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Or, as our new sibling magazine in London touts about themselves,” Legal Week wins top magazine award—again.” The award won was Weekly Business Magazine of the Year in the 2008 PPA Awards. PPA is the association for publishers and providers of consumer, customer and business media in the U.K. The magazine was praised for its “agenda-setting coverage”, a “ground-breaking redesign” and the title’s success at building a “vibrant online community”.
Clifford Chance recently announced pay raises of just over 4% for its junior lawyers, according to Legal Week, which brings the big firm in line with its “magic circle” rivals Linklaters and Freshfield Bruckhaus Deringer. Allen & Overy, on the other hand, has frozen it associate salaries for 2008, Legal Week reported, the first magic circle firm to do so.
ALM Research has been tracking associate salary and bonus news in a spreadsheet. The Associate Salary Update is free to subscribers, and to non-subscribers with the purchase of any product from the ALM Research Store. Send an email to almresearch@alm.com for a link to the Update spreadsheet.
According to a recent report from New York Lawyer, Harvard Law School's faculty unanimously voted to make all faculty member-authored scholarly articles available on the Internet free of charge. The law school said the articles would be available in an online repository, which could also be accessed by outside services like Google Scholar. The policy would also allow faculty to post the articles on their own Web sites. Educators at any institution are also free to give the articles to students as long as they're not used for profit.
Tom Kane has another good post, More on Business Development in a Recession, on his Legal Marketing Blog, which focuses on “adjusting the four “P’s” (Product, Place, Promotion, Price) of marketing as one way to develop business in these troubled times.”
Speaking of which, our third Business Development Practices Survey Report is now available in the ALM Research Store. For those not familiar with this survey, ALM Research has been tracking the role of business development in law firms since 2005—budgets, staffing, compensation for business development managers, strategies used, and the overall organizational structure of the business development effort. While it is still housed within the marketing department in most firms, the largest of firms (those at the top of the Am Law 100, the Global 100, and the NLJ 250) now see business development as a separate function from the firm’s marketing efforts. Read more about it here.
A list of the successful candidates for the February New York bar exam was published by New York Law Journal and the newspaper reported that the pass rate had increased over last year. Notice of the publication of the Ohio Bar results was published on the Stark County Law Library Blog and can be found here.
For more information about bar exams and results, check out FindLaw’s links for each state.
The buzz about The Am Law 100 continues. ALM’s newspaper in Washington, DC, Legal Times has its own list, the D.C. 20 (subscription required), which ranks the top firms in the DC area based on revenues in those offices. (The Am Law 100 ranks firms based on their firmwide revenues.) The top three firms were Hogan & Hartson, Wilmer Cutler, and Skadden—though Legal Times poses the probability that Skadden just might be on the verge of becoming the top firm soon. New York-based Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom topped the profits per partner rankings, with $2,280,000 per equity partner, on average, but Latham & Watkins was right behind them, with $2,270,000 PPP. Third-place ranking went to McDermott, Will & Emery, with a mere $1,520,000 PPP.
The 2008 Am Law 100 is available in searchable spreadsheet format through the ALM Research Store, and data from all previous years' surveys (starting in 1985) is available to ALM Research Online subscribers.
Tom Kane on his Legal Marketing Blog brought up a very interesting metric regarding client satisfaction. “One might think every lawyer is responsible,” Kane writes, “or maybe the managing partner if it has to be brought down to a single individual.” His initial reaction was that it should be the former, but after reading the article “The Power of One” by Marcie Borgal in The Complete Lawyer, Kane’s viewpoint was completely changed—as is ours, after reading about this one statistic presented by Borgal. (Marcie Borgal is a senior strategic analyst with The BTI Consulting Group. Her article starts with this: “A research study recently conducted (by BTI) … revealed a startling fact. Having a single individual accountable for firm-wide client service boosts per attorney profits by up to 41.2%.” Over 41 percent! That should be one metric that makes you want to read more here.
