ALMResearchBlog

Survey: Few Companies Tightening Controls To Prevent FCPA Violations

A Deloitte Financial Advisory Services survey of 620 financial services, telecommunications and manufacturing executives found that only 32% say they are enhancing their internal procedures to prevent Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations, despite heightened government enforcement. The survey results were reported by National Law Journal. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) imposes criminal penalties on companies or individuals who do business in the U.S. who offer a bribe, pay one or authorize one to a foreign government official for business gain. According to NLJ, 30.3% of respondents believed FCPA violations were most likely to arise in citing agent or consulting relationships; 28.4% felt that foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies were most at risk; and 21.8% named strategic alliance partnerships as risk-prone.

Laterals: The Ones That Get Away

In contrast to the recruiting of inexperienced law students, few firms work as hard to develop a system for recruiting lateral talent, according to a recent article in National Law Journal. (See also commentary by Bob Ambrogi on Legal Blog Watch.) Too often, poor communication, bureaucratic processes, disorganization and misinformation thwart even the best firms' efforts. Stacey Humphries offers a compilation of anecdotes drawn from actual incidents as a 10-step how-not-to guide on lateral recruiting.

For data about successful lateral partner moves, the ALM Research Store  offers a compilation of information that includes names of partners and their practice specialty, the organization moved to and from, and the date of the move. The 2008 Lateral Partner Moves spreadsheet is updated monthly and non-subscribers who purchase the spreadsheet receive a link for the monthly update. Historical data is available also for 2000 to 2007.

Survey: Firms Improve Diversity Efforts In Response to GC Pressure

A new survey from Altman Weil, and reported in the Daily Report says that under increasing pressure from general counsel to diversify their personnel, law firms are making some progress. Altman Weil canvassed the firms in the The Am Law 200. Of the 80 respondents, 58% have a designated diversity manager or director, up 8 percentage points from 2007 and 13 percentage points from 2005, the first year the survey was conducted. Also, the survey found that 100% of participants report having a diversity committee in their firm, up from 96% from the previous year. One area of concern, according Altman Weil, is that those diversity directors are increasingly not full time on the job but often are practicing attorneys with billable-hour requirements. The number of diversity managers who work full time in the position is down from 61% in 2007 to 53% in 2008.

How diverse are these biglaw firms? See the recently published Diversity Scorecard, available in searchable spreadsheet form from ALM Research Online for the years 2001 through 2008. Data from previous years (starting in 1984) is available to subscribers only.

Allen & Overy Has Best Law Firm Website, According to Poll

London based “magic circle” firm Allen & Overy is the U.K. law firm with the website most likely to win business, according to the 7^th annual Intendance Fast 50 survey and reported recently by Legal Week. The study rates the websites of the 50 fastest-growing U.K. law firms on criteria including content, usability, design and marketing potential. Nabarro topped the marketing category for its strong branding, while Mishcon de Reya was deemed to have the most user-friendly website, allowing users to access many different types of information from a single page. Freeth Cartwright offered the most depth of content, while A&O’s site was judged to have the best design as well as claiming top spot overall

IP Survey: U.S., U.K., Germany Ranked Highest For Protection

European firm Taylor Wessing recently compiled its inaugural Global Intellectual Property Index, using a statistical analysis to rank jurisdictions in terms of patent, trademarks and copyright protections. As reported in National Law Journal, the GIPI ranked 22 countries and economies on their intellectual property protection and enforcement records, with the United States, United Kingdom and Germany garnering the highest scores. The rankings were based on responses to an online questionnaire and a range of factors affecting the intellectual property climate, including: the number of specialized intellectual property judges and lawyers relative to the population, the number of patent or trademark filings and the number of patents and trademarks granted and active. The online survey tallied assessments of 9,333 patent jurisdictions from 341 CEOs, intellectual property lawyers, in-house counsel and law firm partners.

Law Firm GCs Earning More—But Is The Position Here To Stay?

