Category: News Feeds

What do associates at major law firms care about more than money? Prestige, of course. But, at the end of the day, sometimes being a leader when it comes to compensation is enough to boost a firm’s prestige. As luck would have it, the closely watched Vault 100 rankings are here to remind lawyers at the nation’s largest law firms about exactly which ones are considered the most prestigious.

In last year’s Vault 100 rankings, Cravath — the firm that matched Milbank’s $190K associate salary scale two summers ago with over-the-top monetary compensation for senior associates — managed to retain its number 1, with Wachtell Lipton clinging to its spot in second place, even though the firm had once dominated Vault’s top spot for more than a decade. Was Cravath able to keep its cachet as the most prestigious Biglaw firm in the country in the latest Vault rankings?

Obviously. Here’s what Mary Kate Sheridan, Vault’s senior law editor, had to say about Cravath’s placement in the latest rankings: “Cravath is the undeniable leader in the legal field, as the top firm in our ranking for five years running and the only firm to achieve a prestige score above ‘9’ this year. Associates at peer firms recognize Cravath not only for how elite it is, but also for its consistent leadership when it comes to industry practices and standards, such as associate compensation and training.” Cravath keeps crushing it in every way imaginable. Way to go!

Although Cravath kept pace, this year, there was some historic drama when it came to the tippy top of the Top 10 in the latest edition of the Vault rankings. Without any further ado, here are the Top 10 Most Prestigious Law Firms based on Vault’s Annual Associate Survey for 2021:

1. Cravath, Swaine & Moore (no change)
2. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom (+1)
3. Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz (-1)
4. Sullivan & Cromwell (no change)
5. Latham & Watkins (no change)
6. Kirkland & Ellis (no change)
7. Davis Polk & Wardwell (no change)
8. Simpson Thacher & Bartlett (no change)
9. Gibson Dunn & Crutcher (no change)
10. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison (no change)

For the first time in the history of the Vault rankings, Skadden has overtaken Wachtell for the No. 2 spot. (And it was just by a hair, as Skadden earned a score of 8.577, while Wachtell earned a score of 8.567, making Skadden 0.010 points more prestigious than Wachtell.) Associates at Skadden — a firm described by Vault respondents as “esteemed,” “excellent all around,” and “top of the field” — are sure to enjoy the schadenfreude of Wachtell’s fractional rankings tumble. Let’s see if Skadden is able to hold onto the silver medal next year.

Congratulations to all of the Biglaw firms that made the latest edition of the Vault 100 rankings. How did your firm do this time around? Email us, text us at (646) 820-8477, or tweet us @atlblog to let us know how you feel.

Vault’s Top 100 Law Firms For 2021 [Vault]
Introducing Vault’s 2021 Top 100 Law Firms! [Vault]

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

One of America’s most venerable legal institutions has fallen into rank buffoonery and it’s genuinely tragic to watch. From Bill Barr declaring racism over — except on college campuses — to a stumbling effort to get Michael Flynn out of his own sworn testimony, Joe is joined by ATL and Wonkette columnist Liz Dye to discuss what’s gone wrong over there. And we check in on Kyle Rittenhouse’s legal team who’ve made some… let’s just say “interesting” strategic decisions.

Canelo Alvarez has initiated a lawsuit based on what he claims to be the breach of the single largest contract in the history of boxing and one of the largest contracts in all of sport. The complaint, filed on September 8 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, includes Alvarez’s longstanding promoters Golden Boy Promotions and Oscar De La Hoya, as well as sports broadcaster DAZN, as defendants.

Alvarez says that, in October 2018, he committed to a five-year, 11-fight deal with DAZN that was said to be worth a minimum of $365 million. Twenty-three months later, after Alvarez fought in only three boxing matches (all victories), he is suing for damages of at least $280 million.

The complaint reveals that Alvarez appears to not be certain that the $365 million contract was entered into by the relevant parties. The beginning of the general allegations section is premised on information and belief that Golden Boy Promotions and DAZN entered into such a contract. Later on, Alvarez says he is informed of and believes that the contract required DAZN to pay Golden Boy Promotions a licensing fee of $40 million per bout for 10 bouts, with a reduced fee for a December 2018 fight against Rocky Fielding. Another upon information and belief sentence says that there was an expectation and understanding that the bulk of the licensing fees would flow to Alvarez as his purse for the bouts.

