Category: News Feeds

Vault recently published the 2021 edition of all manner of its closely watched rankings for the largest law firms in the country, proving that money — in the form of Cravath’s perennially competitive pay scale — can buy prestige and happiness.

But what about the nation’s midsized and regional firms? Which ones are the best to work for, and will young associates be happy there as associates Today, Vault released the latest edition of its list of the 25 Best Midsize Law Firms to Work For.

Associates at firms with 200 attorneys or fewer were asked to rank their own law firms based on categories most relevant to their overall quality of life, including overall satisfaction; firm culture; hours; compensation; quality of work; informal training, mentorship, and sponsorship; business outlook; career outlook; associate/partner relations; leadership transparency; and formal training.

There was a huge amount of movement in the Top 10 this year. Which firms made the cut? Without any further ado, here are the Top 10 Best Midsize Law Firms to Work For based on Vault’s Annual Associate Survey for 2021:

1. Harrity & Harrity (not ranked; first time in Top 10)
2. Lightfoot, Franklin & White (+20)
3. Bookoff McAndrews (-2)
4. Smyser Kaplan & Veselka (not ranked; first time in Top 10)
5. Farella Braun + Martel (+7)
6. Susman Godfrey (-4)
7. Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman & Machtinger (-4)
8. Robinson, Bradshaw & Hinson (not ranked; first time in Top 10)
9. Stotler Hayes Group (not ranked; first time in Top 10)
10. Fitch, Even, Tabin & Flannery (not ranked; first time in Top 10)

That’s a whole lot of firms that have never been ranked before, but if you scroll further down the list, you’ll see a lot of more familiar names. Harrity & Harrity shared the spotlight with Susman Godfrey (Vault’s best litigation boutique) this year in terms of claiming No. 1 spots in the rankings. That said, here are the No. 1 firms in each Quality of Life category for 2021:

Congratulations to each of the firms that made the latest edition of the Vault Best Midsize Firms to Work For rankings, and a huge congratulations to Harrity & Harrity and Susman Godfrey for sweeping the rankings. How did your firm do? Email us, text us at (646) 820-8477, or tweet us @atlblog to let us know how you feel.

Best Midsize Law Firms to Work For (2021) [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.

Some of the upcoming October bar exams require applicants to download their mock exams this week — a process that more or less locks in how they expect to take the exam. Many law grads have the laptops that allowed them to clatter away during lectures, but there are still many who have desktop computers that offer better performance that they prefer to use when they can. Until recently, these folks believed that they’d be able to take their bar exam on this computer.

Alas, like so much of the 2020 bar experience, the powers-that-be waited until the last possible second to declare, “PSYCHE!”

Or perhaps more accurately to whisper, “psyche.”

Examsoft just quietly announced through an update of their minimum system requirements that desktop computers are not allowed for the bar exam two days before our deadline to download the mock exams.

This with no actual announcement, and with their previous site containing multiple references to pc’s and desktops on both their requirements page and the jurisdiction specific pages. Also, I have personally called examsoft TWICE in the past week and asked them about the software on my desktop and they said it was totally fine.

What? This seems to reference the New York bar exam which released new FAQs without fanfare on September 15 that did appear to ban not only desktops for laptop docking stations. Sorry if you bought a 10-inch laptop to save your back in law school!

It’s unclear where this rule is coming from. California also states “Desktop computers are not allowed for security reasons” and according to its revisions appeared to add this new restriction on August 31. ExamSoft’s requirements recently read “If using a PC or laptop….” and now reads “If using a laptop” with a curiously vestigial “If” for a test that now can only be done on a laptop. Yet, as of this writing, Florida’s bar instructions — which also use ExamSoft — still read: “In order to take the October 2020 examination, applicants will be required to have a laptop or desktop computer….” Given everything else, I think Florida applicants should expect a surprise edit to that document really soon.

Beyond shanking people out of their preferred computers 48 hours before they have to commit, this change exacerbates the already noted concern that many applicants have about having access to a quiet place to take an exam. For many people, their office or personal desk is set up as their only quiet space and that PC sits right there on that desk. Now — apparently because ExamSoft found yet another bug a couple of weeks before the test — the bar exam is telling these applicants they have to disassemble everything to clear out a new work space.

This is a plea to any remaining state supreme court or state legislator out there who can stop this madness: Do you trust that there’s any sanctity to this process when the software running the online bar exam figured out that it can’t even work on a whole class of computers less than three weeks before the exam? Seriously, how do you shrug your shoulders and assume everything is going to be fine when major changes to technical requirements are still popping up in the final days before the exam?

Diploma privilege is the most sound answer for the short-term. But if you simply must have an exam it needs to be “here’s three essay questions, it’s open book, we don’t care what computer you use, just hit us back with answers before close of business” like Indiana did.

You know, like how actual lawyers are expected to do their jobs.