These two stories made an interesting juxtaposition, as they appeared within days of each other. On the one hand, we learned that Law Firm GCs Are Earning More. The report of an Altman Weil survey appeared in Legal Times and noted that general counsel at top law firms have seen a significant pay hike over the last year, with the average full-time general counsel at Am Law 200 law firms earning more than $750,000 in 2007. Those lawyers who worked in the law firm GC role part-time saw a 9 percent increase from 2006, raising their compensation to about $665,000 a year. Altman Weil also found that 85% of responding firms have a designated general counsel, the same percentage as in 2006.

And then came this story from The American Lawyer: Shearman Eliminates General Counsel Post. Shearman & Sterling, ranked 19^th in this year’s Am Law 100, has eliminated the job of its full-time general counsel, John Shutkin, in 2004 from KPMG International, where he had been general counsel for five years. Shutkin was one of the few law firm GCs brought in from outside the law firm world, part of a wave of hirings of in-house lawyers at that time. Though a Shearman spokesperson was quoted as saying they were “restructuring” and “returning to the more traditional structure of partner oversight over risk management,” the article also noted that the move seemed to go against the grain of the business model most large firms had adopted.

More on Business Development

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.

More on The Am Law 100

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.

Survey: Managing Partners’ Gloomy Outlook

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.

Diversity in Law Firms: News Round-Up

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.

Just Released: The Am Law 100

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.

Just Released: 2008 Diversity Scorecard

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.

Survey: GCs Like Their Job, Plan to Hire More In-House Help

According to a recent survey report by the Association of Corporate Counsel, 85% of chief legal officers and general counsel find their careers rewarding, despite increased corporate governance demands and sometimes tense relationships with independent auditors. A report of the eighth annual survey of CLOs and GCs by ACA,  appeared in National Law Journal, which noted that nearly a third of the respondents expected to add staff over the next year and that records management would be an emerging issue for in-house attorneys this year. NLJ also reported that, while 59% of CLOs and general counsel revealed that increased monitoring by law enforcement and regulators had only a modest influence on their career satisfaction, 30.6% said it would make a "considerable impact" on their future decisions, such as looking for a new CLO job or retiring.

Our Web Site: New Design, New Features

It is my pleasure to announce to you the launch of the newly designed ALM Research Online website. The substance of the site, including our reports, search functions, and continuously updated law firm data, will be the same or even better than when you last visited. The design however, has been changed with a mind towards a fresher, cleaner look and a more user friendly experience. Some new functionality has been added including the ability to download past years’ surveys directly from the site. You'll no longer need to call and request them--unless you'd just like to chat.

I'd also like to encourage you to take advantage of some of the enhancements added within the last six months, including:

• Associate salary spreadsheet updated frequently.
• Staffing Notes spreadsheet to trace branch office openings and closings and significant staffing shifts.
• Corporate representation and lateral partner data continue to be collected from an ever-expanding universe of sources.

The new homepage includes a direct link to Law.com Quest--our newly launched search engine, which targets only legal content. And coming soon: the Legal Week 50-from our new partners across the pond at Legal Week. This relationship will continue to give our database a more global perspective moving forward.

I'll be scheduling webinars to go through the new site, so stay tuned. Feel free to email me: clowry@alm.com.

AmLaw 100: Just Weeks Away

The 2008 Am Law 100 will be available May 1st. The report of the 100 highest-grossing law firms in the U.S. appears in the May issue of The American Lawyer, and simultaneously, the data and a spreadsheet product with the data will be available from ALM Research Online for subscribers.

Non-subscribers may order ahead of time through ALM Research and save $200 on the full Am Law 200 spreadsheet. Purchasers will receive a special discount code to use when purchasing the Am Law 200, which will be published and available June 1st.

