This article in the New York discusses how Skadden Arps has taken a bold step in this troubling economy: offering $80,000 to all of its associates worldwide and a year off. One of the associates, Heather Eisenlord is planning on taking the year off to teach English in Sri Lanka or bring solar power to the Himalayas.
This is not the only option on the table, as the firm is also trying to find pro bono work for its associates and others are attempting to pursue different avenues of work for a year, “So far, the majority of the lawyers are looking for worthwhile legal work, Skadden says, to keep them as competitive as possible; but yes, some will take the year off to spend time with their children or look after a sick relative. Someone’s planning to wrap up his Ph.D., someone else is looking into legal work for a news organization, and another associate will be joining Ms. Eisenlord on her round-the-world adventure.”
The fact that any of these options exist at all, however, can be pretty astonishing to most Americans.
April 19th, 2009
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Eric Holder’s recent appointments to the Department of Justice suggest he will work to bring on a new level of ethics compliance unforeseen in the last ten years. The Bush administration was accused of appointing political appointees to the DOJ; attorneys that are looking to defend the mantra of the administration rather than the rule of law or hold any ethical standards. Holder appears to be moving in a different direction, says this Washington Post article. “(Holder) appointed Mary Patrice Brown, a well-respected career prosecutor in the District, the new leader of the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), which polices misconduct by department lawyers. Brown, who runs the criminal division at the U.S. attorney’s office in the District, will become the third chief of the ethics unit since it was established in 1975 after the Watergate scandal. The move came a day after U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan expressed a lack of confidence in the office, which has been investigating lapses with witnesses and evidence that ultimately demolished the government’s case against Stevens. Citing the seriousness of the alleged prosecutorial misconduct, the judge took the extraordinary step of appointing a special prosecutor to investigate six government lawyers involved in the case against the former senator, convicted last fall of ethics violations for accepting gifts from an oil services company executive.”
April 10th, 2009
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Questions are rising about who exactly will cover the hidden costs of those new graduates who have been deferred from their law firms for a year. While many law firms have agreed to subsidize their these new lawyers upwards to $75,000, and the non-profit and public interest organizations are in many instances happy to take on the new staff, there is the issue of cost that still needs to be answered. An article in the American Lawyer Daily, quotes Mitchell Kamin, the president and CEO of Bet Tzedek Legal Services in Los Angeles, who explains some of the less obvious costs associated with bringing on a new attorney “Kamin estimates the added cost of taking on an intern for one year at his organization will come to roughly $10,500 to cover office supplies, parking, and postage (an additional $3500 will be necessary for the added training and supervision costs for these newbie lawyers).”
Some employers believe the firms had not anticipated some of the costs involved in bringing on a new associate. Non profits have reacted to the situation, in some instances, by asking firms to provide funds to cover training fees which the non-profits believe could benefit the firms long term and also step-up their fund raising efforts to cover other costs like medical benefits or malpractice.
April 5th, 2009
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In an op-ed in the New York Times, Adam Cohen believes that with the recent economic problems facing the legal profession (deferred starts to newly associates, firm closings and the rising costs of law student debt), it may be time to re-configure the profession for the 21st century.
Mr. Cohen believes that the on-going economic problems could force the profession to look at a lot of different professional issues they have not looked at in quite a while, namely salaries and they way clients are billed.
Law schools, too, may realize that reform is necessary. “For years, law school tuition rose along with big-firm salaries. Between 1990 and 2003, the cost of private law schools rose at nearly three times the rate of consumer prices. The average graduate now leaves with more than $80,000 in debt. In one survey, 66 percent of students said debt prevented them from considering government or public-interest jobs.”
While no change is imminent Mr. Cohen conveyed a need to guide the legal profession into a new direction for the future. “Law school deans, bar association leaders and firm managers should follow Rahm Emanuel’s advice about never allowing a crisis to go to waste and start planning for what comes next.”
April 5th, 2009
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The Inspector General in the Department of the Interior has a tough job ahead of him. Earl A. Devaney, Obama’s newly appointed IG for the Department of the Interior, is charged with catching any slip-ups, negligence and wrong-doing with the federal stimulus money. A particularly tough task given what has recently happened at AIG. The trickier part is that he has to try to do this before any of it happens.
Devaney chairs the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board–RAT–to prevent any federal waste. Because of the size of the stimulus bill and the required oversight to manage it, this project is unprecedented in American history.
