watch is Wikipedia.
The crowd-source encyclopedia has become the go-to reference site for most Internetters. Society’s sages often warn people not to take everything they find in Wikipedia at face value — since the information does not necessarily come from experts and is not systematically vetted — but that advice often goes unheeded.
Because Wikipedia is such an important source of information, and so easily edited, some try to manipulate entries to give them a positive or negative spin. Lawyers at certain firms have been found guilty of this before (e.g., Wachtell). Sometimes dueling manipulation of an entry reaches the level of what Wikipedia calls an edit war — when two or more editors are continually overriding one another’s changes.
The Wikipedia gods ordered an end to the war on the page of Latham & Watkins. BLY1 noticed that the page was put on lockdown. A note from the Wikipedia war god says:
NOTE: IF YOU HAVE COME HERE TO EDIT ABOUT LAYOFFS, THINK TWICE. EDITS MUST BE FACTUALLY VERIFIABLE, AND NEUTRAL. IF YOU ARE CONNECTED TO THIS COMPANY IN ANY WAY WE ADVISE YOU *NOT* TO TOUCH IT.
Someone kept inserting references to Latham’s layoffs and how hard hit first-year associates were. That info has now been scrubbed from the page.
We decided to take a stroll though the revision history of other law firm pages to see who needs to do clean up, and who has done clean up. Cravath, for example, had a very interesting description for a short time…
Continue reading “Law Firm Wikipedia Wars”
We’ve written before about partner departures from White & Case. Earlier this month, we discussed the firm’s Palo Alto office, which has recently lost some talent.
The latest partner to leave: patent litigator Jennifer L. Yokoyama, who has accepted an in-house position at Nike. Her departure from W&C is effective April 2.
“We are sorry to lose such a talented young partner in Jennifer,” said Bijal Vakil, executive partner of White & Case’s Palo Alto office. “Nike has a good eye for talent. We wish her and Nike well and look forward to remaining in contact.”
“It is a difficult decision for me to leave White & Case,” said Yokoyama. “It is a great Firm, and the Palo Alto office has an abundance of excellent attorneys and is a wonderful place to work. I could not, however, pass up the opportunity with Nike. It is a dream job for me and one that I could not turn down. I wish my friends and colleagues at White & Case continued success and will miss them dearly.”
How will Yokoyama’s leaving affect White & Case?
Continue reading “Musical Chairs: Another White & Case Partner Departure
Jennifer Yokoyama Goes In-House to Nike.“
Lucky little 3Ls with offers, are you dreaming of the Biglaw days that await you? If your firm didn’t tell you last summer that you would be deferred, you should be hearing about your start date soon… right?
Some people have started hearing news. Those heading to White & Case have not gotten start dates but they have heard about their deferral stipend. From a firm e-mail:
We are pleased to confirm that we will be paying a stipend of US$65,000 to students whose start dates have been deferred to Fall 2011. Almost all of you have accepted your offers, and we look forward to having you back at the Firm.
Some especially lucky little 3Ls actually know when they get to start…
Continue reading “Open Thread: When Do You Start Work, Class of 2010?”
Law firm partners come and go, but lately it seems that an unusually high number of them have been going away from White & Case.
Last month, over a dozen partners left WC’s London office for Latham & Watkins. In response, White & Case redeployed key partners, several of them from New York, to shore up certain overseas offices.
But the firm is losing some talent on the domestic side too. Says a source:
I know you’ve covered White & Case Palo Alto before. You mentioned the parking lot fiasco and, more recently, covered the defection of three partners from White & Case to Cooley Godward.
Well, they’ve lost a couple more partners. Last month, Jeff Washenko left, apparently for Morrison & Foerster (although he’s still not listed on the MoFo website).
More recently, Bill Coats left to join Kaye Scholer. This makes five partners who’ve left within the past few months. The office only has three partners left.
(The link to the Palo Alto office lists a few partners with two offices. But the only ones who actually use Palo Alto as their main office are Warren Heit, Bijal Vakil, and Jennifer Yokoyama.)
A second tipster’s take on the Palo Alto situation, plus comment from the firm, after the jump.
Continue reading “What’s Going on at White & Case?”
Earlier this month, we wrote about the departure of over a dozen partners from White & Case to Latham & Watkins (which is once again in expansion mode). These defections took place mainly in London and the Middle East, outside our usual geographic focus; but they were sizable and dramatic, and therefore worth covering.
Am Law Daily described Latham’s poaching of White & Case lawyers as “among the more spectacular lateral raids of recent years.” As reporter Richard Lloyd breathlessly wrote, the moves “raise[] serious questions about White & Case’s London finance practice, its position in the Middle East market, and its relationships with such important clients as Deutsche Bank and Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company.” In other words: the ship be sinking?
Well, not so fast. White & Case is rearranging the deck chairs taking decisive steps to beef up the offices that lost all that talent.
Continue reading “Musical Chairs: White & Case Regroups After Latham Raid”
Our coverage of the London legal market tends to be episodic. We tried offering more regular coverage for a while, with our Letter from London column, but we put the feature on hold to focus on domestic developments. (We might revive the London column if we can find a sponsor for it.)
We will, however, cover major news out of London — such as last week’s massive defections from White & Case to Latham & Watkins.
Continue reading “Musical Chairs: White & Case Loses Lawyers to Latham in London”
Let’s finish off the prestigious Vault 20. Here we have some firms on the rise, and some firms that are … not.