Survey: Minority Attorneys More Satisfied at Large Firms

According to a survey by the Cuban American Bar Association, and reported in Small Firm Business, minority attorneys at larger law firms are more satisfied than lawyers at smaller firms. The survey's goal was to identify which firms have greater success with diversity. One Holland & Knight partner, according to the report, said that some large firms have diversity ingrained in their cultures through committees and formal retention and recruiting policies, whereas promoting diversity in a smaller firm isn't as precise a science as with a big firm.

Law Schools: Recruiting

According to a report April 14 from the National Law Journal Columbia Law School landed in the No.1 spot again as the school that sent the greatest portion of graduates to NLJ 250 law firms, with nearly 75 percent of its students in 2007 taking jobs among the nation's largest law firms. Last year, 69.6% of its graduates went to NLJ 250 law firms. All told, the top 20 law schools that NLJ 250 law firms relied on most to fill their first-year associate ranks sent 54.9% of their graduates to those firms, compared with 51.6% in 2006.

Data from this survey report is available from ALM Research Online. Called the 2007 Law School Hiring Survey , the data is presented in spreadsheet format and includes the law firm, schools from which they hired associates, and the number hired from each school. In addition, this product includes the number of associates promoted to partner in 2007 at each participating law firm. Years available for purchase (or free download by subscribers) are 2006 and 2007.

Firm Financials: Report from Atlanta

Each year ALM Media’s Atlanta-based newspaper, the Fulton County Daily Report publishes a regional version of The Am Law 200, called the Daily Report Dozen —which seems to have expanded to 16 firms this year (listed below). The report focuses on the Atlanta-based office of firms, whether they are based in Georgia or elsewhere. Though one needs a subscription to see the full report—and here is a sample for King & Spalding if you follow the Daily Report’s Blog, you would have access to all reports.

Each report is rather attractively laid out, as well as informative, and includes financials, a short bio of the firm, number of lawyers, lateral hires and losses, significant transactional and litigation work during 2007, office locations and number of lawyers in each, significant clients, and occasional other interesting factoids.

• King & Spalding
• Alston & Bird
• Smith Grambrell
• Fisher Phillips
• Troutman Sanders
• Sutherland Asbill
• Kilpatrick Stockton
• Ogletree Deakins
• McKenna Long & Aldridge
• Womble Carlyle
• Powell Goldstein
• Morris, Manning
• Seyfarth Shaw
• Jones Day
• Hunton & Williams
• Paul Hastings

New Role at Firms? Client Interviewer

Ballard Spahr has hired a veteran journalist, Debra Nussbaum, to be a full-time client interviewer, according to a recent report on the Law Marketing Blog. Nussbaum has more than 30 years of newspaper reporting experience, beginning her career at The Minneapolis Star, then writing about real estate for The Philadelphia Inquirer and about schools for The New York Times. She started in the firm's Philadelphia office in February and is gradually starting to meet with clients for candid interviews in which the clients can talk about what type of service they are getting, any problems that have arisen and what needs to be done better. Nussbaum is not a lawyer herself, but might be accompanied to some of these interviews by lawyers from the firm.

As Larry Bodine of the Law Marketing Blog notes:  Client interviewers are a perfect extension of the marketing function, not a replacement.  Gathering data about clients is what marketing is supposed to be all about. In our recently-completed survey of Law Firm Business Development Practices, over half (56%) of large firm respondents said their firms conduct formal client interviews or satisfaction surveys, and 70% felt that it was a “very” or “extremely” effective strategy for building business. Hey, it just makes common sense to find out if your clients are satisfied with the service they are getting—and if, perhaps, they have more business they’d like to bring your way.

Practice Focus: Bankruptcy Expected to Be Hot

Robert Half Legal’s annual survey of the upcoming year’s hot practice areas was released recently. Lawyers from large firms and legal departments at the top corporations are predicting that bankruptcy will be a very hot practice area in 2008, along with litigation, and ethics and corporate governance.

