Category Archives: New Lawyers

The apprenticeship marketplace

By Jordan Furlong | Published: September 9, 2009
Critical mass, like the famous definition of obscenity, is one of those things you can’t necessarily define but that you know when you see. We’re approaching a critical mass of discourse on the necessity of change within the American law school system, and when we reach that point, the focus will switch overnight from necessity [...]
Also posted in Innovation, Law School | 5 Comments

Momentum

By Jordan Furlong | Published: June 24, 2009
Momentum is one of those things everyone talks about but nobody can ever precisely define or quantify. It’s that sense that things are turning around or gathering speed in a certain direction, usually for the better — with a corollary borrowed from physics that the larger the object and the greater its velocity, the more [...]
Also posted in Billing, Innovation, Outsourcing | 8 Comments

The canary in our coal mine

By Jordan Furlong | Published: June 8, 2009
My newest column has been posted at Slaw, winner of the Canadian Association of Law Librarians’ 2009 Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing. It’s the latest honour for Canada’s best legal website, and yet another reason to read this post there and take in the rest of the terrific content.
Also posted in Compensation, Law School | 1 Comment

The legacy of work-life balance

By Jordan Furlong | Published: June 4, 2009
I think we’ll soon be closing the book on one of the legal profession’s most-used and least-understood phrases of the last decade: “work-life balance.” It was still all the rage just a couple of years ago — new lawyers invoked it as a mantra, talent recruiters bandied it about, and many legal publications (including those [...]
Also posted in Big Firms, Billing, Purpose, Satisfaction, Talent | 10 Comments

Graduating into a recession

By Jordan Furlong | Published: May 19, 2009
It’s rare that a reader asks me to write something on a specific topic, rarer still that multiple requests for the same subject come in. So the fact that a few people have now asked for a post about law students and the recession indicates just how much anxiety is rising in law schools and [...]
Also posted in Careers, Recession | 8 Comments

The disappearing associate

By Jordan Furlong | Published: February 13, 2009
Well, that was ugly. In case you missed it, or you need a summary, here’s what happened on a day (yesterday) that the ABA Journal called Black Thursday and Above The Law readers have decided should be named (a little early) the Valentine’s Day Massacre: Holland & Knight fired 70 lawyers and 173 staff DLA Piper fired [...]
Also posted in Big Firms, Recession, Talent | 7 Comments

Can’t get no LSATisfaction

By Jordan Furlong | Published: November 10, 2008
Here’s something interesting: the consultancy Kerma Partners recently conducted an in-depth study of more than 1,300 current and past “timekeepers” on behalf of an AmLaw 25 law firm. The study identified which personal qualities and attributes of lawyers correlated most strongly with firm success factors such as productivity and longevity. Lawyers possessing the best of [...]
Also posted in Law School | 3 Comments

Trading money for time in your legal career

By Jordan Furlong | Published: October 23, 2008
One of the unexpected benefits of this blog for me is the correspondence I’ve received from people who’ve read something I’ve written and have struck up a conversation about it. Recently, I received an email from a reader in the western US, and I thought you might be interested in both his question and my [...]
Also posted in Careers, Satisfaction | 4 Comments

Dispelling the myths of lawyer education

By Jordan Furlong | Published: October 15, 2008
There’s an old story about a supposed experiment in which five apes are placed in a cage containing a stepladder. A banana is hanging from the roof of the cage, and a sprinkler with ice-cold water is positioned above it. Whenever an ape tries to climb the ladder to get the banana, the sprinkler comes [...]
Also posted in Innovation, Law School | 3 Comments

Fear and loathing in the law firm

By Jordan Furlong | Published: September 10, 2008
Many law firms’ insistence on treating their newest associates as adversaries continues to baffle me. Law firms know very well that the associates they hire fresh out of law school (or even after a year of articling) are sufficiently unskilled that they don’t merit the salaries they make or the rates they bill. Equally, firms traditionally [...]
Also posted in Compensation | 3 Comments

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