Posts Categorized: New Lawyers

The disappearing associate

Posted by & filed under Big Firms, New Lawyers, Recession, Talent.

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 »

Can’t get no LSATisfaction

Posted by & filed under Law School, New Lawyers.

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 »

Fear and loathing in the law firm

Posted by & filed under Compensation, New Lawyers.

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

Posted by & filed under Compensation, New Lawyers.

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

Posted by & filed under Innovation, Law School, New Lawyers.

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

Posted by & filed under Clients, Collaboration, Competition, Management, New 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

Posted by & filed under Law21, New Lawyers.

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

Posted by & filed under Generations, New 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 »

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