This jives with our findings in ALM Research’s recently completed report of our survey of Law Firm Business Development Practices, in which the top five practice areas predicted to bring in the most revenue in the coming year were litigation, intellectual property, real estate, bankruptcy/reorganization, and business law. Industries that the majority of respondents predicted would bring in the most revenue in 2008 were finance/insurance/real estate; energy; technology; biotechnology; and health care.

2008 Legal Technology Trends

If you missed Legal Tech in New York last month, Geoffrey G. Gussis has posted on the In-House Blog links to reviews of the conference, and genres of tools, from e-discovery to automated document review.

Related products available via the ALM Research Store include the 2007 In-House Tech Survey, the 2007 AmLaw Tech Survey (law firms), and the Legal Technology Assessment Study, which can be purchased either whole or in parts: Case Management, Client Relationship Management, Document Management, Electronic Discovery, and Online Research.

Surveys: Business Development and Marketing

The ALM Research Survey Report of the 2007 Law Firm Business Development Practices Survey is at the printers and ready for orders. Note that participants will be receiving a free Executive Summary, their own benchmarking information compared to overall results and Tier 1/Tier 2 Firm results, as well as a 20% discount on the full report. You can place your order by clicking here or by contacting Chuck Lowry, the Director of Client Relations.

In the meantime, Suzanne Lowe, author of the Expertise Marketing Blog, is conducting another one-minute survey for her upcoming book. The title of this survey is "How well do Marketing and Business Development work with other operations, like Finance, IT, HR, Legal and more?" You can access the survey site by clicking here.

And Larry Bodine of the Law Marketing Blog has a report of his own survey of how law firms spend their marketing dollars. Bodine says, among other things, that a preponderance of law firms spend 2% of their gross revenues on marketing. We found a similar result in our own survey, which covered budgets and staffing for both business development and marketing efforts, and compensation paid to the senior-most professional who headed these two efforts.

Just Released: 2008 Corporate Scorecard

The 2008 Corporate Scorecard report from The American Lawyer is now available in spreadsheet format online in the ALM Research Online store. This annual report details the performance of law firms with the most active corporate finance and capital markets practices. Firms are ranked on both the number and value of the deals handled in specific transactional areas, including Asset-Backed Securities, Bankruptcy, Equities, High-Yield Debt, Investment-Grade Debt, IPOs, Mergers & Acquisitions, Mortgage-Backed Securities, Municipal Bonds, Private Equity, Project Financing, REIT Debt, and REIT Equities. Contact information is also included for the Marketing Director of each firm listed in the report.

Big Lobbying Practices See a Billion-Dollar Year

D.C.-based newspaper Legal Times has published their annual report on the lobbying industry, including a ranking of the 50 highest-grossing lobbying practices in the U.S. The 2008 Influence 50 rankings show that some of the biggest players in the lobbying world raked in multimillion-dollar increases in fees from public relations, legislative activity monitoring, and grass-roots advocacy, according to Legal Times. The survey, which covers annual income from lobbying work for 2007, also reveals that law firms are continuing to outpace non-law lobbying firms in revenue. Overall, revenue among the Influence 50 was up 11 percent. Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld is No. 1 on the list for the second consecutive year, with $89.8 million in lobbying income. Patton Boggs was a close runner-up, pulling down $89.3 million.

Another Firm is a “Best Place to Work”

Congratulations to another firm, Bingham McCutchen, which was recently named one of the 20 winners in the California’s Best Places to Work survey conducted by the Los Angeles-based Employers Group, a human resources consulting and educational company for California employers. Bingham was selected  in the large company category out of more than 400 entrants. Another firm, Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp won in the medium company category. (Mitchell Silbergerg is not among this year’s NLJ 250, which mean the firms has fewer than 170 lawyers.) Thanks to Larry Bodine for mentioning Bingham’s award; his blog post about it mentions a string of similar awards the firm has won recently.

