Category: News Feeds

2020 has been a helluva ride for Winston & Strawn.

Back in September, we reported that the firm, ranked #40 on the latest Am Law 100 list, was letting go a number of associates and staff, and that was after they’d already cut partner compensation as part of their COVID-19 austerity measures. But there’s been a return to normal, and just yesterday the firm announced year-end and special bonuses.

The scale below reflects the size of the bonuses, and lucky associates (who bill enough) will have the opportunity to make full market compensation at the firm.

Notice that “up to” notation in the special bonus column? You see, at Winston it isn’t as simple as all associates get the full special bonuses. The memo goes on to clarify:

Associates who meet or exceed their target hours: 100% of special bonus
Associates who meet 75% or more of their hours targets: 75% of special bonus
Associates who are below 75% of their hours targets: 50% of special bonus

The memo also noted, that, as they have in the past, “the Firm will pay additional bonuses to eligible associates who substantially exceed the Firm’s productivity goals.” You can read the full memo on the next page.

Associate reaction has been mixed — at least judging by a sampling of the Above the Law tipsters. Some are disappointed the firm’s hours threshold hasn’t been changed by COVID:

Associate bonuses announced at Winston & Strawn. As in prior years, year-end bonuses are tied to hours thresholds set by the firm, and which have not changed to account for covid. Some associates are frustrated that a decrease in hours completely out of their control will lead to zero year-end bonus.

While others are happy there’s a bonus available for associates that don’t hit their hours:

Kudos to Winston for living up to its self-described status as a market-paying firm. Our leadership expressed skepticism about COVID bonuses in the fall, so this is a pleasant surprise. And paying partial COVID bonuses to associates who missed their hours is a nice touch—some of our peer firms didn’t do this, and the Firm clearly has been paying attention to the negative reactions to those decisions.

I guess it’s just a matter of perspective (and how many hours you’ve been able to bill).

As always, we depend on you when it comes to bonus news. As soon as your firm’s bonus memo comes out, please email it to us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus”) or text us (646-820-8477). 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, 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.

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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).

After Judge Esther Salas was attacked in her home and lost her son to a crazed gunman, New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez drafted legislation to make it a crime for data brokers to sell personal identifying information of federal judges. Dubbed Daniel’s Law after Daniel Anderl, Judge Salas’s deceased son, the bill creates a common sense disincentive that could deter future attacks.

So Rand Paul blocked it because he’s a complete dick.

Yes, the senator who whines about being “attacked” by people standing around and chanting feels the need to unilaterally hold up a law designed to protect judges. At least he’s doing it in the midst of a Newsmax temper tantrum about federal judges “stealing” the election — no gun-toting wingnuts in that audience!

Paul offered the following for his move:

“I really think that this is important that we protect addresses for our judges, but it’s also important that we do this for our elected officials,” he said, citing the attempted assassinations of Reps. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.) in 2011 and Steve Scalise (R-La.) in 2017.

Great point! Then write another fucking bill. Is there a paper shortage on Capitol Hill or something? Also, Giffords and Scalise were both attacked in public… no one needed any personal information to find them so extending this bill to cover Congress would have done exactly nothing for them.

Other Republicans objected to increased funding for the Marshals charged with protecting judges in court and forced Menendez to alter the bill to remove funding to state governments to offset the costs of enforcing the law. But only Paul was willing to straight-up block the law.

How do we know this “protecting Congress” talk is disingenuous bullshit? Rand didn’t care about protecting legislators even after his neighbor beat the shit out of him for making his house an eyesore. He just wants to grandstand about how attacked he felt that the hoi polloi would dare speak to a federal lawmaker in public like the snowflake he is.

This guy is a joke. Unfortunately, he’s a joke with the power to single-handedly endanger federal judges.

Rand Paul blocks federal Daniel’s Law [New Jersey Globe]

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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.

