I’m starting to think that staff attorneys are being discriminated against because they are staff attorneys.
Today Thomson Reuters reports that a racial discrimination lawsuit has been filed against Quinn Emanuel by a former staff attorney. The plaintiff, who is African-American, claims that she was given less desirable work than her white colleagues and that she was forced to work with a person she “feared,” as retaliation for complaining about her treatment at the firm.
I’m not sure if racism really fits into Quinn’s work hard/play hard firm culture. I feel like the only color Quinn cares about is green, as in, “You’ve billed a ton of hours today despite being all kinds of hungover, I think you’re turning green”….
* If you root for your law school alma mater over your undergrad alma mater, you are the kind of unprincipled betrayer who deserves the very worst of all that life has to offer. [PrawfsBlawg]
* Did you know that university professors could get fired for appearing in burlesque shows? [Siouxsie Law]
* Some thoughts on what black prospective law students should consider when choosing a law school, from Yolanda Young. [On Being a Black Lawyer]
* Best. Deposition transcript. Ever. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Please, please, please, let there be many character and fitness boards who will ding this law student who stomped a bird to death. [Huffington Post]
* Happy Purim, everybody. And if you are an Irish Jew, I wish your liver the best.
* What’s the secret to lawyer happiness? And no, it doesn’t involve illegal drugs or porn stars (Charlie Sheen isn’t a lawyer). [Slaw via Legal Blog Watch]
* Want to start your own law blog? Read this interesting interview with BL1Y (a regular in the ATL comments section). [Lawyerist]
* Superstar criminal defense lawyer John Dowd, the Akin Gump partner who successfully got Monica Goodling (among many other clients) out of legal trouble, offered a rousing defense of Raj Rajaratnam today. [Dealbreaker]
* Elsewhere in Ken Starr news, it seems that some celebs are getting hit with IRS tax liens as a result of their ties to him. [TaxProf Blog]
* Congratulations to a 3L at Harvard Law School, Nneka Ukpai, who trounced the prosecution at trial and won an acquittal for her client. [Yolanda Young / On Being a Black Lawyer]
* Congratulations to a 3L at NYU Law and future S.D.N.Y. law clerk, Eli Northrup, who belongs to a hip-hop band called Pants Velour — which has, in the words of our tipster, “captured the magic of Charlie Sheen as only music can.” [YouTube]
* Apple could end up paying $625.5 million in a patent case. Proposes a WSJ commenter: “They need to settle. Apple should offer an I-Phone and spotty coverage for life.” [WSJ Law Blog]
* If you talk trash about for-profit schools by suggesting that they dispense worthless degrees (which many of them do), could you get sued? [Full Disclosure / Forbes]
* We have no comment on the possible sale of our sister site Dealbreaker to the New York Observer — but our ex-colleague, former Dealbreaker editor John Carney, does. [CNBC]
* If FindLaw has helped you out with a legal issue, tell your story — and possibly win a cash prize ($1,000 or $5,000). [FindLaw]
If you are new to Above the Law, you might not remember Yolanda Young. She’s an African-American woman who used to work as a staff attorney at Covington & Burling. Some time ago, she sued the firm for racial and gender discrimination. You can read all about her claims here.
Regular readers of this site are already thinking: “Wait, didn’t that suit get dismissed?” ATL veterans are working on their obese/race-baiting/marine mammal mad libs as we speak.
But before we get to those fresh horrors, you all should know something: a federal judge has reinstated part of Yolanda Young’s case against Covington…
* Crocs have no teeth when it comes to fighting legal battles. The footwear company has settled five design defect lawsuits filed by parents whose children suffered escalator injuries. [On Point News]
* Yolanda Young’s suit against Covington & Burling is back on. [BLT]
* The ATL editors are not the only legal groupies in New York. [New York Times via Gothamist]
* Blago’s judge is prepared for theatrics in the court. [Associated Press]
* Looks like Rihanna and Chris Brown may be violating the judge’s “two-way” stay-away order. [New York Post]
* The latest abortion legislation. [Slate]
* Senators Orrin Hatch and John Cornyn will vote against Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. [Associated Press]
* Law school students interning in the Brooklyn DA’s office lack salaries and chairs. [New York Times]
* Is the ABA a club that’s not cool anymore? [National Law Journal]
We’ve been following the lawsuit filed by former Covington & Burling staff attorney Yolanda Young against Covington. She alleged that various incidents of racial discrimination derailed her Covington career.
Covington denied those claims.