Alvarez explains that he has repeatedly asked for copies of the contract and that both Golden Boy Promotions and DAZN have refused to share whatever may exist to support the alleged contractual relationship.

While Alvarez has not been able to get his hands on any contract between Golden Boy Promotions and DAZN, he is sure that he signed a separate agreement with Golden Boy Promotions that required the promotions company to pay Alvarez a total of $365 million for 11 boxing matches, and the contract purportedly includes a clause whereby Golden Boy Promotions’ CEO, Oscar De La Hoya, personally assumed liability for all guaranteed payments.

As is true for many individuals and corporate entities, problems surrounding the business relationships sprouted with the coming of the coronavirus pandemic. According to the complaint, after a temporary pause, the parties resumed discussions about 2020 bouts in May, with Alvarez indicating he was ready and able to face world-class opponents in September and December. A dispute arose when, in June, DAZN said it would not pay the license fee and allegedly used Alvarez’s failure to fight professional boxer Gennady Golovkin in 2019 as an excuse.

“After extended discussions between the parties, DAZN offered to pay Alvarez and Golden Boy Promotions a fraction of the contracted $40 million license fee in cash and some DAZN stock in advance of a potential IPO. However, the entire value of the package — for a bout against another World Champion — was substantially less than Alvarez’ contractual guarantee,” the complaint states.

Alvarez says that he has asked Golden Boy Promotions to explore alternative broadcast options for a Fall 2020 bout but no alternative plans have been provided that would compensate Alvarez with the $35 million per bout that he believes he is owed.

The complaint has 10 counts, including a cause of action for declaratory relief whereby Alvarez asks the court to determine the legal rights and duties of the parties, such as whether he is able to participate in bouts arranged and promoted by entities other than Golden Boy Promotions and broadcast by entities other than DAZN based on each of their alleged breaches.

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Darren Heitner is the founder of Heitner Legal. He is the author of How to Play the Game: What Every Sports Attorney Needs to Know, published by the American Bar Association, and is an adjunct professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. You can reach him by email at heitner@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter at @DarrenHeitner.

Yesterday, the Justice Department filed a motion removing E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against the president to federal court. The disputed evidence in this case is literally Donald Trump’s own body, and yet the federal government demands to be substituted as defendant because the president was acting “within the scope of his employment” when he said he couldn’t possibly have raped Carroll because she was “not my type.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but 2020 is F*CKED UP.

In June of 2019, longrunning Elle advice columnist E. Jean Carroll wrote in New York Magazine that Trump had raped her in a dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman’s on 5th Avenue — where Trump could famously shoot someone and not lose one supporter — 25 years ago. Trump denied the allegations repeatedly, claiming never to have met Carroll, implying that she was carrying out a political attack, and telling The Hill, “I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?”

With great respect.

Carroll sued Trump for defamation in New York state court almost a year ago, since which time the president has ducked service of process, made various assertions of immunity, and generally tried to throw sand in the gears. Having exhausted all remedies and facing the prospect of having to turn over his DNA to see if it matches the male genetic material found on the dress Carroll wore the day of the alleged assault, Trump’s consigliere at the Justice Department has come to the belated realization that his boss was just, ummm, doing his job when he called Carroll a liar.

“Defendant Donald J. Trump was acting within the scope of his office as the President of the United States at the time of the alleged conduct,” attested James G. Touhey, Jr., Director of the Torts Branch at the DOJ’s Civil Division in yesterday’s filing.

In its Motion to Substitute the United States as Defendant, the government gestured vaguely toward the presidential media obligations, writing that “Numerous courts have recognized that elected officials act within the scope of their office or employment when speaking with the press, including with respect to personal matters, and have therefore approved the substitution of the United States in defamation actions.”

Other than that, Mr. Touhey and AAG Stephen Terrell did not elaborate as to how the president’s comments on events which preceded his presidency by 20 years relate to his current “employment.” Nor did they explain how this theory of the president as “employee” gibes with the theory of a unitary executive immune from civil and criminal process in both federal and state court and with absolute control over the Justice Department, which the government has been pressing since January of 2017.

Under the Westfall Act, the Attorney General can unilaterally certify that a government “employee” was acting within the scope of his employment and substitute the government as defendant in a tort claim, and by God, Bill Barr is going to do it no matter how much prestige it costs the Justice Department. And since defamation cases against the federal government are not authorized by statute, a successful move to substitute the United States of America as defendant would effectively disappear the entire suit.

