Category Added in a WPeMatico Campaign
More Good News: Stoel Rives changing course on salary.
Tough Times For Partners: Biglaw partners getting forced out.
Legal Technology On Display: ILTACON has moved online but is going strong.
Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day!
We told you about the American Lawyer’s Midlevel Associate Survey earlier today, but they also break the rankings out by specific offices. Which New York office of a Biglaw firm is ranked best in midlevel associate satisfaction in the Big Apple?
Hint: The firm got a 4.878 out of 5 in overall satisfaction for their New York outpost, which is one of 20 offices the firm has worldwide.
See the answer on the next page.
Kinney Recruiting is working with an excellent firm on its search for a junior to mid-level litigation associate to join its DC office.
The ideal candidate will have prior law firm, government, or clerkship experience.
A background with bankruptcy and/or creditors rights is preferred. This is a great opportunity to join a healthy and thriving practice and work with partners at the top of their field. To learn more, please apply to this posting, or submit your resume to jobs@kinneyrecruiting.com.
“Do VERY FEW projects EXCEPTIONALLY well. No one will remember how much work you have done. They will NEVER FORGET the ONE thing you effed up.” I received this well-intentioned advice frequently as a summer associate when I split my summer between two well-known national law firms after my 2L year.
But how do you figure out what area of law you like best if you are limited in what you’re exposed to?!
How do you find your place in the vast legal universe if you only see a minuscule fraction of it?!
How do you decide where to focus for 5, 10, 20 years, perhaps your entire career, if you don’t test-drive it?!
If your law school is less than practical and your summer clerkship strategy is to do as few projects as possible, it seems like clairvoyance is a must-have skill for a successful future lawyer. Maybe they should add a section for it on the LSAT!
When it comes to summer clerkships and internships, which is a better strategy – doing a few things exceptionally well or many things 95% there? I crowdsourced this question to my followers.
The Pragmatists
Sean Rayani, commercial contracts senior manager at Twilio, said, “As a lawyer or legal professional, you will not have the luxury to just do a few things when you start practicing (especially if you start in-house at technology companies in their infancy). There will be times where you will have the kitchen sink thrown at you, and you will have to get it all done.”
He explained, “Inevitably, you can not do everything perfectly if you have an overflowing plate, but you will have to do the best you can. Reenacting what you will experience once you start practicing during a summer clerkship, in my opinion, serves as a really good training and expectation setting for the legal profession generally.”
Likewise, Sarah Feingold, co-founder of the Fourth Floor and former GC of Etsy and Vroom, advised, “I say — try a lot of things, talk to a lot of people, and then prioritize, focus on doing a few things well, and periodically take a step back to reevaluate how your career is proceeding.”
The Go-Getters
Jamie Szal, Maine state and local tax attorney at Brann & Isaacson, said, “My law school was structured on a co-op model: normal 1L year, then switch to 4 alternating quarters each of class and internship. That model spat out graduates with literally twice as much experience as most new law grads, because we had to do 4 full-time 12-week posts to graduate.”
She continued, “I highly, highly recommend pursuing not only summer positions but also internships, externships, clinics, and other practical skill-building opportunities throughout law school to maximize exposure to different practices. For those like me who had a good sense of what we were interested in, use those opportunities as a finely honed tool: explore different work environments within the same field of practice.”
The Learn-As-You-Goers
Lisa Lang, general counsel of Kentucky State University, said, “I never set out with a plan in terms of the practice area. I initially gravitated toward whatever opportunity I found.” She continued, “After several years of practice, I realized where I was strong and where I was weak. That realization helped guide my choices and made me more selective in terms of the opportunities I pursued (and later enjoyed). My choices, at the time, did not appear to make sense. Looking back now, everything makes complete sense.”
Rachel Coll, lawyer and certified life coach at Rachel Coll Coaching, observed, “I’m a big believer in sampling what you might like, and making decisions as you go. I was always a ‘learn by doing’ kind of lawyer. That’s just me. I loved treating the practice of law like a buffet of practice areas that I just sampled until I was full, and I think this experience helps me look back at my legal career as something that I thoroughly enjoyed.”
The Strategic Type
Anjie Vichayanonda, founder and CEO of Leg Up Legal, explained, “We have to constantly try new things, see if they work, and fail A LOT. If you’re not failing, you’re not growing. Do more. Fail more. Fail hard. Fail fast. And you will learn better. For young lawyers, I would urge you to find a firm with a culture that allows you to explore, challenge yourself, and fail in a safe space. I know it’s extremely difficult to find, but in the long run, it will make you a better lawyer.”
