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… Read more »
Posts Categorized: New Lawyers
Can’t get no LSATisfaction
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… Read more »
Trading money for time in your legal career
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… Read more »
Dispelling the myths of lawyer education
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… Read more »
Fear and loathing in the law firm
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… Read more »
Casualties of the salary war
Dan Hull at What About Clients has stirred the smouldering embers of the associate salary debate with a post suggesting that new lawyers should pay law firms to apprentice with them. It’s a provocative idea, and while I voiced my disagreement with it in a comment there, I do appreciate the frustration he and other… Read more »
Results, not résumés
Professor William Henderson, who teaches at the University of Indiana Faculty of Law and blogs at Empirical Legal Studies, has written a watershed treatise on how large law firms recruit and use associates. The ELS blog summarizes it, the ABA Journal reports on it, and Bruce MacEwen and Gerry Riskin have already flagged it as… Read more »
Core competence: 6 new skills now required of lawyers
Up till now, the necessary and sufficient skill set for lawyers has looked something like this (in alphabetical order): Analytical ability Attention to detail Logical reasoning Persuasiveness Sound judgment Writing ability (okay, that one’s apparently optional for some) This list doesn’t include such characteristics as knowledge of the law, courtroom presence, or integrity — these… Read more »
Interview with the publisher
I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Cole Silver of The Silver Group, Ltd. for his well-known Expert Audio Series. Cole and I talked about finding careers within the legal profession outside of the default mainstream jobs — one point I focused on in particular was that many new lawyers consider a law… Read more »
How to work with Boomer lawyers
Dan Hull at What About Clients? has apparently had it with the ruckus over Generation Y. In a post yesterday (HT to Legal Blog Watch), Dan responded to a seminar pitch on “learning to work with Millennials” with this riposte: It’s your problem, Gen-X and Gen-Y. Not ours. Work, figure it out, ask questions, and… Read more »