(Remember those halcyon days where twelve lawyers in America had to concern themselves with the vagaries of the Westfall Act, the Hatch Act, the Logan Act, and the Federal Vacancies Reform Act and the rest of us could just get on with our lives?)

The “new” case is already off to an inauspicious start, with the DOJ filing it as Carroll v. USA, and the Southern District of New York forcing them to re-docket it as Carroll v. Trump, the original caption. They’ve also drawn U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee. So, make of that one what you will.

Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan, a partner at Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP, and counsel for E. Jean Carroll, was disgusted.

“Even in today’s world, that argument is shocking. It offends me as a lawyer, and offends me even more as a citizen,” she said. “Trump’s effort to wield the power of the U.S. government to evade responsibility for his private misconduct is without precedent, and shows even more starkly how far he is willing to go to prevent the truth from coming out.”

And Carroll herself was defiant.

“Today’s actions demonstrate that Trump will do everything possible, including using the full powers of the federal government, to block discovery from going forward in my case before the upcoming election to try to prevent a jury from ever deciding which one of us is lying,” she said. “But Trump underestimates me, and he also has underestimated the American people.”

No one should ever underestimate E. Jean Carroll! As to the American people, well, that remains an open question.

Notice of Removal [Carroll v. Trump, Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York, Index No. 160694/2019]

Motion to Substitute Party [Carroll v. Trump, No. 1:20-cv-07311 (S.D.N.Y. Sep 8, 2020)]

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Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Last week, I wrote about President Donald Trump’s executive memorandum directing the Treasury Department to defer the withholding of employees’ social security taxes from September until the end of the year. The IRS has decided to turn the tax deferral into a short-term loan, with employees getting an extra withholding between January and April of 2021 to pay back the deferral. Due to the difficulty of implementing the proposal and the unlikelihood that the deferred taxes will be forgiven, most employers are not expected to comply with the order. However, the military and federal employees will get their future paychecks in compliance with the order.

I wondered if there were any businesses that implemented the order despite the criticism. After asking around, I found a business that has begun implementing the tax deferral order in its future paychecks. So I reached out to the business owner to see why and how he is doing this.

I won’t identify the business, but I will disclose that it is a corporation with two employees, one of whom is the sole shareholder and chief executive officer. The other employee is a full-time assistant.

When I asked the CEO why he decided to follow the new deferral rules, he said that he was treating the extra take-home pay as a no-interest loan, and he could use the extra money for the holidays. He was also hoping that Trump will pull some strings and get the deferred taxes forgiven before the end of the year.

I asked the CEO what would happen if his employee’s hours were reduced or was fired or laid off during the repayment period. He said this was unlikely but, just in case, both he and his employee knew about the repayment requirement and the potential consequences of not repaying the loan. They both agreed that if there was a separation, each would be responsible for paying back their portion of the deferred taxes.

Immediately, he ran into problems. The payroll program he was using did not have software updates to implement the deferral rules. When he contacted his payroll company’s technical support, the customer service representative told him that no update was available, but they would contact him if there are any developments. We suspected that his payroll company was not going to participate due to low interest.

I should note that other popular payroll programs have not issued any software updates to accommodate Trump’s deferral order as well.

The business owner then contacted local bookkeepers and payroll servicers to see if they can issue payroll checks with the modified withholdings. Almost all of them declined. One offered to do it but wanted a surcharge which the CEO thought was excessive for a company with only two employees.

So after speaking with his accountant, the CEO decided to modify the payroll tax withholdings himself. He issued paychecks to himself and his assistant last Friday, and both did not withhold their portion of the social security taxes. The taxes that were not withheld were recorded in a separate ledger so he will know how much to pay back during the repayment period. The total deferred amount will be given to his employee every pay period so she will know how much to pay back.

I wondered how this modified withholding would be reported on his next employment tax return (Form 941). It turns out that the IRS has issued a draft Form 941 that allows employers to report the employee’s deferred share of social security taxes pursuant to the order. In a few weeks, we will see if this draft version becomes the final version due on October 31.

