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Evidence Of A Broken System: Dumb but constitutional is a terrible standard.
Kirkland Had A Great 2019: $4 billion in revenue is pretty great.
Be Kind: It’s an order.
Will COVID-19 Ruin A Good Thing? I mean, probably… at the rate things are going.
Joe chats with Adam Balinski, founder of Crushendo, a test prep program focused on maximizing human memory. Auditory courses with a strong emphasis on tried and true memory hacks like location association and mnemonic devices, all worked into short, repeatable episodes you can listen to while going about your day.
Special thanks to Logikcull and Crushendo, for sponsoring this episode.
Well, we may not know what 2020 will bring for the economics of Biglaw, but we are getting the 2019 results right about now. While not every firm has yet reported their financials, we do know what Kirkland & Ellis — the reigning top revenue pile in Biglaw — did in 2019. And, you guys, they had a banger of a year.
That’s right, in 2019, Kirkland saw their revenue rise by an impressive 10.6 percent, bringing them to a crazy $4.154 billion in revenue. Wow. And profits per equity partner were also up — 3.13 percent to $5.195 million.
The firm is also busy getting bigger. In 2019, Kirkland’s headcount went up 12.6 percent, with the London office leading the way with a 3.3 percent headcount increase, bring that office to ~307 lawyers. However, all the headcount growth does have a downside, with revenue per lawyer dipping 1.8 percent to $1.59 million.
As reported by Law.com, a big part of the firm’s growth — in both headcount and money — has been their mergers and acquisitions practice:
Among the deals Kirkland lawyers worked on last year was the $90 billion acquisition of Celgene Corp., a Summit, New Jersey-based pharmaceutical company, by Bristol-Myers Squibb, in one of the largest pharma industry acquisitions ever.
The firm’s 2019 lateral hires reflected its continued focus on M&A and private equity work. Among the 20 lawyers Kirkland poached from Proskauer Rose in March 2019 were several partners whose work centered around private equity. The firm also added Adrian Maguire from Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer; corporate lawyers Vincent Ponsonnaille and Laurent Victor-Michel; Latham’s Debbie Yee; and David Klein of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison to its ranks over the past year.
They also had some big-ticket litigation victories on behalf Boeing and Facebook. Plus the restructuring practice also had a great year. They worked on the Toys “R” Us restructuring as well as the bankruptcies of FullBeauty Brands, Things Remembered, Forever 21, Destination Maternity, Pier One, Acosta, McDermott International, Vanguard Natural Resources, Jones Energy, and Murray Energy.
Congrats to Kirkland on a great 2019.
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).
To help legal professionals who are having to work from home or make other adjustments during the coronavirus crisis, I have created a page where I will track offers of free products and services from legal technology companies and others.
I have started it here: Coronavirus Resources.
If you have something to add, email me (ambrogi-at-gmail.com) or tweet at me (@bobambrogi).
Image by thedarknut from Pixabay.
(Image via Getty)
Be kind to one another in this most stressful of times. Remember to maintain your perspective about legal disputes, given the larger life challenges now besetting our communities and world. Good luck to one and all.
SO ORDERED this 17th day of March, 2020.
— an except from an order written by Judge Amy Totenberg of the Northern District of Georgia, directing parties to behave as if there’s a global pandemic going on and treat each other with respect. Judge Totenberg included this order in all of her current cases.
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.
Ever since the agrarian era when women gave birth in the fields, then strapped the baby on their backs, women have been multi-tasking childcare and work. Corona virus won’t be the first time that parents – primarily women – will be called upon to work from home while watching the kids nor will it be the last.
Here was my set up circa June 1997. I owned my law firm and served as counsel for Scott Hempling, a national energy regulatory attorney. I had a part time nanny for my daughter Elana but otherwise she played with toys by my side while I worked out of our basement. When Mira was born, I perfected the one arm hold, one finger peck as I simultaneously nursed and worked. A few tips for getting it done:
1. Shift work – I did most of my work between 8/9 pm – 1/2 am and maybe another spurt at 5/7 am. During that time, my husband was on duty but if he was traveling, I still got it done. I knew that there wasn’t much I could do with my daughters around even if they were distracted so shift work let me get work done so I was less stressed. Plus my clients were pretty impressed to receive 2 am dispatches!
2. Dive In – If you’re not formally set up to telecommute or work from home, don’t sweat it. You don’t need anything fancy. Use common sense. Make calls from your cell phone. Use your work email and internet. Experiment with web platforms and file sharing or video and other products you haven’t used but don’t feel as if you have to set up a remote office overnight. If you’re looking for free communication and work tools, check out these free resources.