As noted by Joe Hodnicki on the Law Librarian Blog, the Web Marketing Association is calling for entries for its 12th annual international WebAward Competition for websites. The Association will once again name the Best Legal Website of 2008.
The WebAwards is "the standards-defining competition that sets benchmarks for 96 industries," including legal web sites, based on the seven criteria of a successful website. The deadline for legal websites to enter to be judged is May 31, 2008. To access details and an entry form, click here.
This was an interesting post on Larry Bodine’s Law Marketing Blog, reviewing Bingham McCutchen’s almost-sweep in the 2008 LMA Your Honor Awards. Bingham earned first place awards for its 2007 branding identify and advertising, and second place recognition for its web site design, and had earlier in the year secured nine regional LMA awards. Among the many winners was Bingham’s Bear and Baby ad, as Bodine notes, which was also named Law Firm Ad of the Year by The Wall Street Journal Law Blog and was featured on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” with host Stephen Colbert reiterating his well-known fear of bears and calling Bingham “the No. 2 threat to America.”
As the BLT (Blog of the Legal Times) notes, it is no surprise that the 2008 first quarter Managing Partner Confidence Index, released this week by Citi Private Bank Law Firm Group, depicts a gloomy outlook on the economy’s impact on law firms. This is the fifth index released by Citi Private Bank, and it marks the first time that managing partners were, on average, more negative than positive in their responses. Dozens of U.S. managing partners participate in the survey, and this quarter, U.K. managing partners were also included for the first time.
We had posted previously on this blog results from several managing partner surveys, including the last one from Citi Private Bank, The American Lawyer, and Legal Times. There appears to be a general consensus that a weak 2008 will bring fewer equity partner promotions, longer hours, and higher rates.
With the release of the just-published 2008 Diversity Scorecard, it’s worth taking a look at some of the “diversity news,” that has floated through the blogosphere recently. Most important is the recent Call to Action Summit, attended by more than 100 general counsel from Fortune 500 companies and managing partners of U.S. law firms. The purpose of the conference was to come up with specific ways to improve diversity in the legal profession. In moving more aggressively toward specific goals, Call To Action is attempting to address a growing problem. Last year, for example, women made up less than 33% of lawyers employed in the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Blacks made up less than 5%, Asians 2.6% and Hispanics 4.3%.
Prior to the “diversity summit,” New York’s Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom had already made a pledge of $9.6 million to help minorities enter law. According to a story in the New York Law Journal, Skadden will commit the money over the next decade toward an honors program to help City College of New York’s minority students become attorneys. The Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom Honors Program in Legal Studies is set to begin on the 14,000-student Harlem campus this fall. Freshman and sophomores will be recruited for what will eventually involve 100 juniors and seniors in a two-year curriculum of course work and seminars to complement the school's range of undergraduate academic majors.
But of course not all firms are as big and profitable as Skadden. A story that ran recently in The Recorder focused on how one Small Firm Draws In Big Clients With Diversity. That small employment defense firm, Villarreal Hutner, which is women- and minority-owned, has managed to land a variety of Fortune 500 and other large national companies as clients—companies with an interest in diversity. In the less than two years since name partner Lara Villarreal Hutner, who is Mexican-American, launched the firm, has brought in five other attorneys, all women with in-house or big-firm experience.
The Am Law 100, the legal industry's equivalent of the Fortune 500, was released yesterday and it seems everyone has lots to say about those numbers--available, by the way, through the ALM Research Online Store (free to subscribers; $275 for non-subscribers). First of all,The American Lawyer magazine has a variety of stories which look at the 100 from various angles, including:
And now other media have begun to weigh in:
Just think-- we get to go through this again next month when the second half of The Am Law 200 is published!
Just in the last few days, several mega-firms in London have announced pay raises for their associates, according to reports in Legal Week. This story reported that Linklaters, in a "confident move," had raised salaries for junior associates by about 4%. In another story, the London office of Shearman & Sterling was reported to have raised salaries by 7%. And this story,reports that Bird & Bird (number 23 on Legal Weeks' 2008 Top 50 Firms list) raised salarieds by 9%. But the raises at those three firms may not signal the type of salary wars we saw last year here in the U.S. Herbert Smith, which ranked number 40 on the most recent Global 100 list, just instituted a freeze on salaries for 2008, according to this report.