For the past few years, law student recruitment for summer associate programs has been incredibly successful, harkening back to a time when law students quickly accepted the offers that Biglaw firms handed out like candy. The 2020 recruitment cycle, however, was just a tad different in that law firms and law students were dealing with a deadly virus that threatened to completely destroy the typical summer associate experience — and it did, it a way. Some programs were canceled entirely, and others were pushed into the virtual space, but they all had the same thing in common: offer rates were plentiful, and like the vaccine, they offered hope for the future.

According to the latest recruiting figures from the National Association of Law Placement (NALP), offer rates from Biglaw summer programs were just shy of last year’s historic highs. Despite all of the challenges that were created by the coronavirus crisis, not only did Biglaw’s aggregate offer rate for summer 2020 programs (including those that were held and those that were canceled) hover at nearly 97 percent, slightly below last year’s historic high of nearly 98 percent, but the acceptance rate for those offers reached an historic high of 87.8 percent. What’s even more exciting is that this historic acceptance rate is significantly higher than acceptance rates measured before the recession, which tended to hover between 73 to 77 percent.

Here’s what James Leipold, NALP’s executive director, had to say:

The high-level takeaway is: Not withstanding how difficult this summer was in putting these virtual summer programs on at the last moment—the outcomes were very strong. … Offers and acceptance rates both remained at historic highs. The summer class size was down, but those decisions were made before the pandemic, and that was part of a three or four years of pulling back that we’ve seen over time with firms trimming back their summer classes. There was none of the interruption we saw in 2009 when nobody got offers, and all these students had to graduate without jobs.

Here are some interesting facts about the unprecedented summer programs of 2020:

• For programs that were actually held, more than 86 percent were entirely virtual, while 8 percent were a hybrid model of some in-person and some virtual programming. Only 6 percent of summer programs were held entirely in-person. The average 2020 summer program length was 5.6 weeks, whereas in 2019, summer programs averaged 9.7 weeks.
• Law students didn’t seem to mind that their first experiences at their firms were virtual. At 97 percent, offer rates for summer programs that were held were a bit higher than those that were canceled (93.3 percent). Relatedly, acceptance rates were higher for summer programs that were held (88 percent) than those that were canceled (85.6 percent).
• At 11, the average summer program class size decreased from 13 in 2019, and it had previously been flat at 14 from 2016 to 2018. At the biggest of Biglaw firms (700+ lawyers), these class sizes have continuously fallen since 2016 (from 22 in 2016 to 20 in 2017 and so on until we reach 14 in 2020).

Congratulations to all law students who went through the entry-level recruitment cycle in 2020, as things seem to have worked out marvelously for them, no matter how much the pandemic tried to derail their plans. Let’s be thankful that a new generation of associates wasn’t lost thanks thanks to COVID.

NALP Finds Offer and Acceptance Rates Remain High, Despite Virtual, Shorter Summer Programs [NALP]
The Pandemic Hasn’t Curtailed Big Law’s Appetite for New Associates [Law.com]

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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.

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Sarah Feldman Horowitz back to our pages. Click here if you’d like to donate to MothersEsquire.

I had always intended to be a litigator. I took trial advocacy in law school. I participated in my law school’s family law clinic, which focused on litigation skills. And after graduating, I even worked for a judge in a trial court, with the intention of observing trial lawyers at work so that I could learn from their experience in real time.

After finishing law school I received two job offers — one was litigation-focused, for which I would be in court day in and day out, and the other was a counsel position for a government agency. Despite the fact that the litigation job was more in line with my interests and even offered a higher salary, I ended up turning it down. I knew that I wanted to start a family, and even though I didn’t know exactly what the experience of motherhood would be like, I imagined that having to be in court at a specific time each day would be stressful when trying to balance work and family life. So, ultimately, I took the more flexible position with the government, which ended up fitting well with the beginning of my motherhood journey.