3. Let it go – Most of the tight-ass child rearing magazines that make you feel like a loser for lack of discipline will implore you to inflict schedules and rules and use the time to make your kids learn to code or speak a new language (even if they don’t want to – more power to those that do). I implore you to do the opposite and let it go. No rules, no schedules. Let your kids gorge on TV or play on the computer while you’re outside in the car or in the closet on a conference call (been there, done that – it works). Shove them out the door unsupervised and let them spray paint the grass or mix baking soda and vinegar or put mentos in coke bottles. Heck, I think my daughters even lit and burned a pack of matches. Covid-19 won’t last forever but your relationship with your kids should. Why make it more difficult with screaming fights and arguments over things that won’t get done anyway. Let. It. Go.
4. Be creative in finding quiet and help. As noted above, the car or a closet can give you private time for a call. Make liberal use of the mute button. Make use of virtual assistants or another attorney to handle a call for you if you know there will be noise in the background. Or schedule calls for after hours or weekends when your partner (if you have one) can serve as backup.
5. Don’t make your work your kids’ problem. Please don’t force your kids to do the work that you can’t do. Don’t ask them to arrange your files
or make them vacuum because you don’t have time. They are kids and it’s not their problem. Plus let’s be honest – the work will never get done and you’ll wind up arguing with your kids even more. Someday, you want your to look back on this time as one where their parents got it done and they had fun. Not where you were at each others’ throats. They’ll be old and have to be responsible and miserable someday and they will. Why make them do it now?
6. Take some alone time and don’t feel guilty about it. Take walks or run around the neighborhood early in the morning alone – don’t drag the dog or your kids. And guess what – 3 or 4 year olds will be OK if they’re sleeping and you’re down the block for a few blocks without them.
7. You do you – Too too many articles telling you to make use of this downtime to Marie Kondo your house or cook and enjoy healthy family meals or do something productive. Again if that makes you feel better, do it (I personally like having downtime for side projects and intend to keep busy). But you don’t have to dive in right away or at all. And if wine and junk food relieve your stress, then indulge and don’t berate yourself afterwards. This is a battle so do whatever it takes to get through this.
8. Everything is going to work out fine – My sisters and I ran wild like a pack of wild dogs – summers in front of the TV until 3 in the afternoon, maybe time mucking around in the dirty creek behind our house or riding our bikes then dinner in front of more TV and a trip to the pool at night. No chores or responsibilities yet we are productive members of society.
My daughters and no chores or rules, and went unsupervised while I worked and they too are hard working and responsible 20 and 23 year old young ladies.
Please – realize that two months off the rigid schedule isn’t going to doom you or your kids to a lifetime of harm. Everything is going to be OK. Take it from someone who’s been there.
Read more articles and inspiration for parents who practice.
‘We got offers!’
For the past few years, law student recruitment for summer associate programs has been incredibly successful, harkening back to the pre-recession era. The 2019 cycle was only different than usual in that its outcomes were even better than last year’s historic trends.
According to the latest law student recruiting figures from the National Association of Law Placement (NALP), offer rates from Biglaw summer programs have reached brand new historic highs. Not only did the aggregate offer rate jump to almost 98 percent (slightly better than last year’s historic high of nearly 97 percent), but the acceptance rate for those offers was 88 percent, the same as last year’s historic high. 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 about 73 to 77 percent. On the other hand, the average size of summer associate classes at the largest of law firms fell slightly from 14 to 13. Here’s what James Leipold, NALP’s executive director, had to say about the latest figures:
What these data suggest is that in the more than 10 years following the Great Recession, law firms steadily rebuilt their summer programs and entry-level recruiting pipeline, but that regrowth has now definitively been capped, and in some cases firms have begun to implement a gentle taper, perhaps in anticipation of some economic uncertainty ahead.
Speaking of economic uncertainty…
Last week we wondered if the coronavirus would lead to a situation where upcoming summer programs would possibly be postponed or even canceled outright. Leipold says that hasn’t happened yet, in terms of rescinding offers or anything of that nature, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t anxiety in the air. From Law.com:
“I don’t think canceling summer programs is what’s going to happen,” he said. “But I think if firms are still stuck in remote work, they’ll be thinking, ‘OK, what does that look like for a summer associate who has never worked here? How do we train them? How do we give them virtual assignments? How do we have social bonding when we can’t come into work?’ I think those are the questions being asked right now for the incoming summer class.” …
“Nobody has really made a decision,” Leipold said of how firms will handle the incoming summer associate class and upcoming recruiting season. “Firms are grappling with that right now. I think firms will make good faith efforts to honor their commitments under the present circumstances. There’s not enough information in the marketplace yet to know how all of this will play out. But it will certainly have an impact on everything.”