Salaries: In-House Counsel in Southern California

As mentioned on the Wall St. Journal Law Blog, a survey of 324 members of the Southern California chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel, conducted by First American CoreLogic revealed the following information about their compensation:

• Average 2007 Salary + Bonus for In-House Attorneys: $181,810 + $56,13
• Average 2007 Salary + Bonus for General Counsel: $220,164 + $82,640
• Male vs. Female Pay for In-House Jobs: Men were paid a cash salary of 13% more than women in 2007 (and men hold 60% of general counsel jobs.)
• Private Company vs. Public Company Pay: Counsel at private companies were paid slightly better than their public counterparts in 2007.

Another Best Law Firm To Work For

The Chicago office of Perkins Coie made the list of Chicago’s Best Places to Work, published by Crain’s Chicago Business, and reported on the Law Marketing Blog. The firm has also been named to FORTUNE magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” every year since 2003.

We’ve posted before about this year’s lists of best law firms to work for—click here to read about firms named in FORTUNE’s and Working Mother's annual surveys.

Law School Survey: Students Are Happy, Unprepared For Class, and In Debt

The 2007 Law School Survey of Student Engagement (pdf), conducted and published by Indiana University-Bloomington, found that more than 75% of students rated their law school experiences as “good” or “excellent”; more 20% of 3Ls went to class unprepared; and more than 33% of students will graduate with more than $100,000 in law school loans (reported on the Law Librarian Blog.  The report is based on online surveys completed by 27,000 students at 79 law schools.

Other findings, however, show that: 13% expect to graduate with no debt; those 3Ls who come to class unprepared—64% are working in either legal or non-legal settings; and 49% said they would prefer to work in private firms when they graduate.

More On Laterals: Primary Way To Spur Growth, According To Survey

In our soon-to-be released report of the 2007 Business Development Practices Survey, we found that “lateral hires” was rated the primary strategy for growth; in the previous survey, it had been rated as the second-most important factor leading to growth in a firm’s revenues. After laterals, the next two factors leading to revenue growth were strategic business development efforts, and increasing billing rates. We will have the report in print and ready for distribution by the end of the month. For more information contact head of client relations, Chuck Lowry.

For more information about laterals—specifically, lateral partner moves at large firms— ALM Research Online offers the Lateral Partner Moves spreadsheet. The 2007 spreadsheet is now complete, and the 2008 information is in progress (the information is updated monthly). Included in this product are: the name of the partner; the law firm or organization (and city) left; the law firm or organization (and city) joined; the position left and joined (e.g. Partner or other position, such as General Counsel, or a political or judicial appointment); the partner’s practice area; the month and year of the move, and the source of the information.

Rankings: Public Relations M&A Advisory League Table

The PR firms here are the ones responsible for investor relations and announcing M&A deals of public and private enterprises. The Deal recently published the 2007 M&A Advisory League Table. Joele Frank Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher edged ahead of Kekst & Co. for the No. 1 spot this year.

Law School Surveys: Students There For Money and Influence – But Law School Enrollment Flat

A recent Kaplan survey (December 2007) asked 2,000 potential law school applicants why they want to be lawyers. The conclusion: financial gain and political ambition. (Find the survey and related articles at the Tax Prof Blog and a short article and comments on the Wall St Journal Law Blog. According to the WSJ report, 73% of the survey respondents indicated that they wanted to enter the legal profession because of the high income potential, and 42% would “definitely” or “probably” run for political office in the future.

There was any interesting gender twist to the political ambitions, and this is what most of the school newspapers picking up the story focused on: 52% of males said they had political aspirations, while only 34% of women said the same.

In the meantime, law school enrollment for first-year law students essentially was flat this past fall, with the number of men enrolled falling by 2% and the number of women rising 2.4%, according to the American Bar Association (ABA), and reported by National Law Journal. Total enrollment for students seeking juris doctor degrees rose by 2.9%, from 141,031 to 141,433 students attending the 196 law schools accredited by the ABA. First-year minority students enrolled in juris doctor programs increased 0.9%, but as a percentage of the first-year class, they dropped from 22.4% to 22.3%.