Fast forward nine years and four kids later, I now have my own law practice, which I started out of my desire to have more control over my life while continuing to develop professionally. I purposely chose to focus my law practice on estate planning, an area that did not require litigation, so that I could work on my own time and terms. This choice served me well in my parenthood journey, and continues to do so during the transition to parenting during the COVID-19 pandemic. But my desire to be a lawyer in a courtroom never really went away.

Because of the importance that I placed on building a family, I always thought that it would be fulfilling to represent parents who were seeking to grow their family through adoption. However, I always hesitated moving forward with this practice area because an in-person hearing is required to finalize adoptions in the jurisdictions where I practice. One day, I was contacted by a potential estate-planning client who was also seeking a second-parent adoption. I contacted a prominent adoption attorney in my neighborhood with whom I had grabbed coffee several years ago to learn more about becoming an adoption attorney, and she offered to mentor me if I took the case. I was excited for the opportunity to dip my toe into this new area of law, and to have my first-ever court appearance before a judge. But at the same time, I was nervous about the demands that the appearance schedule would have on my weekly childcare and family logistics.

Then came the all too well known pandemic. Courts needed to adapt to virtual technology if they didn’t want to fall years behind with the docket. When my adoption hearing was eventually scheduled to be held virtually, I was relieved that this normally time-consuming experience could be seamlessly integrated into my day, requiring only a 10-minute break from my childcare duties. Instead of waking up early (likely after a night of interrupted sleep), getting dressed for court, commuting to the court house, meeting my clients early, waiting for the Judge to call our case, etc., I simply put on a suit jacket and kept on my pajama bottoms, locked my bedroom door for 10 minutes, and was able to successfully represent my clients in the same time it would have taken me to jump out of bed and shower.  Likewise, my clients were happy that the hearing didn’t impact their young child’s naptime routine (a sacred and respected hour as any parent of young kids will tell you).

Now that the courts know how to operate virtually, I hope that this digital option persists long after COVID-19 is no longer a concern. The ability to appear in court virtually is a benefit to both attorneys and clients who are parents of young children, and may enable more parents to opt for a litigation career, instead of shying away because of work-life balance concerns. The time that is saved for attorneys by representing clients virtually may also enable legal representation to be less expensive for clients, as lawyers typically charge clients by the hour. It may have taken a global pandemic to make this shift, but I hope that when things go back to “normal” the court leadership can appreciate the benefits virtual appearances provide to attorneys who are trying to advance their careers while simultaneously growing and caring for young children.

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Sarah Feldman Horowitz is a mother, lawyer, and “momtrepreneur” in Chevy Chase, Maryland. After completing a judicial clerkship and working at the FDA for 6 years, she decided to start her own mobile estate planning law practice, with the goal of making it easy for parents to cross estate planning off their to-do lists. When she is not child rearing or lawyering, she enjoys hiking, trail running, yoga, and biking. For more information about her law practice, please visit www.sarahhorowitzlaw.com, or e-mail Sarah directly at sarah@sarahhorowitzlaw.com.  

The Cleveland Indians franchise officially announced that it will be changing its name after operating as the Indians for over a century. Team owner Paul Dolan has indicated that it will be a slow transition and that the club will still be the Indians in 2021.

“It’s a difficult and complex process to identify a new name and do all the things you do around activating that name,” Dolan said. “We are going to work at as quick a pace as we can while doing it right. But we’re not going to do something just for the sake of doing it. We’re going to take the time we need to do it right.”

Part of doing it right is to make sure that any desired names are cleared with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The last thing ownership wants to do is evolve from an unacceptable name to a new name that infringes on another’s trademark registration.

Meanwhile, the team should expect that crafty individuals will spend a few hundred dollars per application and begin the process of seeking to register trademarks associated with possible new team names. These applications are often filed by individuals without legal representation, including numerous errors in the filings. However, they can still serve as a frustration.