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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.

Elite boutique Hueston Hennigan has also entered the COVID bonus fray. The firm, which traditionally blows the Biglaw market year-end bonuses out of the water, has announced a second round of bonuses at the firm.

Back in April, the firm bucked the austerity trend that was making its way through Biglaw. Then they offered staff a special $1,000 bonus to assist them or their families with any unexpected expenses during the pandemic. All lawyers got an additional $500 at-home technology budget (which supplements their existing technology) to make the transition to remote working just a little bit easier.

Now that COVID bonuses are all the rage, they’re matching the market rate on that too. All attorneys will receive a special appreciation bonus ranging between $7,500 and $40,000 depending on year. And staff will also get their second set of COVID bonuses.

The firm also clarified that these bonuses are in addition to their usual year-end bonuses. Can’t wait to see the eye-popping numbers that the firm gives out this year.

Please help us help you when it comes to bonus news at other firms. 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).

A lot of the time, I use this column to highlight immigration news that is flying under the radar. I’m pleased (sort of) to say that this time around, I’m highlighting something that a lot of people outside of the world of immigration law have heard of: allegations that an ICE detention center in Georgia is removing detainees’ uteruses at abnormally high rates.

As the BBC reported Tuesday, this is one of multiple allegations in a complaint that immigrant and prisoner advocates filed with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General and Office of Civil Rights on Monday. The complaint pertains to the Irwin County Detention Center, an ICE contract facility that is actually run by private prison company LaSalle Corrections. The complaint details what it calls “jarring medical neglect” of detainees, including shredding requests for medical care, fabricating medical records to make it look as if they saw people that they refused to see, and refusing to treat people who were bedridden with suspected COVID-19.

But the centerpiece is evidence of unnecessary hysterectomies. (Hysterectomy is removal of the uterus, and renders the patient unable to have children.) A nurse named Dawn Wooten, who left her job at the facility in July, says in the complaint that “just about everybody” seen by a gynecologist the facility uses gets a hysterectomy, even though “everybody’s uterus cannot be that bad.”

Indeed, there is evidence that these surgeries are being performed on the thinnest of excuses, and without the legally required informed consent. One detainee says in the complaint that she asked three different people why she was having the surgery, and got different answers from each. Julie Schweitert Collazo of Immigrant Families Together said on Twitter Tuesday that, according to an inmate at Irwin, every woman that inmate knows at Irwin has been diagnosed with ovarian cysts. (She also says the jailers at Irwin took away inmates’ ability to make video calls on the same day the complaint was filed. Hmmm.)

As it happens, ovarian cysts can affect your fertility, but not because the normal treatment is hysterectomy. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says surgery to remove the cyst itself, or at most an ovary, is recommended for a cyst that’s very large or causing symptoms, or if they suspect cancer. A friend of mine who’s struggled with ovarian cysts says treatment for young women considers the risks of the treatment to future fertility. But as she observes, it’s a lot easier to take someone’s fertility away if you think they’re subhuman to begin with.

By now, it should be crystal clear that the Trump administration indeed does not believe that Latino people are human beings. It’s the only way someone could conceive of and implement family separation as a way to deter requests for asylum (which are both legal and protected by an international treaty). It’s the only way you can send people to their likely deaths in San Salvador, or in coronavirus-filled ICE jails.

But it’s also eugenics, and I suspect that’s why this is resonating beyond the outrage-fatigued world of immigration law. There is a long, ugly history of unnecessary sterilizations in this country, targeting Black women and other women of color, and some of them were more recent than we’d prefer to think. The Nazis did that stuff too — one of the women in the whistleblower complaint said the hysterectomies are “like an experimental concentration camp” — but it’s worth noting that they were inspired by American eugenicists.

There are only two things I’ve ever known to change Trump administration immigration policy: lawsuits and sustained, family-separation-level outrage. Get to work.

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Lorelei Laird is a freelance writer specializing in the law, and the only person you know who still has an “I Believe Anita Hill” bumper sticker. Find her at wordofthelaird.com.

The Florida Board of Bar Examiners told Brian Heckmann that he had a clean, qualifying record in 2018. In the intervening months, Heckmann has joined thousands of other law grads around the country in criticizing his local bar examiners for fumbling with his future: attempting to hold in-person exams… then canceling in-person exams; setting up online exams, failing to have tests of the exam platform… and then canceling online exams; and now trying to have the bar exam again with a different provider. But Heckmann had gone further than many and become a visible critic — appearing on local TV and publishing op-eds.

Now — TOTALLY COINCIDENTALLY — the Florida Board of Bar Examiners have a lot of issues with Heckmann’s application, asking for a bunch of additional material about his prior work. HMMMMMMM!