Either way, congratulations to all law students who went through the recruitment cycle in 2019, as things seem to have worked out great for them. Cross your fingers that they actually get the summer associate experience that they expected to receive.
Summer Associate Hiring Was Strong, but COVID-19 Prompts Uncertainty Ahead [Law.com]
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.
It’s very hard to find anything positive about the pandemic that we are now in. But if this forces us to be creative about how we deliver legal services, then a collateral consequence of all this may not be all bad. Of course, lawyers and the profession are not known for being proactive or anything close to that. We are masters of the reactive, the “let’s wait and see,” and similar foot-dragging sentiments.
COVID-19 is forcing our hand, and I, for one, don’t think that’s a bad thing for the profession. If one of the things we should be doing is to make legal services more affordable and more accessible, then COVID-19 may prompt, indeed, mandate changes in our thinking and delivery of those services.
As just one example, some ADR providers in Southern California are now offering the option to attend mediation via videoconferencing. I know mediators, including me, would prefer to see the “whites of their eyes” so to speak, but right now, in the times of social distancing, that’s not the best idea. Anything to make the legal process work better and more economically is what works for clients. I only wish that more lawyers would see that; of course, it’s not in our economic self-interest.
Los Angeles is not the only city with lousy traffic. Having to pay counsel for time spent in the car traveling to and from mediation is not the most effective use of that time. I don’t have to explain the benefits of videoconferencing, and if I do, then shame on you. I used videoconferencing in a mediation fifteen years ago when my client was here in SoCal and the other side was in Nashville. It resolved. My client put more on the table (and I am talking cash, not rolls of toilet paper) and the other side was willing to accept less due to reduced expense.
Logistics play a major part right now. The Los Angeles Superior Court, the largest trial court in the country, is, among other things, continuing civil jury trials for thirty days and postponing criminal jury trials where statutory time has been waived for at least thirty days.
Courts will remain open for emergency hearings, including domestic violence restraining orders and other legal matters that cannot wait. Will the delays in civil trials prompt more resolutions? We’ll have to wait and see.
In an interview this past January (it was a different world then, at least to me), the legal technology guru and author Richard Susskind spoke of the significant challenges and difficulties that courts around the world face (and this was before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold). He thinks that online courts could be the answer to the access to justice issue.
How many times have we told clients, potential or otherwise, that the economic value of a case does not justify litigation? How many times have we advised clients to resolve a matter, rather than going through the expenses of litigation? How many times have we suggested to clients that for very small matters, take it to small claims court and remit any amount in the jurisdictional excess? It rankles a client who thinks that she has a good, albeit small, case and she wants to tell her story.
Susskind’s suggestion for online courts is twofold: the first, which lawyers will not like, is the submission of evidence and arguments in an “asynchronous” hearing system. While he concedes that this process may not work for all cases, he does think it’s a better use of everyone’s time to resolve what he calls “relatively modest difficulties and differences.”
His second suggestion is that it should be part of the court’s job to provide tools so that nonlawyers can better understand their rights and obligations and provide ways for parties to resolve disputes among themselves. The Family Law Department of the Los Angeles Superior Court put into effect last summer an online dispute resolution tool for parenting plan agreements.
Every little step takes us closer to where we need to be in order to provide better access to justice. I would imagine that courts elsewhere have similar programs, at least I hope so.
Susskind says that we have the ability through technology to help nonlawyers access legal information and documentation. The goal is to improve access to justice, rather than perfect it, at least now right now.
The question Susskind asks is whether the court “is a service or a place?” Here in Los Angeles County, it took years and years for Court Call to be acceptable as an alternative to in-person appearances for such mundane matters as case conferences, trial settings, and the like. Some judges here were also resistant to telephone appearances; of course, they didn’t have to bill the clients for the hours spent in court on those mundane matters.
As if to underscore Susskind’s comment that it’s so easy to take potshots at recommendations to improve access to justice, the State Bar of California just essentially put the kibosh on task force recommendations to try to improve that access, which suggested taking baby steps, ironically called a “regulatory sandbox.” While the official line is that “political headwinds” have put the brakes on those recommendations, this seems to be one more example of the ostrich-like thinking that permeates California bar leadership.
As Susskind points out, compete or help build emerging systems. To compete will leave lawyers in the dust sooner or later. It may seem superficially safe to cling to the status quo, but as we are finding out, the status quo doesn’t work anymore.
Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for over 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.