Neil Greenbaum, partner at Greenbaum Law Firm and a former general counsel, said, “As a law student, it would certainly make sense to learn as much as you can in various areas of law. That way, you can actually have some idea of what you might like over what you might not like. However, as a seasoned practitioner, you do want to do a few things as possible exceptionally well.”
The Formulaic Type
“80-20 rule — Pareto rules all the way. Do multiple things 80% [then] focus on a few things with 100%. Use the same rule to pick what 20% of those projects you are working on that will likely drive 80% attention from management or provide you learning experience, and provide extra focus on these projects, and less focus on the others.” Yosr Hussein Hamza, director, legal and ombudsman affairs, Middle East at Gartner, explained.
She continued, “You never know which chance at this age can help you know which area of law you’d like to practice. And this rule helped me so much to date. Perfectionism leads [nowhere] eventually.”
This is a question for which there is no universal answer. As demonstrated by the diversity in answers, it’s a dynamic that each person must be mindful of for themselves, in shaping their own career and balancing learning more with doing good work. But it’s also not a question that is settled once you’re a few years in. Careers are constantly changing, and with more and more opportunities to adapt, lifelong learning is part of what it means to be a modern lawyer. We should all, then, stay intentional about how we can learn new skills while continuing to do our current job well.
And finding that balance is its own skill to develop.
Olga V. Mack is the CEO of Parley Pro, a next-generation contract management company that has pioneered online negotiation technology. Olga embraces legal innovation and had dedicated her career to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive than before by embracing technology. Olga is also an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor, and entrepreneur. She founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to participate on corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. She authored Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board Seat and Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security. You can follow Olga on Twitter @olgavmack.
On August 23, the Baltimore Ravens terminated the contract of safety Earl Thomas, claiming that Thomas’s personal conduct adversely affected the organization. The early termination of Thomas’s contract creates a situation where the Ravens will seek to void all remaining compensation provisions, including $10 million in guarantees, based on a provision in the agreement that allows the team to back out of the deal if Thomas engaged in conduct detrimental to the club.
The pertinent portion of Thomas’s contract with the Ravens stated as follows:
“In the event Player . . . is suspended for Conduct Detrimental (either by the NFL or Club) . . . then Player shall be in default (“Default”). If Player is in Default, then, the Guarantee shall immediately be deemed null and void from the beginning and in its entirety regardless of whether or not the Guarantee had otherwise been earned according to its terms at the time of Player’s Default.”
Thomas and the National Football League Players’ Association (NFLPA) will certainly challenge the Ravens by filing a grievance. The Ravens have not provided any specificity surrounding the basis for the franchise’s claim that Thomas’s personal conduct adversely affected the organization, but it is assumed that it was mainly the result of fighting with a teammate in practice.
It is expected that the grievance procedure will be initiated in the near future, with a hearing likely to be held in Fall 2020, while an actual ruling may not be issued until 2021. The NFLPA has a limited number of options to expedite hearings and if the NFLPA chooses to invoke the option in this instance, then a hearing could occur as quickly as a week or two after a grievance is filed.
Any grievance process will focus on the specific conduct detrimental definition language within Thomas’s contract as well as how the Ravens organization has responded toward players who have committed similar acts in the past. Thomas happens to have what is considered to be a player-friendly conduct detrimental clause, which allows for guaranteed money to be voided in the instance that he is suspended, whereas less player-friendly provisions sometimes permit teams to get out of such monetary obligations if a player is merely fined. It does not appear that Thomas was ever technically suspended prior to his contract being terminated.
Putting issues surrounding suspension aside, the Ravens could have a tough case on their hands due to the fact that fights during practice are common and rarely acted upon. In fact, the Ravens organization has a history of shrugging off such altercations without imposing any discipline on those involved in the acts.
For instance, in 2016, fights broke out during Ravens team drills, with at least one of those fights resulting in a player suffering a minor injury. Ravens coach John Harbaugh did not mind the fighting and is quoted as stating, “this is what it’s all about … this is football, and we’ve got to build a football team, and we’ve got a bunch of young guys that like to play and want to get after it and have a lot of pride.”
It may be hard for the team to take the position that fighting in practice is acceptable in one circumstance, but a terminable offense when it comes to Thomas, unless there exists additional evidence to distinguish Thomas’s termination from the incidents that took place four years ago and were referred to as simply being “football.”