The Washington Post article goes on to explain what the RAT Board is charged with and how much oversight relies upon the effectiveness of already existing agencies; perhaps being more effective than they have in years past. “The RAT Board is a grand experiment in government oversight. Made up of inspectors general from across the government, it is tasked with coordinating with overseers in federal, state and local governments to detect and prevent fraud, waste and abuse of stimulus money. But while most inspectors general are skilled at examining fraudulent activities through audits or criminal investigations, the RAT Board’s priority is to install preventive measures to ensure that no fraud occurs in the first place.”
March 26th, 2009
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What is being done to address the issue of immigration (both legal and illegal) in New York City? This New York Times article highlights some of the problems occurring in the immigration law community in New York. Robert A. Katzmann, a federal judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, lead a “working colloquium” on the subject of immigration law and how to better connect the immigrant community and the legal community. Lawyers from all arenas of law (judges, big firm attorneys, legal service lawyers) showed up to this colloquium to discuss these issues. Many were on the same level and agreed that immigration law needs some fixing.
A big problem is the workload required of the immigration attorneys and judges–making it hard to
devote a great deal of time to any one immigrant’s case. Take the Varick detention center mentioned in the Times article. The center, operated for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is part of Homeland Security, has had a spotty past and precarious future. The article mentions that “leaders of the fledgling legal triage program said it has only enough volunteers to talk privately with a dozen of the 250 men held there, a few subway stops from federal and state courthouses and the skyscraping headquarters of international legal firms. Hundreds more immigrant New Yorkers are detained in New Jersey jails where few or no free lawyers visit regularly.”
On top of that, judges and attorneys are dealing with massive case loads of which many should not be on their docket.
The legal imbalance is clear. The writer points out that “studies show immigrants with legal representation are three to four times more likely to win their case, yet nationwide, only about 35 percent have any kind of lawyer.”
March 25th, 2009
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The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) and the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released their 67-page report outlining cases of discrimination and politicized appointments in the DOJ Civil Rights Division’s hiring practices.
The report focuses particularly on the work by a former principal deputy attorney general in the Civil Rights Division, Mr. Bradley Schlozman. The report details emails written by Mr. Schlozman as well as interviews that showcase a discriminating lense through which Mr. Schlozman hired and promoted lawyers within the Civil Rights Division.
To read the article, visit the link here.
The full report can be found here.
January 15th, 2009
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For those law students who put their fraternity hazing rituals on their facebook page or those who put revealing spring break to Cancun on your MySpace page, you might want to think long and hard about what exactly you should and should not reveal on your online social networking sites.
These two articles, one from law.com and the other from the San Francisco Chronicle, explore some of the potential pitfalls, dangers, and repercussions of using the site as more that a way to connect or re-connect with family and friends.
The Law.com article discusses a case where an intern at the San Francisco’s Public Defender’s Office wrote on her MySpace page about possible ethnic discrimination on the part of the defender’s office.
To read the full article, click here.
The other article discusses some general guidelines on how to use sites such as facebook and MySpace. The article can be read by clicking on this link.
January 15th, 2009
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Kenneth Zimmerman ‘88, former Chief Counsel to New Jersey Governor Jon S. Corzine and a current partner with the firm Lowenstein Sandler PC which has offices in Boston, New York, Palo Alto, and Roseland NJ, has been chosen to lead the firm’s new public interest center which it opened at the end of October.
The center will oversee the entire firm’s pro bono efforts and hopes to expand upon its commitment to “addressing significant social issues and provide community assistance.” The firm stated in a press release.
As part of the program, five associates working at Lowenstein Sandler will dedicate 25 percent of their time to the Center’s projects and help spearhead the firm’s overall pro bono efforts, which in 2007 involved some 230 lawyers and totaled nearly 19,000 hours of attorney and paralegal participation.
To read the press release, follow this link.
Click on this link to visit the firm’s website.
for more information about Ken Zimmerman, click here.
January 8th, 2009
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The Harvard Crimson, Harvard’s daily since 1873, discussed the initial sign-up for the PSI in a recent article. The initial sign-ups for the PSI suggest the program will have a much greater rate of participation than imagined—about 50% above the targeted number.
“On the one hand, it’s a little bit scary, but on the other hand, it’s very exciting for me,” Dean Elena Kagan commented in the article.
Kagan has made a commitment to funding the program at least through its five-year experimental phase, regardless of the number of students who sign up. “I’m hopeful it’ll work really well, and that we’ll find whatever extra money we’ll need for it.”
To read more about the PSI, visit the PSI section of the Student Financial Services website
http://www.law.harvard.edu/current/sfs/p…
November 3rd, 2008
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