ALM Research is tracking associate salary news in the "Associate Salary Update" spreadsheet, available free to subscribers. If you don't yet have a link to access the Update, contact us at almresearch@alm.com. Non-subscribers may get the link with the purchase of one product.
The corporations at the top of this year’s Fortune 500 aren’t exactly surprising: Wal-Mart, Exxon, Chevron, GM, Conoco Phillips. And the “biggest losers,” as Fortune calls them, are not exactly surprising either. GM managed to make both lists, along with two companies very much enmeshed in the sub-prime crisis—Freddie Mac and Merrill Lynch—the struggling Sprint Nextel, and the “perpetual No. 2 of PC chipmakers,” Advanced Micro Devices.
For quick reference to who counsels these and other companies and organizations, see the ALM Research Store and products such as Big Deals & Big Suits and Corporate Representation (Who Counsels Who).
The 2008 Am Law 100 spreadsheet and data are now available through ALM Research Online. As always, the sortable spreadsheet of America’s highest-grossing law firms contains even more than what you see in print. All the data from the charts published in the May issue of The American Lawyer, as well as contact information for key marketing personnel at the firms.
Speaking of which—The American Lawyer’s main story accompanying the annual rankings asks: Is the Golden Age Over? with the lead-in “Big firms just finished the best five years since we began our records. Now, head count and salaries outpace revenue and rates.” Click here for the story, as well as a number of charts showing changes over the years.
An interesting piece by The Legal Intelligencer notes that lateral movements are rather uncommon in the plaintiffs bar, though very common among defense attorneys. The story also mentions, however, that some law firm leaders said they lateral movement among plaintiffs attorneys do happen but go largely unnoticed by most of the legal community.
Checking our 2007 Lateral Partner Movements spreadsheet, we noted that there were 328 moves recorded among litigators last year. Unfortunately, our data doesn’t track information about which side of the bar these partners practice on, but those in the business might be able to see at a glance what the trends are.
The Deal’s blog, The Dealscape, recently included recently published M&A league tables from data compiler Dealogic, including rankings for legal advisors on global M&A deals. These included a real mix of U.S. and U.K. firms, but the top five spots were occupied by three New York-based firms (Sullivan & Cromwell, Skadden, and Simpson Thacher) and two headquartered in Los Angeles (Latham & Watkins and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher). Other tables included in the same report were for investment bank rankings.
Today at 3:00 p.m. ET, 12:00 PDT, editor in chief of The American Lawyer, Aric Press, will host a 15-minute free webinar to discuss the 2008 Am Law 100, offering insight and analysis about why this year's numbers are so impressive. Register here or by visiting the home page of AmericanLawyer.com (bottom right).
The new 2008 Diversity Scorecard spreadsheet is now available through the ALM Research Online Store. Based on the survey published every spring by the Minority Law Journal, Diversity Scorecard contains detailed information on minority legal staffing levels at law firms in NLJ 250 and Am Law 200 firms. This report also includes supplemental data not published by MLJ, including the number of women attorneys employed at these firms.
Key data points include: number of U.S. citizen attorneys; number of minority attorneys; specific figures for four major ethnic/racial groups ( African-American attorneys, Asian-American attorneys, and Hispanic-American attorneys); figures for other minority attorneys, including Native American and multiracial attorneys; breakdown by partner and non-partner attorneys; number of women attorneys. Note that the methodology for Diversity Scorecard was changed slightly this year. Firms were asked to count only their minority attorneys who are employed in U.S. offices. That number was then divided by the number of attorneys at the firm who are employed in the U.S. The result gives the percentage of a firm's U.S. attorneys who are members of ethnic minorities. Rankings are based on this percentage.
Diversity Scorecard data is available from ALM Research for the following years: 1985, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993, 1997, 1999, 2002—2008.
