Our First Year Part 1 – December 08

It’s been a busy first year here at Law Shucks. Right from the beginning, our plan was to report on stories of interest to the population of big-firm lawyers and alumni.

We started out covering general legal news, but realized pretty quickly that a trend was brewing: layoffs. Above the Law, the WSJ Law Blog, and a few others had been doing a great job of reporting the stories as they came out, but no one was curating and synthesizing them, so it was hard to get a handle on what, exactly, was going on.

In this multi-part series, we trace some of the highlights of a year that started from scratch and ended up with a nomination as one of the ABA Journal’s Blawg 100

After the jump, December 2008 – in which we started to find our niche and the now-ubiquitous law-firm layoff tracker was born.

When we started, on about December 11, no one really knew who Bernie Madoff was. We all thought Marc Dreier would surely be the biggest swindler of the year. A day later, we met the man, and pointed out how he had quickly knocked Dreier off his throne.

We linked to Jason Mendelson’s Law Firm 2.0 series for the first time, which not only led to a nice friendship with Mendelson, but also showed our ability to recognize winners – Mendelson just won the ABA Journal Blawg 100 in the Business category.

We mentioned Jessica Cutler, a sex blogger who became a lawyer’s wife – a journey which would be reversed in spectacular fashion in coming months by Deidre Dare.

But that wasn’t our first viral hit. That honor goes to one Jessica Grimald, a former Skadden lawyer who promoted her site by modeling on it in her lingerie. The popularity of that story also made us realize that, for better or worse, a prurient angle was popular with our nascent audience. That led us to apologize for missing the Playboy Playmate in an insider-trading story, and writing about the proposed IPO of Penthouse Media. We also realized that there’s a healthy interest in practical advice – and thus was born the Wannabe Insider Trader’s Guide.

Another story that remains popular today is “The Interesting Tale of Harvey Miller and WLRK,” in which we recounted the bankruptcy legend’s brush with joining Wachtell Lipton early in his career.

Oh, and we announced a little thing called the BigLaw Layoff Tracker. Inspired by the TechCrunch layoff tracker for the technology industry, we decided to take on that task – naively unaware of how much work it would be and how much of an audience there was for the information.

The Top 5 Posts for December 2008 (all-time pageviews)