- Sidebar – Shon Hopwood, Mediocre Criminal Turned Top Jailhouse Lawyer – NYTimes.com – Seth Waxman raves about the guy's work. Pretty interesting.
- Being Available During Holidays Proved Fortuitous for Steptoe Associate, Now VP at AOL – News – ABA Journal – It's rare that there's such a clear connection between working on the weekends and success, but it's nice to see here. We've always felt the people complaining about "lifestyle" issues weren't the ones actually in the office on the weekend taking on extra work anyway.
- Finances First or Culture First? – Adam Smith, Esq. – This piece is just excellent. They analyze a number of decisions Cesar Alvarez made that took Greenberg Traurig from nowhere 10 years ago to #10 in the AmLaw 100.
- Hogan Lovells names global heads for five core practices- Legalweek – It's a bunch of two-headed monsters. The major practices will have two heads, one in each of the US and Europe. Not surprisingly, the Hogan & Hartson guys are running the US side of corporate, finance, and disputes, while the legacy Lovells guys (it's all men) are running the European side. Jeanne Archibald from the Hogan side is in charge of the government practice and the only woman. Andreas von Falck from Lovells will run IP out of Dusseldorf. So they basically went co-heads on everything important then gave each other sole control of a minor practice each. It's like they tried too hard to make it even.
- Loyola L.A. Law Grad Gets Savaged in the Shark Tank – Above the Law – Jason Calacanis is absolutely right when he talks about how retarded this show is. The VCs have no connection to reality and it's just a disgusting abomination of how real investors treat potential business partners. This show can't get canceled soon enough. Actually, The Deep End needs to get canceled first, then this.
Posted in Administration.
By lawshucks
– February 8, 2010
Below are our top posts for January. As usual, we don’t include our regular features like This Week in Layoffs and The Month in Layoffs in the Top 10 posts for the month.
10. BigLaw Gangs up on NYS Legislature – 51 firms are trying to present a consolidated front against the New York legislature on recently passed legislation pertaining to powers of attorney and certificated securities. Really, it’s just interesting because (a) so many of the firms aren’t from New York, and (b) we previously noted that an exclusive clique of seven firms had joined together on an SEC comment letter.
The rest of the best, after the jump.
Continued…
Posted in Administration.
Tagged with apple, baker & mckenzie, greenberg traurig, wilson sonsini.
By lawshucks
– February 8, 2010
Pic: U. Chicago
Regular readers of this column are well aware by now that the overall unemployment rate isn’t a particularly good indicator, but it’s the most-commonly discussed number so we use it. The predictions are always wrong and it grossly undercounts the number of people any reasonable person would define as unemployed. But for all its problems, it’s not entirely useless to show trends.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
The unemployment rate fell from 10.0 to 9.7 percent in January, and nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged (-20,000), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.
That’s what we’ve been harping on all along. Overall unemployment didn’t improve because of a flood of people going back to work; it improved because so many people fell out of the BLS’s definition. We remain frustrated by any definition of unemployment that doesn’t include people who got frustrated and gave up looking or whose unemployment had outlasted their benefits:
About 2.5 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in January, an increase of 409,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. (See table A-16.)
Among the marginally attached, there were 1.1 million discouraged workers in January, up from 734,000 a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.5 million people marginally attached to the labor force had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities.
The U-6 rate, the government’s most-inclusive definition, is a little closer to what most people would think of when figuring out the unemployment rate, and that is still over 16%. But the trend is the same for both: January was probably slightly better than December (only probably, because the number of long-term unemployed was up again).
Still, there’s a long way to go, with an estimated 11 million jobs needing to be created to get us back to the 5% unemployment level pre-recession.
How that translated into the legal sector, and what firms have been doing to weather the storm, after the jump.
Continued…
Posted in Business of Law.
Tagged with cravath, dla piper, eversheds, fish & richardson, howrey, layoffs, mintz levin, paul weiss, pillsbury, this week in layoffs.
By lawshucks
– February 6, 2010
Contest really does end tonight, so get those last-minute entries in.
Plenty of prizes and good odds to win:
The grand prize winner (1) will receive a gift certificate for use in the Apple Store or at www.apple.com. This gift certificate can be used to purchase a new iPhone 3GS or any other item(s) at the winner’s discretion, up to the value of the gift certificate ($199).
The four participants with the most submissions will each receive a copy of The Lawyer’s Guide to Finding Success in Any Job Market
by Richard Hermann, courtesy of the author.
Ten random winners will each receive a copy of Building a Better Legal Profession’s Guide to Law Firms: The Law Student’s Guide to Finding the Perfect Law Firm Job
, courtesy of Building a Better Legal Profession.
If you don’t want the phone, you’d be half way to a new iPad, instead.
And don’t forget to check out our first visualization of all that data you’ve helped provide (nearly 100 contributions so far!) with the Network Visualization.
Good luck!
Posted in Administration.
By lawshucks
– February 5, 2010
A question we’ve been asked a number of times since announcing the Law Shucks Lateral Tracker is, "What are you going to do with that data?"
The short answer is, we’re going to pick it apart and make pretty charts out of it, just like we’ve been doing with layoffs.
But there are some even cooler things we can do.
After the jump, a sample: an interactive network diagram of the laterals from January 2010.
Continued…
Posted in Administration.
Tagged with laterals.
By lawshucks
– February 4, 2010
Back in July, we noted that “There Are Cliques in BigLaw, Too” when seven firms (Cravath, Davis Polk, Latham & Watkins, Simpson Thacher, Skadden, Sullivan & Cromwell, and Wachtell) collaborated on a comment letter to the SEC about shareholder-access rules.
This time around, the firms are getting all “We Are the World” and ganging up on the New York legislature.
51 of New York’s finest issued a white paper, “Interpretive Issues Related to Recent Changes to the New York Power of Attorney Law.”
A summary of the white paper (boring) and the firms included and excluded (interesting) after the jump (plus we learn something new about a firm’s organizational status).
Continued…
Posted in Lawyers.
Tagged with cravath, davis polk, jones day, latham & watkins, proskauer, simpson thacher, skadden, sullivan & cromwell, wachtell.
By lawshucks
– February 3, 2010
[This is a post from our newest sponsor, Lexvid. If you're interested in sponsorship opportunities, contact us]
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View the site for yourself at www.lexvid.com.
Posted in Administration.
By lawshucks
– February 2, 2010
January was an odd month. Every week, there was one firm laying people off. Some weeks it was lawyers, some it was staff.
It was just enough to keep everyone on edge.
Which is probably what the firms wanted, as they were focused more on spinning the year-end numbers for inclusion in the AmLaw rankings.
This time last year, it was pretty clear that a number of firms just waited to get through the holidays then opened the floodgates.
The total for January this year was only about 10% of last year’s.
Details after the jump.
Continued…
Posted in Business of Law.
Tagged with cahill gordon, layoffs, morrison & foerster, seyfarth shaw, the month in layoffs, wilson sonsini.
By lawshucks
– February 2, 2010
One of the joys of rolling out a new app is breaking it in production. We had a bunch of downtime last night with procrastinators getting in their last-minute entries (or something – not sure what caused it yet). Plus, non-blog events are conspiring to keep us busy for a few days, so we’re extending the deadline to Friday night, winners will be announced on Monday.
Read the rules, go to the Lateral Tracker, and get in those entries!
Posted in Administration.
By lawshucks
– February 1, 2010
Posted in Administration.
By lawshucks
– February 1, 2010
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