Former JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater has now set the standard for dramatic voluntary departures from employment.
Big Law departures occasionally include a firmwide e-mail, but are rarely glamorous or noteworthy. If you plan on making the talked-about-for-years exit from your Big Law job but do not have access to an inflatable slide or a PA system, you'd better start getting creative.
Traditional legal education assumes that students can figure out, on their own, what is required to do well in law school, but this is an unrealistic expectation for students who have come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Many of these students come to law school without the information, resources and skills necessary to do their best work. Therefore, in order to help them maximize their employment options upon graduation, it is imperative to help them on the front end to excel academically.
Depositions are just about the most deadly boring way to waste a week in the course of seven hours that anyone could think up. There seems to be some rule that they must be held in small, stuffy rooms with tables the size of a Buick Electra that leave 10 inches of push-back room between them and the wall and the witness placed furthest from the door to eliminate any possibility of escape.
If suddenly remembering an important deadline or coming up with a brilliant solution to a thorny problem wakes you up suddenly, you might thank whatever kicked your sleeping brain into gear. Other times, you'd just like it to shut up and let you rest.
The situation sometimes plays out like an awkward date. Two people who know each other fairly well meet in a social setting. They have drinks together and maybe sit down for a meal. Then the check comes to the table. Who should pick up the tab? But these aren’t the early stages of a romantic relationship. It’s what happens when prosecutors and defense attorneys mix in public.
Shakespeare understood hard and unpleasant truths. Effective lawyering requires that we become acquainted with the night. But, to know the dark side does not mean that attorneys, like Iago, inevitably must succumb to it. We don't
need to become hardened lawyers, just clued-in ones.
David F. Levi, dean of Duke Law School writes: The downturn in the legal economy has been hard on many new and young lawyers. They have faced lengthy deferrals and withdrawals of job offers, layoffs, shrinking job prospects and lower salaries. While unwelcome, these new burdens are at least understandable; they reflect the laws of supply and demand at a time when there is simply less legal work to go around. What is not understandable is the surprising amount of criticism heaped upon younger lawyers, offered as if to justify placing a disproportionate share of the economic downturn on their shoulders.
Recently, there's been a flow of upbeat stories about how firms are giving out offers to 100 percent of their summer associates. What's more, firms are announcing that they'll be increasing their summer associate classes for 2011! All terrific news, so why is Vivia Chen not feeling the good vibes?
The American Lawyer reported this year that the percentage of lawyers from racial minority groups practicing at the nation's largest firms decreased in 2009. The decrease in percentage terms was relatively small -- from 13.9 percent to 13.4 percent. But it was significant because it was the first such decrease in the 10-year history of the Am Law "Diversity Scorecard" survey, and because data from the survey combined with other factors suggest cause for more serious concern over the longer term.
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