For instance, on July 7, 2020, a man named Arlen Love from Vancouver, Washington, filed to register the trademark, Cleveland Spiders, for use with sports jerseys but provided no filing basis of actual use or intent to use. The mark, which seems to be a fan favorite, remains pending with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. It typically takes five days for an application to be processed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and, thus, there may be more Cleveland Spider applications on the database in the near future.

On August 19, 2020, a man named Matthew Silver from Redondo Beach, California applied, on an intent-to-use basis, to register the trademark Cleveland Rockers. That application is currently stalled based on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office examining attorney assigned to the file finding a likelihood of confusion with a design mark registration for ROCKERS, owned by a United Kingdom corporation, Ace Cafe London.

Cleveland Guardians, Cleveland Foresters, Cleveland Warriors, Cleveland Natives, Cleveland Engines, Cleveland Baseball Team, Cleveland Rooks, Cleveland Heroes, Cleveland Baseball Club, and Cleveland Squires have also all been applied for in the past six months by individuals and companies looking to get lucky by landing on a name that the baseball team truly covets.

Another suggested name change is to the Cleveland Naps. It was once the name of the team and brings back memories of one of Cleveland’s best players — Nap Lajoie. Interestingly, this is a trademark registration currently owned by the Cleveland Indians Baseball Company, LLC, which is the parent organization of the club. The company has possessed the registration, for the purpose of selling clothing, since April 13, 2020.

Cleveland Indians Baseball Company, LLC owns other registrations to the trademarks Cleveland Blues and Cleveland Bronchos for the same goods. The company currently possesses no pending applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

There will certainly be new applications filed and processed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in the coming days. Meanwhile, the team will have an important decision to make on its new name, which will not be announced for some time. However, we could see the team itself file new applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in the near future unless it wishes to go with the Naps, Blues, or Bronchos.

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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.

It has taken the entirety of the president’s term, but the Trump Administration has at last done a real number on the fiduciary rule. As with so much with Trump and his lackeys, it’s more about posturing than anything: Those supposed to benefit from the rollback say they won’t use it, and it’s taken so long that by the time it actually goes into effect Joe Biden will be president and having his people rewrite it to look something more like it looked back when he was vice president and it came into being in the first place.

Lawyers across much of the Northeast portion of the country find themselves buried in snow today, but we know just the thing that’ll inspire everyone to dig themselves out: bonus news.

Yesterday afternoon, Covington & Burling announced its 2020 year-end bonuses, and the firm has matched the Baker McKenzie bonus scale that was later adopted by Cravath. The good news for associates at the firm doesn’t stop there. After originally refusing to get on board with the fall bonuses that were offered by the most elite Biglaw firms, Covington has now decided to match the Davis Polk scale for those as well. Here’s the Covington bonus scale for 2020:

Sources at the firm tell us that while an hours requirement applies to both bonuses (i.e., 1,950 hours, including unlimited pro bono hours), associates reportedly aren’t as up in arms about it as they are at other firms. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, people are pleased and understanding about the hours requirement,” says one tipster. “Can’t understand why that’s been an issue at other firms.”

Bonuses are expected to be paid by the end of January 2021. Congrats to Covington!

(Flip to the next page to read the Covington & Burling bonus memo in full.)

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of important bonus updates, so when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Matches”). 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!

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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.

* Sanctions have been upheld for a lawyer who included a haiku and cited to Bugs Bunny in litigation papers. “That’s all folks!“… [ABA Journal]

* A New York man, who allegedly posed as a lawyer to bilk elderly victims of money supposedly needed to bail out grandchildren, has been indicted. [New York Post]

* A fake immigration lawyer in Florida has pleaded guilty to aggravated identity theft and other charges. Lots of lawyer wannabes in the Morning Docket today! [Tampa Bay Times]

* A judge has ruled that the Trump Organization must turn over more documents to the New York Attorney General. [CNN]

* Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is trying to keep documents from the company’s lawyers a secret. [Wall Street Journal]

* A server at Denny’s is suing for back pay. Her lawyers probably think the case is a “grand slam”… [Connecticut Law Tribune]

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Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

We can all point to moments in our professional lives that changed the course of our careers — crushing a stretch assignment, really connecting with a mentor, seizing a new job opportunity.