Here is the next batch of firms:
16. WilmerHale
17. Latham & Watkins
18. Arnold & Porter
19. Jones Day
20. White & Case
Okay, before we discuss Latham and White & Case, let’s give a good cheer for WilmerHale (up one spot from last year), Arnold & Porter (up two spots from last year), and Jones Day (up four spots from last year).
The Jones Day surge is particularly impressive. You’ll remember that the firm slammed its competitors earlier this month. But it seems like the firm is walking the walk as well as talking the talk.
After the jump, you know what happens next.
Continue reading “Fall Recruiting Open Thread: Vault 16-20 (2010)”
Based on a Washington Post article profiling the Five O’Clock Club, an outplacement and career coaching company, we constructed a Biglaw blind item:
Which New York law firm, having already completed two rounds of layoffs, has hired the Five O’Clock Club to help it carry out additional layoffs (in August, October, and November)?
After we ran the item, several firms came forward to declare they’re not the firm in question. And now they’re joined by one more: Morgan, Lewis & Bockius.
A spokesperson for Morgan Lewis contacted ATL to say that it isn’t the firm with layoffs in the works. In fact, Morgan Lewis claims that it shouldn’t even be on the shortlist of contenders.
Read why — and check out the list of the Five O’Clock Club’s clients, including some very prestigious law firms that haven’t publicly admitted to layoffs — after the jump.
Continue reading “Blind Item Follow-Up: Morgan Lewis Also Denies Layoffs
(Plus a look at the Five O’Clock Club’s law firm clients.)”
On Monday, we tossed out a blind item about future layoffs at a Manhattan law firm, mentioned in the Washington Post as a client of the Five O’Clock Club, an outplacement firm. On Tuesday, with the help of Law Shucks, we narrowed down the list of suspects.
We’re happy to report that we can advance the ball on this. Three firms should be cleared of suspicion:
1. Dewey & LeBoeuf: A spokesperson from D&L stated that it is not the firm in question and has no layoff plans.
2. Schulte Roth & Zabel: A spokesperson from SRZ stated that it is not the firm in question and has not hired a layoff consultant or outplacement consultant.
3. White & Case: A reader pointed out to us that White & Case is listed as a Five O’Clock Club client (PDF). [Update: Looks like the client list has been removed, but we downloaded it; check it out here.]
This caused us to wonder if White & Case might be the firm at issue. But White & Case denies it.
Continue reading “Blind Item Follow-Up: Denials of Upcoming Layoffs from Dewey, Schulte, and White & Case”
There are times when Biglaw seems to speak with one voice.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
This week appears to be one of those times.
Current summer associates all across the land are learning that any cherished hope of starting work in 2010 was a fool’s hope. Coming into this week Skadden, Cravath, Orrick and Ropes & Gray had deferred current summer associates (lucky enough to receive offers) to 2011 or beyond. But this week we’ve seen Hogan & Hartson, Morgan Lewis, and Weil Gotshal defer some of their current summer classes as well.
White & Case is the latest firm to join the list.
Read the full memo after the jump.
Continue reading “Deferral Friday Rolls On: Next Stop White & Case”
As we mentioned last night, there is an interesting debate over what White & Case should have done in response to the adulterous sex scandal involving its associate, “Miami White.” The Daily Business Review takes a look at some of the competing theories for crisis management:
For White & Case, the unwanted publicity raises a question all law firm managers and public relations professionals should consider: If an employee’s dirty laundry gets a public airing, how can a law firm respond to minimize the damage?
When asked about the matter, White & Case spokesman William Sancho in Miami offered a brusque “no comment.”
Hours later, an official firm statement came out: “This is a personal matter for the individual involved, and we cannot comment on it.”
It wasn’t really surprising when White & Case declined to respond to the affairs of SexyLexus. But I wonder if Miami White was told by the firm that he couldn’t comment in the press? Cuckolded in Canada said his piece, SexyLexus called in, but multiple phone calls and emails to Miami White have not been returned.
Regardless of the particular plight of Miami White, should White & Case have gone in a different direction? Let’s get into it after the jump.
Continue reading “Should White & Case Have ‘Gotten In Front’ of the Miami White Situation?”
Yesterday, we told you about a bizarre love triangle — or perhaps pentagon — between a husband, a wife, and an associate in the Miami office of White & Case. Today, the wife (a.k.a. “SexyLexus”) called us to explain her side of the story and her relationship with her husband (a.k.a. “Cuckolded in Canada”) and the White & Case attorney (a.k.a. “Miami White”). We once again ask that commenters refrain from using real names in the comments.
SexyLexus called to make one thing clear. She told us, in no uncertain terms, “I am not a whore.”
In his email to Miami White’s colleagues at White & Case, Cuckolded in Canada claimed that SexyLexus was a porn star. She disagrees with that characterization:
It’s a camera-site. That is all it is. I am not in contact with anybody, there is no contact between me and anybody on that camera-site.
In fact, SexyLexus claims that not only did Cuckolded in Canada know about her online presence, but that he encouraged her to do it in order to make money for the family:
He told me to get back on the camera-site. I was out of the business, but Cuckolded in Canada told me to get back on to make money for the family … I think it turned him on, me doing it. … He loved it.
Despite her showing off the goods on camera and pursuing liaisons of late, SexyLexus was vehement about the paternity of her children not being in doubt:
Yes, the kids are Cuckolded in Canada’s. They are all his.
Above the Law once again reached out to Cuckolded in Canada and Miami White, but neither responded to our multiple inquires. But SexyLexus has more information on both of those guys, which she shares with Above the Law after the jump.
Continue reading “SexyLexus Speaks With Above the Law: ‘I am not a whore.’”