Today, we have a judgment. Attorneys from Akin Gump — which represents Covington in this matter — sent out the following press release, earlier today:
United States District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton today dismissed Yolanda Young’s lawsuit against Covington & Burling LLP after Ms. Young and her attorney failed to appear for a court hearing.
Young filed her complaint in February 2009 against Covington and five of its present or former lawyers. Covington answered, denying Ms. Young’s allegations. Separately, on March 11, Covington filed a motion to strike certain of plaintiffs’ allegations on the grounds that they were false and scandalous, a motion which plaintiff neither responded to nor disputed. In addition, two of the individual lawyer defendants moved for dismissal for failure to state a claim against them, which the Court granted on May 28.
The Court on May 14 issued an order warning plaintiff that her failure to abide by the Rules and participate in a meet and confer conference might be treated as grounds for dismissal. Today’s hearing was scheduled more than two months ago. When neither Ms. Young nor her attorney, Latif Doman, appeared for the hearing or contacted the Court, Judge Walton dismissed the case without prejudice for want of prosecution.
Talk about anticlimactic.
After the jump, more details from the order.
Only staff attorneys that were “integral” to ongoing matters have been kept on. And there is no word on whether those people will have any job security after their matters wrap up.
It appears that Covington & Burling is also undergoing a major reduction of its staff attorney program.
Tipsters (including some recently laid off staff attorneys) report that firm management has decided to effectively discontinue its staff attorney program. The firm has been letting go of staff attorneys at the rate of a couple per week over the last few weeks. As we understand it, as staff attorneys finish up their active matters, they are being let go.
Our sources tell us that the decision was made by firm management some weeks back. At the time the decision was made, the staff attorney manager was out of the office on vacation. When she came back, she allegedly told Covington’s staff attorneys that they should start circulating their resumes.
In some cases, laid off staff attorneys are being given a one week severance option. One week, if they sign a form promising not to sue the firm over the circumstances of their termination. Some Covington personnel that spoke to Above the Law believed that clause is proof that Covington decided to move out staff attorneys as a response to the lawsuit filed by former-Covington Staff Attorney Yolanda Young.
After the jump, we have statements from Covington & Burling, and Yolanda Young.
Ed. note: This post is authored by Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney of Kinney Recruiting, sponsor of the Asia Chronicles. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates and partners in Asia than any other firm in the past five years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com
Happy Chinese New Year! We were extremely busy the past few months, including most of our US based team working from our Hong Kong offices during November and December.
As a follow up from our recent post, which listed our 62 US associate and counsel placements in Asia last year (vast majority in HK / China), please note that thus far in January ’12, we have already made seven US associate and counsel placements in Asia. This is an especially impressive number, considering the biglaw lateral hiring market in Asia is down right now (see state of the market brief overview below). These new placements are of new hires in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai, who were interviewing with their new firm for a month or more and they are spread out among different practice areas, including project finance, litigation, fund formation, M&A and cap markets. We are close on four additional new associate placements, in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai, that we expect to close soon. We do not discuss partner placements in these articles, but the pace of partner recruitment in Asia (a large part of our business) has continued.
Hedge Fund In-House Openings in Hong Kong
We are seeing a small run of new in-house openings in Hong Kong at hedge funds. We are currently filling three different in-house positions at three different hedge funds in Hong Kong, two of these searches we are handling on an exclusive basis. All three will most likely be filled by a US associate, with about 4 to 6 years of experience. Mandarin not required. Candidates from NYC and London will be considered, but at one of these funds the new hire will likely come from Hong Kong / China or Singapore (with HK being the strong preference).
Please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com if you are interested in these hedge fund openings. As you probably would expect, the competition for these spots will be fierce and the funds will be very selective when choosing which candidates to interview.
In 2009, a small group of Harvard Law School students noticed an absurd monopoly in the bar prep space, held by an unchallenged leader with a non-evolving product. In response, these students teamed up with Harvard Law alumni to launch BarMax on January 14, 2010.
The mission: democratize bar prep by embracing new technologies to provide the very best bar exam review courses at a fraction of the cost normally associated with these courses.
Since then, with the encouragement of thousands of students and an unwavering commitment to their success, BarMax has established itself as a comprehensive alternative to the stagnant, over-priced status quo.
As we continue to expand, we do not want to lose sight of the basic premises that led us to create BarMax in the first place. If you are a law student who believes that there is something fundamentally wrong with being forced to take out yet another loan to pay for a $4,000 bar exam prep course, you are not alone.
I’m starting to think that staff attorneys are being discriminated against because they are staff attorneys. 
Continue reading “Staff Attorney Claims Discrimination at Quinn Emanuel”
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