Those moments don’t happen all at once. And sometimes we only appreciate their origins with the benefit of hindsight.

In our experience, business development and marketing successes often start out small, whether you’re networking with potential new clients, establishing yourself as a thought leader, or building your brand on social media.

Co-hosting PLI’s inSecurities podcast, which focuses on developments in the securities regulatory, enforcement and accounting space, has been one of the coolest and most rewarding opportunities of our careers. And like so many great opportunities, it started small — with a hashtag.

Long before we hit “record” on the first episode of inSecurities, we connected through a hashtag at a securities enforcement conference. Attending the conference for our “day jobs” as forensic accountant (Chris) and securities regulatory attorney (Kurt), we were among a handful of people “live-tweeting” the event.

After we connected “IRL” at the conference networking happy hour, our bosses were impressed (and surprised!) that we managed to make meaningful professional connections over this “social media thing.”

We’d each found a kindred spirit in the securities enforcement and regulatory space, and we spent the next several years trading well-meaning barbs over lunches on K Street and in posts on LinkedIn and Twitter. We referred one another business from time to time, but we were mostly in it for the banter.

Along the way, we began to carve out space as thought leaders in our practice areas and on social media, and when PLI approached us with the opportunity to develop a podcast, we jumped at the chance. We saw the podcast as an opportunity to explore our love of content creation and marketing, to build our profiles in the regulatory and enforcement space, and to offer substantive — and fun — commentary for industry leaders.

Over the past 18 months, we’ve recorded pilot episodes, built a network of guests, and planned, recorded, edited, and produced more than two dozen episodes of the inSecurities podcast. It’s been quite a journey, and we’re incredibly grateful for the opportunity and the help we’ve received along the way.

We want to pay it forward by sharing some of the lessons we’ve learned, and some of the great advice we received from Deborah Farone and Stefanie Marrone on Episode 11 (“Business Development for Lawyers & Law Firms: A Conversation About Marketing, Selling and Social Media in Today’s Legal Environment”). Our top takeaways:

• Don’t go it alone – We never would have been able to finish 25+ episodes on our own — or had as much fun doing it. Along with our incredible partners at PLI who help shoulder the heavy burden of content creation, idea generation and promotion, and the enthusiastic, insightful guests we interview, we’re able to achieve results well beyond what we could have done alone.
• Be flexible – Our conception of the podcast has changed (more than once!) over time. Between the complex issues we tackle on the show and challenges arising from COVID-19, we’ve had to be flexible and strike out in new directions. We’ve also responded to the market — we’re sometimes surprised by the episodes that get the most downloads, so we take the feedback and adapt.
• Know when to skate, and when to glide – We have busy day jobs and competing demands for our time. There are times to push hard and churn out a few episodes quickly, and other times to focus our energy elsewhere. We’ve felt the tension of balancing deadlines in client matters with other professional commitments, our personal lives . . . and a podcast! Learning to navigate peaks and valleys has helped us to continue producing quality episodes at a steady pace (and to enjoy it!).
• Don’t be afraid to brag – As with our live-tweeting at the conference, we experienced mixed reactions to exploring this new media. But we took time to sit down with our colleagues, share the metrics, and discuss the meaningful connections created by our podcast efforts — to brag a little. Now, our firms fully support us, and recognize the potential business development and marketing opportunities that come with the podcast.

Our podcast hasn’t become the next Serial, but it has given us a platform and the chance to learn, grow, and share knowledge with listeners around the globe — and to build relationships with experts in our field. Think about how you might create and seize opportunities, even when they start out as small as a hashtag.

Access the full inSecurities archive on PLI’s website and on major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.