April 2006 Archives
This post is brought to you from Breckenridge, Colorado, where the temperature is in the 60s in the valley and around 45 at 12,500 feet, people are enjoying one last day of skiing before the resort closes for the season, and a bunch of young lawyers from a Denver firm are in town for a retreat.
That last bit would be why I'm here.
Spotted recently online:
- Produce becomes less nutritious.
- Bruce MacEwen recommends that law firm managers read "The Enthusiastic Employee." He adds, in a comment about how equity is a motivator for employees, "I've often noted that human beings have evolved with an exquisitely tuned sensitivity to inequity and unfairness, and nothing will destroy the motivation of of an enthusiastic employee to go above and beyond the job requirements faster than a whiff of injustice. . . . And how much does it cost you, again, to lose an associate?"
- What's worse than a nail to the head? Twelve nails to the head. That's twelve reasons to stay away from the meth — as though you needed any more.
Update: Retreat was a good time. Saturday included a well-designed and entertaining 'teambuilding' activity not contaminated with some of the trite exercises that tend to pollute conventional corporate 'teambuilding' activities (as one associate put it, "no trust falls!"). We had a nice, casual dinner that night in a beautiful location, and there was plenty of unprogrammed time to visit with each other and enjoy the town. That was far better than the lectures, filling out of forms, and structured discussions about business that constitute some firms' "retreats." I think there's probably more to be gained from the approach my firm chose.
Security expert Bruce Schneier quotes the Wired story on the NSA's wiretapping and data-mining program at AT&T. He also links to Narus, the likely maker of the NSA/AT&T Big-Brother machine, and more detailed discussion at the Daily Kos.
Narus's website says it provides "real-time traffic insight." You don't say. Here's the website for their NarusIntercept suite of equipment and software.
Wow.
The New York Times has an article today, "Debate Revives as 9/11 Dust is Called Fatal." It tells the story of a 34-year old detective who died of a lung malady. The coroner reported, "It is felt with a reasonable degree of medical certainty that the cause of death in this case was directly related to the 9/11 incident." "A reasonable degree of medical certainty," the article notes, is "coroner language for 'as sure as I can be.'"
According to the article, some people suggest that the mix of chemicals in the air after the collapse of the World Trade Center somehow accelerated the development of cancers and other respiratory maladies.
One of our relatives has been diagnosed with lung cancer. She's a non-smoker with no risk factors. So far as we know, she's never lived somewhere with high concentrations of radon, and her two sisters are in good health. But she works in Manhattan and spent a lot of time breathing that post-collapse air. It seems like 2001 was too recent for cancer to develop, but it's the only risk factor that we can come up with.
That sounds like an appropriate post title for Topic Drift, but it's not.
New York Times: Chicken with arsenic? Is that O.K.?
I wouldn't have predicted it, but Apple Computer has released a public beta trial of a dual-boot system tentatively named Boot Camp that can launch Windows XP or Mac OS X on the new Intel-based Macintoshes. It includes Mac-specific drivers for Windows. Of course, you still have to provide your own copy of Windows XP SP2, because Apple isn't going to sell you that.
This means Apple is listening to its customers, especially those "power users" who until now were experimenting with ways to make Windows run on Intel Macs themselves. I don't know if we'll ever see Apple providing technical support for those who want to run Windows on Apple computers, but at least it's interested in providing the capability.
[Via several sources more or less simultaneously, including Blurbomat and Pages in the Ether.]
The Wired GC promises us one client's view on the salaries paid to associates in large law firms in the United States. The GC begins with a question:
But today I’ll end with a question. Why is this news? Why don’t we hear what new MBAs make at Fortune 50 companies? Or new residents at major research hospitals? Or new CPAs at the Big Four (or however many there are left this week)?Do the major legal publications torture managing partners to extract this information? It’s sort of unseemly. Guess how much my new Mercedes convertible cost! Guess how much my new IWC watch cost! Guess how much my new associate cost!
The answer to that question is straightforward enough: Firms quite readily tell law students what first year salaries they pay. They volunteer this information to candidates and to the National Association for Law Placement. Anyone can look at the NALP Directory online (though it might be a bit out of date - for example, it doesn't appear to include the latest salary increases). So, information about starting salaries flows freely. Does the same thing happen at other kinds of businesses? I assume not, but I wouldn't know.
Kevin O'Keefe (who sells blog development services to law firms, among others) refers us to this Times (UK) story on blogging law firms.
Dennis Kennedy muses at Between Lawyers about corporate blogging policies.
Am I the last one to hear that the gargantuan national law firms have raised first-year salaries yet again?
I heard or read somewhere that Irell & Manella started the trend by bumping first-year salaries for the current class to $135,000 per year. (I was vaguely aware that until then the national BigLaw starting salary had been around $125,000.) Not only did a bunch of BigLaw firms follow suit, but some twelve or so New York firms decided to raise the ante by pushing salaries even further, to $145,000.
This weekend, prompted by an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, a few respected voices in the legal blogosphere weighed in on the change. The op-ed suggested that law firms are just adding associates to increase their "leverage" (i.e. net profit from associates that partners get to take home), and that having hired more associates the firms simply assign more associates to work on projects than is necessary. Larry Ribstein's post here seems to play around with that idea a little bit to see if it was tenable, and Ribstein suggests that law firms over-recommend legal services when something else would suffice.
Bruce MacEwen gives Prof. Ribstein's observation a nod, but proceeds to conclude that the WSJ op-ed's theory is still absurd; young associates (unlike their more senior counterparts) just don't make much if any money for firms, and clients won't tolerate firms that churn projects. MacEwen suggests that the high salaries of the premium NYC firms reduce turnover, provide an incentive to work harder, and draw out the highest quality workers. He also suggests some cultural angles to the story. Steve Bainbridge doesn't believe the economic interpretation suggested by the WSJ op-ed, either.
It's all a little through-the-looking-glass from my perspective. Those New York kids would sneer at my salary now and guffaw at what I made in my first year of law practice. But I sure wouldn't trade places with them. I guess the good news is that there are places in law for each of us to do good work. I'm with Gerry Riskin on this:
I said then and I will say it again that salaries alone do not buy you motivation, commitment, drive and the desired peak performance. They buy you compliance with extremely high billable hour targets. I believe the long term winners have to be competitive in their salaries but also must learn how to enhance the satisfaction of both lawyers and the clients they serve.
Supplement: Arnie Herz's two cents on this point are worth a lot more than two cents.
I like Denver, but I start to get a little stir-crazy after a few months in town without a break. One of my college friends' family owns a condo in Dillon, and this weekend six of us gathered there to hang out and relax. It was a very welcome trip. My wife and I got to visit two friends we only get to see about once a year, and two more that we hadn't seen since 2001 (but they've recently moved to the Denver area, so we hope to see them more often).
It was wonderful to get out of town to spend some time with great friends, but there was a cloud on my mood that has intensified since we returned to Denver.
For the last couple of years, the mother of one of my wife's students has been living with an aggressive form of lymphoma. On Friday night, she died. I only met her a few times, but I've come to know her, her husband, and their two children a bit through stories related by my wife and through their telling of their own story on their blog (I'm omitting a link since it isn't really meant to be a public blog). I've had lots of feelings about this transition and about the rest of their journey over the last year or so, and I know I've been learning something important about humanity from them, but at the moment I can't put any of it into words.