Right now, the IRS does not require employers to abide by Trump’s deferral order. But if he wants more businesses to participate in his order, there needs to be guidance on forgiving the deferred taxes that was suggested in his executive memorandum. I mentioned last week that Section 7122 of the Internal Revenue Code allows the IRS to compromise existing liabilities. The IRS can modify its final draft of the Form 941 to include a forgiveness provision for the deferred taxes. Most businesses will start filing Form 941 employment tax returns starting in October so the Treasury Department has almost a month to make this adjustment.

If small businesses want to participate in Trump’s order, they should take some precautionary steps to avoid misunderstandings and minimize the chances of defaulting on the repayment.

First, the business owner should determine whether the employees will be around during the repayment period. This is not recommended for businesses with seasonal, part-time, or as-needed employees who are not expected to work between January and May.

Second, the owner should give employees a choice about whether they want the withholdings deferred. If the employees do, they must be made aware that the deferred amount has to be paid back and how it will be paid back. The cumulative deferred amount should be noted on employees’ paychecks every pay period so they know how much they will have to pay back.

Lastly, since most payroll providers are not participating in the plan, CEOs or their accountants must know how to make the modifications themselves. Most payroll providers have online guidance on adjusting withholding numbers. For example, here is guidance for modifying tax withholdings on Quickbooks.

Based on the experience of one small business, it seems like small business owners should not have too much trouble implementing Trump’s deferral and repayment order on their own. Some might like getting an interest-free loan and won’t mind paying it back over a four-month period. And who knows, there might be a forgiveness provision coming in the near future.

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Steven Chung is a tax attorney in Los Angeles, California. He helps people with basic tax planning and resolve tax disputes. He is also sympathetic to people with large student loans. He can be reached via email at sachimalbe@excite.com. Or you can connect with him on Twitter (@stevenchung) and connect with him on LinkedIn.

Despite the layoffs (largely impacting staff) that seem to be making the rounds in Biglaw, there is a lot of good news too. A lot of firms took a conservative financial approach to the pandemic, cutting expenses — including salaries — where possible. Now that they have a better sense of their 2020 economic outlook, a lot of firms are reversing course on those cuts.

The latest firm to undo their COVID-19 austerity measures is Holland & Hart.

Back in May, the equity partnership’s profit distribution was reduced. And salaried attorneys are also took a hit to their paycheck — to the tune of a 15 percent reduction. Employees making between $60,000 and $99,999 had their compensation reduced by 5 percent — those making under $60,000 were not impacted by the reductions. Plus the employer portion of the 401(k) matching program was suspended.

But now the firm has announced that because of a stronger than anticipated financial performance, all employees will return to their full 2020 salaries, and the 401(k) program is being reinstated. The firm also announced that because of these measures, they were able to avoid layoffs during the pandemic.

Plus, there are bonuses afoot, as Holland & Hart announced, “The firm has reserved a significant bonus pool to reward at the end of the year those staff and lawyers who contribute to the firm at a high level.”

The firm made the following statement on the end of their austerity measures:

Since the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Holland & Hart’s business decisions have been driven by our core values—our commitment to our people and our dedication to deliver excellent service to our clients.

In response to the economic disruption and uncertainty caused by the pandemic, last May, Holland & Hart proactively implemented several fiscal adjustments to offset anticipated revenue declines. Although the firm had one of its strongest financial years in 2019, and an equally robust start in the first quarter of this year, these measures were taken to protect our people and the short- and long-term business interests of the firm. Compensation cutbacks, combined with significant expense-saving and expense deferral initiatives, allowed the firm to avoid any layoffs.

After a significantly strong financial performance the past few months, we are pleased to announce that effective this month, the firm will return all employees to their full 2020 salaries and 401(k) matching contributions will be reinstated. The firm’s third quarter profit distribution to equity partners was restored in full. Finally, the firm has reserved a significant bonus pool to reward at the end of the year those staff and lawyers who contribute to the firm at a high level.

We are grateful to the incredible dedication of our lawyers and staff who continue to demonstrate resilience and a willingness to adapt to change. More than ever, we value our relationships with our clients and appreciate the trust and confidence they have placed in our firm as we have all embraced ways to connect and work together in these challenging circumstances.

If your firm or organization is slashing salaries or restoring previous cuts, closing its doors, or reducing the ranks of its lawyers or staff, whether through open layoffs, stealth layoffs, or voluntary buyouts, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Our vast network of tipsters is part of what makes Above the Law thrive. You can email us or text us (646-820-8477).