Even if Thomas ultimately prevails against the Ravens in a dispute, the Ravens still can limit the damage based on offset language contained within Thomas’s now-terminated contract. Such language allows the Ravens organization to deduct any amounts owed to Thomas by the amount of money he receives from the next NFL team that signs him to a contract.
Additionally, it may be more likely than not that the parties come to an early settlement, especially if the NFLPA does not utilize one of its expedited hearings on this forthcoming case. In 2015, the Indianapolis Colts looked to terminate its contract with running back Trent Richardson and void all remaining guarantees. Richardson filed a grievance and the parties ultimately settled for roughly $561,000 of the $3.18 million in guaranteed money that remained on his deal.
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 was an idea so breathtaking in its inanity, so charged with chutzpah, so completely lacking in sense that, truly, it could only have come from this foul year of our Lord 2020: Let’s take a formerly great but now failing and flailing piece of American industrial history and transform it into producer of ingredients for a vaccine that doesn’t yet exist and other generic drugs so as to reduce our reliance on the Chinese, and let’s do it with more than three quarters of a billion tax dollars. Oh, and can we do it in a way that produces an insider-trading probe?
But ideas do not come from calendrical periods, even those that last all of two weeks. Days and months and years have no agency, no ability to dream big, and certainly no ability to think wildly insane and borderline impossible schemes. Those have to come from people. No points for guessing which member of President Trump’s brain trust farted this one out.
On a white board in his office earlier this year, Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro made a list of potential companies that could manufacture pharmaceuticals in the U.S.
He separated them into three columns, one for each stage of the production process. Eastman Kodak Co. stood out, overlapping two of the three columns….
Mr. Navarro… spearheaded the idea and then used his sway within the administration to help Kodak navigate the bureaucracy to be first in line for the potential contract, including tapping an obscure government agency to help push the loan through the final stages…. In June, Kodak submitted a 17-page financial model code-named “Project Tiger” and a 96-page business plan, according to a person familiar with Kodak. There were no other applicants, according to a senior administration official.
Truly shocking that the economics professor who doesn’t understand economics and senior trade adviser who doesn’t understand how trade works, a man who has to be routinely sent to time out for not playing well with others and for, well, not understanding economics and trade and anything else by who amount to the grown-ups in the particularly maturity-free room that is the Trump administration, was behind what might be its most batshit connivance in a breathtakingly strong field. And you know what’s even more shocking? That a senior member of said administration is taking absolutely no responsibility for it.
Mr. Navarro said, “we did everything right in moving the project forward but something on Kodak’s end appears to have gone wrong….”
Mr. Navarro tweeted: “VERY disappointed last week’s great deal with Kodak tarnished by allegations. Absolutely RIGHT move by DFC! We must redouble efforts to bring our pharma manufacturing home!!”
“Based on what I’m seeing, what happened at Kodak was probably the dumbest decisions made by executives in corporate history,” Navarro said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box….”
“You can’t fix ‘stupid,’” Navarro added. “You can’t even anticipate that degree of stupidity.”
Truer words have never before passed the jabbering lips of Peter Navarro.
Kodak’s $765 Million Moment: How It Happened and How It Went Wrong [WSJ]
‘You can’t fix stupid’ – Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro rips Kodak executives as dumbest ever [CNBC]
(Photo by JB Lacroix /WireImage /Getty Images)
Kim is taking her legal studies extremely seriously now that she’s back in town… [her studies] are all she’s talking about.
She’s saying that no matter who is president, she is planning on working closely with them in DC to fight criminal justice and prison reform. She doesn’t care who’s in office for her to work with, she just wants to really help people and do the right thing and she feels she can work with anybody. She knows she has the power to do that. This is something that’s really important to her and friends are even saying that they could see her getting a place in DC to be closer to doing her work. [We] could even could see her running for some kind of office with the drive she has right now. This is no joke for Kim and she’s throwing everything she has into this.
— a source close to Kim Kardashian, commenting on the reality TV and beauty mogul turned law student’s hopes to continue with her criminal justice reform efforts. Kardashian is currently studying the law as part of a four-year apprenticeship program in California, and is scheduled to take the bar exam in 2022.
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.
Usually this time of the year finds me in some conference center catching up with legal technology vendors from around the world at the annual ILTACON show. This year, the nearly 2,000 vendors, legal technologists, IT professionals, legal department managers, firm management representatives, and journalists were all going to descend on Nashville like the world’s nerdiest bachelorette party.