From the Daily Business Review:

“The reason why people are speaking out anonymously is because of a general perception—which I think is valid—that the Board of Bar Examiners is just vindictive,” Heckmann said.  “We’re making them look bad, and they know they can’t publicly get back against us but they’re still trying to extract a pound of flesh [through the character and review process.]”

Karen Sloan managed to get a comment from the Florida Board of Bar Examiners:

Michele Givagni, the executive director of the Florida Board of Bar Examiners, said Tuesday that court rules prohibit her from commenting on any character and fitness reviews except with the applicant.

That’s not quite how confidentiality works in this setting. See, the proper response would be that she cannot comment on any C&F review except with the applicant… “BUT I CAN ASSURE YOU UNIVERSALLY THAT WE DO NOT ENGAGE IN RETALIATORY CHARACTER & FITNESS REVIEWS AND NO ONE IS RECEIVING ADDITIONAL VETTING BASED ON THEIR CRITICISM OF THE PROCESS.” That statement doesn’t violate any court rules and would be remarkably easy to add.

But it’s probably not something she could add because it’s probably not true. Putting aside the specifics of the Heckmann case, we already know that the “mood” of bar examiners around the country was to try and use the character and fitness process to get back at applicants whose complaints made the examiners look bad. NCBE President Judith Gunderson told an audience in August that applicants petitioning for diploma privilege should keep their mouths shut lest they get dinged on character and fitness. Technically she said that it wasn’t her, but rather some unnamed collection of bar examiners she’d spoken with (“a lot of people are saying,” as the President of the United States might put it) and not that all critics would be targeted but the ones with a “lack of civility,” a notoriously eye-of-the-beholder standard designed to chill speech by making every critic feel potentially ensnared in someone else’s subjective sense of decorum.

Maybe Heckmann’s case isn’t related but if there’s one rule that the American public needs to embrace it’s that when people tell you who they are, believe them. And bar examiners pretty clearly told us through Gunderson’s statement that they view the character and fitness process as fair game to get back at anyone pointing out that the emperor wears shockingly little clothing.

Law Grad Says He’s Being Retaliated Against For Bar Exam Criticism [Daily Business Review]

Earlier: NCBE Prez Issues Threat To Tie Up Licenses Of Bar Exam Critics
NCBE President Gives Trainwreck Of An Interview

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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.

We regret to inform you that Kodak shares are again on the move, and in an upward direction, and that, as with all such movement over the last two months, and most especially the past six weeks, it has nothing whatever to do with the anything like the company’s fundamentals.

Shares of Eastman Kodak Co. were up about 60% shortly after the start of trading in New York, following a legal review of how it award stock option grants to its chief executive officer before announcing a federal loan. The review determined the company had mishandled the process, but also that stock transactions by its chief executive officer and a board member didn’t constitute insider trading.

* Kayne West said he was going to tweet his recording contracts since he apparently needs “every lawyer in the world to look at these.” Can all of us lawyers send him a bill if we review the agreements? [Hollywood Reporter]

* Joe Biden is purportedly assembling an army of lawyers for a possible post-election legal fight. [Guardian]

* A new lawsuit has been filed against Kushner Companies, the outfit owned by Jared Kushner’s family, over allegedly dangerous living conditions at apartment buildings owned by the company. [Hill]

* An OBGYN is being accused of fertility fraud after it was allegedly revealed that the doctor’s sperm, and not that of an anonymous donor, was used to create an embryo. [Fox News]

* William H. Gates, Sr., a name partner of K and L Gates, has passed away. He is also the father of billionaire Bill Gates, what a legacy! [American Lawyer]

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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 called it yesterday, the COVID-19 bonus wars are upon us. Cooley’s announcement got the ball rolling — and sent a signal to elite Biglaw firms that they’re going to have to pony up additional bonus money, on top of year-end bonuses — as a special thank you for all the hard work associates have been putting in during this difficult time. Then Davis Polk came over the top, offering associates a lot more money than Cooley did. Now we have our first match.

Milbank announced special bonuses today in the range of $7,500 to $40,000, depending on class year, matching the DPW scale. If an associate is below 80 percent utilization (inclusive of pro bono and work on behalf of the firm), they won’t be left out in the cold entirely, they’ll get 50 percent of the bonus for their class year. And for those extraordinarily busy (over 110 percent utilization), they’ll be rewarded with an extra 50 percent of their class rate.

And, as has become typical with the COVID bonus announcements, Milbank noted that their 2020 year-end bonuses will at least be as large as their 2019 bonuses.

These special bonuses will be paid on or before October 30th.

You can read the firm’s full announcement on the next page.

Please help us help you when it comes to bonus news at other firms. 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.

Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day!

According to a retrospective survey of partner compensation data compiled by Major, Lindsey & Africa, from 2000 to 2018, by what percentage did compensation go up for male partners?

Hint: For women, compensation only went up 22 percent over that same time period.

See the answer on the next page.