If you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Layoff Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the layoff alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each layoff, salary cut, or furlough announcement that we publish.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

Whenever a law school opens a food bank for its students, you know there’s a serious problem.

Michigan State University Law is a couple of weeks into virtual law school right now, but has opened a small food pantry to service students and “reportedly bought several Meijer gift cards for those who need them,” according to the Lansing City Pulse.

Why are these students struggling? It all starts when you realize that MSU Law is the artist formerly known as Detroit College of Law. Detroit College was a private school that moved to Lansing in the 1990s and took on the Michigan State moniker — even though it remained a private school. This year, the university integrated the law school into the public entity.

What they forgot about was that the decades the university spent recklessly enabling Larry Nassar to sexually abuse athletes resulted in sanctions preventing the school from accessing Department of Education-backed loans for students without prior formal approval from the DOE. Hence, a law school full of students hitting the food bank.

Dean Melanie Jacobs told students in an email:

“We had been led to believe it would happen seamlessly in conjunction with our integration, so all of us at MSU are surprised by this development,” Jacobs wrote in an email last week apologizing to students for the “financial snafu.”

“But our surprise should not be your stress,” she added.

In the meantime, MSU has temporarily waived a 7-percent interest rate on short-term loans of up to $1,500 for those struggling to make ends meet amid the delays and we hear that most students are using them. Additional short-term loans are also available for students that need more than $1,500. That’s all well and good, though it seems as though students could have just gotten a cash advance under the pre-integration financial regime meaning this waiver is less an accommodation than the bare minimum for students disadvantaged by the merger.

Which brings us to Betsy DeVos, the Trump administration Secretary of Education who could greenlight this integration and get the money flowing, but is instead focused on trying to steal public COVID funds for private schools. Even if university officials failed to alert the DOE early enough about the proposed integration — which strains credulity — the DOE knows now that there’s a problem. They know now that action could be taken to release the funds.

DeVos just isn’t doing it.

Nassar fallout delays student loans for hundreds at MSU Law [Lansing City Pulse]

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

It is not a good time to be starting your career in America. The unemployment rate sits at 8.4 percent. For those lucky enough to have a job at all, almost half aren’t particularly happy with it: one survey found that approximately 46 percent of Americans consider themselves underemployed (defined as having part-time work but wanting to work full-time, or holding a job that doesn’t require or utilize your education, experience, or training). In the legal profession in particular, the recent spate of layoffs doesn’t seem likely to slow anytime soon, and we’ve all been increasingly well-informed about the difficulties inherent in paying down six figures of student loan debt on relatively unimpressive starting salaries.

Given the significant headwinds that young people face in entering the workforce, the big news from the Pew Research Center that 52 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds are now living with one or both parents might not be such big news after all. This is a new record: the previous recorded high was in 1940, toward the end of the Great Depression, when 48 percent of young adults lived with their parents (there is no data available for the worst years of the Great Depression, when higher proportions of young people certainly could have been moving back home).

There is nothing inherently wrong with moving back in with mom and dad. I’m sure some parents love having the company. But a trend this big isn’t just a mass pining for more family time. Young adults cannot afford a mortgage or rent payments without decent job prospects, not when many of them are already carrying around a mortgage-worth of student loan debt.

Which is why a recent ruling by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals might provide the slightest glimmer of hope for some educational borrowers. For decades, student loan debt of any kind has been thought to be sacrosanct in bankruptcy proceedings. Barring the undue hardship discharge — which I’ve heard described as having to prove not only that you can’t pay off your student loans now but that you have no chance of ever being able to — bankruptcy filers inevitably emerged from the bankruptcy process with their student loan debts just as enforceable as ever.

Now, some bankruptcy filers, in the Tenth Circuit at least, might not have to carry their student debts to the grave. A Colorado couple successfully argued that about $200,000 worth of their private student loan debt was discharged in their Chapter 13 bankruptcy proceeding, without having to demonstrate undue hardship.

While the Tenth Circuit’s opinion has precedential value (within the Tenth Circuit), this is an exceptionally narrow ruling. It only applies to private student loan lenders, so you’re out of luck if Uncle Sam holds your student loan debt, and it arguably only applies to some of the most exploitative forms of student loan lending, like loans that exceed the cost of attendance at a given educational institution. Still, this case demonstrates courts’ increasing reluctance to allow any and all student loan debt to survive bankruptcy filings.