COVID-19 and common sense kept everyone out of Tennessee this year, but in a year that saw a traditionally tech-phobic profession successfully move online, the 2020 now-online installment of ILTACON is more relevant than ever. The last tech doubters in the legal community are gone, converted by the coronavirus crucible. But now that everyone is on board with using the cloud to work from home — something the tech savvy knew about roughly eight years ago — this is a pretty good time to find out what else is out there. In other words, “If you like Zoom, wait until you see contract analytics.”
The first day of the online show, kicked off with a keynote from Stephen Carver of The Cranfield School of Management on “Leadership Under Stress” focusing on NASA mission failures. Because when you think of a major law firm, the stakes are exactly like strapping human beings on top of several tons of barely controlled explosives.
The first day also brought the expected torrent of new product announcements. Kira Systems, the contract tool that recently made headlines for lending a hand to Campaign Zero, launched a new feature called Answers & Insights coming out next month that will build on the existing 1,000+ built-in smart fields “where users will be able to train Kira to ask their most pressing questions or pick from a selection of built-in questions and get answers in the form of yes/no or multiple-choice options across their contracts and documents.”
While “does this renew automatically” is a reasonably common question, the promise of Answers & Insights is the freedom to craft specific questions that really open up the product for those niche inquiries. One can imagine contracts in some specific industry having standard clauses that the rest of us don’t employ so this provides some good flexibility.
“Answers & Insights represents the next level of our no-code AI technology,” said Dr. Alexander Hudek, Kira Systems CTO & Co-Founder. “It allows you to go beyond simply identifying relevant text by additionally assigning fine grained meaning to extractions. We achieve this without hard-coded rules, custom code, or human intervention, letting you truly scale your knowledge work.”
Meanwhile, relationship management provider Intapp announced a new data integration service to advance the interoperability of firm software with a native-cloud platform that lets you plug any other product or data source into it.
Intapp Integration Service is supported by the first-ever Intapp Open API and a set of prebuilt integration processes to foster overall interoperability. Initially, Intapp plans to deliver purpose–built integrations for four major technology suites — Vuture, Thomson Reuters Elite 3E, iManage, and Dun & Bradstreet — that will take advantage of the Intapp Open API to enable key processes and data sharing; Intapp will announce several additional integration partners in the coming months.
Since the “Int” in “Intapp” is for integration, I guess this could also be styled as Int2App Service?
One of the biggest events of any ILTA conference is the sneak peek at the technology survey providing some insight into emerging trends. This year’s survey was put together before COVID really hit the country and then sent out to gather responses during the pandemic (with a few added queries), creating a bit of an anachronistic result in places because it’s hard to see trends when the world radically changes. On the other hand, the fact that the survey showed a major swing in the past year to the cloud — only about 11 percent are still “uncomfortable” with the cloud — we’re probably going to see huge numbers in cloud adoption in 2021 when the COVID impact is added in.
The biggest challenges facing the industry largely tracked prior years with “user behavior” tagged as a top 3 issue by 46 percent of respondents, up from 39 percent last year underscoring the old adage that the biggest error in computing exists between the keyboard and the chair. Phishing also continued its upward trend having jumped from 19 percent in 2017 to 30 percent this year, proving that the lawyers — ever fonts of human generosity — are still ready to help Nigerian princes.
One of the most striking findings was the extent of documented firm disaster recovery programs. Three-quarters of respondents say they do have a plan and 22 percent said they are currently working on one. I wonder what happened to spur that? All kidding aside, this does reflect a consistent trend with the prevalence of these plans up from around 56 percent in 2014.
What are firms planning to do as work-from-home rules loosen up? The overwhelmingly most popular answer was more working from home with 45 percent choosing that option. That said, upwards of 60 percent of firms are refusing to reimburse for hardware. How this plays out as firms adjust to the reality of more remote work will be interesting.
The full survey results will be available to ILTA members in September and there’s a lot more to dig into based just on this executive summary.
And the day is only about half done. We’ll have continuing coverage throughout the week.
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.
(Photo of Kellyanne Conway, George Conway, and their twins, via Kellyanne Conway’s Twitter feed.)
Last night, senior White House advisor Kellyanne Conway announced that she would be leaving her position at the end of the month to spend more time with her family.
