Earlier this week, Conor Friedersdorf, writing for The Atlantic, poured a big bottle of haterade all over the legal profession. More specifically, he criticized the way “Ivy League” lawyers are recruited, and the “palpable sense of entitlement” they exhibit even when they don’t take Biglaw bucks and instead work for the government. Here’s the set […]
Last Friday, we named Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney Ama Dwimoh our Lawyer of the Day. As a prosecutor, Dwimoh goes after child abusers. And yet, according to the New York Daily News — irony alert! — she herself abuses the kiddies, i.e., legal interns in her office. One reader with firsthand knowledge protested this portrayal […]
This tweak to your financial management seems like a no-brainer.
Over on Am Law, The Careerist has been doing a series of interviews with hiring partners at Biglaw firms. They are fun reads, at least if you like to see the extreme hubris exhibited by hiring partners during this buyers’ market for fresh associate talent. A month ago, Jones Day’s hiring partner gave a really […]
A year ago, Howrey announced that it was slashing first-year starting salaries and radically changing its first-year program. Drinker Biddle had adopted a similar “apprenticeship” approach a few weeks before Howrey. Aside from Howrey, Drinker Biddle, and some firm in Kentucky, no other law firm has tried to sell below market salaries and intensive “training” […]
So far, it looks like Jones Day has weathered the recession quite well. At the very least, we know Jones Day is proud of itself and feels like it will have a recruiting advantage. It managed to avoid the crazy layoffs and deferrals that have plagued Biglaw, and to top it all off, the firm […]
There are a lot of media outlets falling over themselves to capture a new angle to the Goldman Sachs lawsuit. But the Washington Post’s Matt Miller (gavel bang: ABA Journal) brilliantly used the Goldman lawsuit to address a potentially much bigger issue. S.E.C. v. Goldman could be the first shot of a new kind of […]
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Well, it’s about time. On April 13th, a small claims court in Florida will deal with a case where an associate is suing his former law firm over allegedly deferred compensation. Only $2,000 is at issue, but this is a battle of principle. The Daily Business Review (subscription) sets it up: The salary deferral imposed […]
Last month, we learned that deferred lawyers got along pretty well with their temporary public interest colleagues in New York. Yesterday, the Chicago Tribune reported that public interest organizations were more than happy to have temporary talent who had their Biglaw dreams deferred for a year: The opposite ends of Chicago’s legal profession found a […]
An article in today’s New York Times, by former WSJ Law Blog writer Dan Slater, discusses changing law firm business models. Much of the piece covers ground that will be familiar to ATL readers. But the article contains some interesting new information about Kaye Scholer (where Slater once worked). According to the Times article, it […]
Most Biglaw New York lawyers would die of malnutrition without SeamlessWeb. Malnutrition, people! Because nobody has time to run down 50 floors to grab a bite to eat after hours. Given the recession, charging 6:30 steak dinners to clients is no longer cool. But Schulte Roth & Zabel could be taking its anti-Seamless policy a […]
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We’ve talked a lot about the cluster of factors that led to massive law firm layoffs throughout 2009. But why did law firms fire the specific people they let go? Let’s say that a firm fired 10% of its associates (whether openly or stealthily) in 2009. That would mean that 9 out of 10 associates […]