Lawyers are very used to the concept of having to accomplish the right thing in a convoluted way. Students shouldn’t have to incur $200,000 in debt to go to school to try to get the good job that will allow them to move out of their parents’ basement, and then they shouldn’t have to go through bankruptcy to discharge the debt they never should have had to incur. Yet, I wouldn’t hold my breath on systemic change when we can’t even fix a slavery-era holdover that keeps the person who gets the most votes from winning the presidency. Until there’s real change for student borrowers, I guess a super-narrow court decision will have to suffice in the meantime.

Keep your head up if you’re one of the many young adults who has to shelter a bit longer with the folks. Maybe you can get a little satisfaction out of seeing a major federal court chip away at the unsatisfying system keeping you under your parents’ patronage. You just have to endure it until we get enough public support built up to (metaphorically) dynamite the whole damn system and build something better.

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Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

Back in July, around the time when Biglaw firms first decided to start partially or completely restoring the salary cuts they instituted due to the economic upheaval caused by the coronavirus, some firms announced they’d be offering bonuses for high billers during these uncertain times.

One of those firms was Ogletree, which had earlier reduced pay for equity partners (by 20 percent), associates (by 15 percent), and highly compensated staff (by 10 percent) for the remainder of 2020. At the time, the firm announced that associates would receive special bonus payments of up to $20,000 combined, plus bonuses based on a percentage of their salary, based on their hours billed during 2020’s pandemic. Given that good news, we wondered if and when the firm would consider restoring employees’ pay to pre-COVID levels.

That time, apparently, is now.

Following the Labor Day holiday, C. Matthew Keen, Ogletree’s managing shareholder, sent out an email (available in full on the next page) letting everyone know that the firm’s August hours were “the best in recent history,” and that given the “positive trend,” salary reductions would be eliminated effective September 1, and the change would be reflected in upcoming paychecks.

On top of that announcement, Keen said that all previously offered bonuses are still in effect, and associates who qualify for these bonuses will be in really great shape, noting that “[m]ost of the associates who earn these bonuses will actually earn more compensation than scheduled before the pandemic.”

Great news all around at Ogletree. Let’s hope more firms decide to restore pay soon.

(Flip to the next page to see the full memo from Ogletree.)

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of important bonus and salary updates, so when your firm announces any type of bonus or salary news for associates, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonuses”). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we also use for salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish. Thanks for all of your help!

Earlier: Am Law 100 Firm Offers Special Bonuses For Associates

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Throughout the online bar exam process, examiners have stressed that aggressive proctoring is far more important than administering a clear, straightforward test. Applicants are spending the last month studying, not Trusts & Estates, but how not to blink excessively lest the algorithm flag them as cheaters. They’ve been told not to be diabetic for the sake of the proctoring process. In the UK, the commitment was so extreme that applicants urinated into bottles while gazing intensely into the eye of the webcam — a practice you usually have to pay for on Pornhub.

Of all the restrictions placed upon applicants for to placate the examiners’ need to feel needed is a ban on scratch paper or any way to mark up the documents used in the questions. When confronted about the hardship this caused, NY examiners pointed out that the test never allowed scratch paper, ignoring that there’s usually a BOOKLET that applicants not only markup, but are trained to mark up by every bar prep course they’ve taken. Having somewhere to write is important because there are questions based on lengthy materials designed to force applicants to identify critical points from within a mush of other stuff.

So here’s what the NY exam is apparently going to look like:

The answer is probably “yes” unfortunately, but representing Gitmo detainees in a closed quasi-kangaroo court system should be the exception rather than the rule.

In this entire mess, the only bar exam — putting aside diploma privilege — to get it right was the Indiana model and that was the product of complete accident. When ILG’s platform proved completely unworkable on the eve of the exam, Indiana opted for an open-book email test. The practice of law is an open book exam, so if we have to have an additional test of minimum competence, it should play by the same rules.

Can an applicant successfully navigate the resources available to find the correct answer for the client before the deadline? That’s the whole point of being an attorney! Indiana cracked the code. And all it took was stripping the examiners of their gatekeeping ego involvement after a calamitous software failure.

Art from adversity.

Earlier: Bar Examiners Ask Applicants To Kindly Stop Being Diabetic For A Couple Days
Law Students Forced To Urinate While Being Watched By Proctors During Remote Ethics Exam
Bar Examiner Offers Less Than Inspiring Answers In Online Exam Defense

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.