“Our four children are teens and ‘tweens starting a new academic year, in middle school and high school, remotely from home for at least a few months. As millions of parents nationwide know, kids ‘doing school from home’ requires a level of attention and vigilance that is as unusual as these times,” wrote the person who spent months inveighing against school closures and pretending that the Trump administration was making great progress against COVID.
With decades of experience selling candidates, Conway is carefully packaging herself in a herself as a relatable mom — “less drama, more mama” — and a Republican stalwart, praising Trump for having “a measurable, positive impact on the peace and prosperity of the nation, and on millions of Americans who feel forgotten no more.”
After five years of “alternative facts” in service of his campaign and presidency, Conway is bailing out right before the Trump train slams smack into that brick wall on November 3. (In theory, anyway.)
Conway’s husband George, a litigation Of Counsel at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, spent the day tweeting his usual barrage of attacks on his wife’s employer before abruptly announcing last night that he was withdrawing from the group and going on Twitter hiatus.
“Needless to say, I continue to support the Lincoln Project and its mission. Passionately,” he posted, before going silent.
The catalyst for the Conways’ abrupt exit appears to have been their daughter’s increasingly erratic public behavior, including tweeting last week that she intends to seek legal emancipation after “years of childhood trauma and abuse.” Which we’re not linking to because she’s a child, and we are all adults who know how to work Google.
But whatever the reason, George and Kellyanne Conway are getting out of Dodge just in time to disassociate themselves from the coming conflagration. She’ll still be a viable Republican consultant, and he’ll still be able to show his face at Federalist Society dinners. Pretty convenient timing, huh?
And speaking of convenient timing, we note that the as-yet unknown author of the White House tell-all A Warning by “Anonymous” (affiliate link) deferred his or her compensation until 2021, meaning that it didn’t appear on mandatory financial disclosures for 2020. The publishers of the book made the author available for a Reddit AMA, during which he or she promised that “Trump will hear from me, in my own name, before the 2020 election.”
Looks like Kellyanne Conway is scheduled to speak on Wednesday at the Republican National Convention. Will we get the usual nasty attacks or … something else?
STAY TUNED.
Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
COVID-19, and the accompanying economic upheaval, has radically changed the legal landscape. We’ve known for a while that furloughs, stealth associate layoffs, and salary cuts were part of this new normal, but now comes word from Law.com that partners are increasingly finding themselves pushed out the door during these uncertain times.
It seems this is a new Biglaw trend — firms are “counseling out” both equity and nonequity partners that are not as productive as they’d like. And it’s largely coming in corporate practice groups, which have been particularly hard hit by COVID-19. But it didn’t start solely because of COVID; an Altman Weil survey found a hefty percentage of firms thought their partners were not busy enough, and the pandemic has exacerbated the problem:
Altman Weil legal consultant Eric Seeger points to his firm’s Law Firms in Transition survey, which found that, among the 182 firm leaders surveyed, 31% of respondents said their equity partners are not sufficiently busy. For nonequity partners, that figure rises to 51%.
And that survey came polled firms in February and March, pre-pandemic. Since then, billable hours at many firms have fallen by 10% to 20%, Seeger said.
The firms are seeing these partners out the door (or sometimes, in the case of equity partners, pushing them down to the nonequity ranks) and using that savings to retain big rainmakers, who are in danger of being poached by other firms.
“All firms are going to do everything they can to protect their most significant contributors from the threat of poaching by other firms. And that is often going to mean getting more money to those people so that they’re paid fairly, meaning market competitively,” said legal consultant Kent Zimmermann of the Zeughauser Group.
This effort to “right size” has taken on new life since, according to legal industry experts, more firms have moved to allow partner removal based on executive or management committee vote, as opposed to a traditional all-partner votes. And you can expect even more partners leaving their firms under less than strictly voluntary circumstances:
“Those conversations are happening. I know it,” said Peter Zeughauser, a law firm management consultant at the Zeughauser Group. ”We’ve talked to some of our clients about it. It’s going to pick up steam.”
Though these changes to the industry seem pretty radical, it’s really only the typically high profits in Biglaw that have previously insulated the industry from these tough cuts:
“Big Law has an unusually high profit margin, and it allows for a lot of sloppiness on this stuff,” Zeughauser said. “There has been a need for this for some time, but firms have done so well that they haven’t had to.”
So, um, thanks COVID?
“As they say, there’s nothing like a good disaster to get things in order,” said one Am Law 100 leader. “A lot of firms don’t have the rigor to do it. But it has been a long time coming.”
But it still has to suck for those fired forced into a career pivot during a freaking pandemic.
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).