David Lat

Sometimes you need to leave a place for a while to figure out what makes it unique. After two and a half years down in Washington, I’ve just returned to New York, which I consider home. My time away has caused me to notice things I never paid much attention to before. Like the trash. And the smells. (Alert: New York is full of really bad smells! Who knew?)

Coming home has also caused me to think more about the legal cultures of the two cities. What makes someone a New York lawyer rather than a D.C. lawyer? What are the defining characteristics of each?  read more »

Something is different this year. Over eight-top lunches at the Modern and partner dinners at Per Se, there’s a palpable silence between courses. (Thank goodness for BlackBerrys!) Meanwhile, the same question keeps echoing around the corridors of Big Law: Where have all the summer associate scandals gone?

Summer associates—law students who spend their summers “working” at law firms, in between being wined and dined and ferried around Manhattan—are reliable generators of laughs and, periodically, tabloid-worthy gossip.

Of course, most summers—they’re first-name only, sort of like “illegals”—behave themselves and work hard. They don’t want to jeopardize their chances of getting The Offer: an invitation to return to the firm full time, after they finish law school, at a current starting salary of $160,000.  read more »

Whatever happened to Ally McBeal? If recent movies and television shows are any guide, the life of a female lawyer has gotten a lot less pleasant since the carefree, charmingly neurotic days of dancing babies and bathroom kisses. But today’s portrayals may be more accurate, and certainly more critically acclaimed.

Last January, Glenn Close won a Golden Globe for her compelling performance as Patty Hewes, a fearsome and wildly successful plaintiff’s lawyer, on the addictive TV show Damages. The following month, Tilda Swinton snagged an Oscar for stepping into the pumps of Karen Crowder, a hard-charging in-house litigator, in Michael Clayton.  read more »

Here’s a fun game: At the start of the summer, weigh the thousands of summer associates employed by the Am Law 100—the nation’s 100 top-grossing law firms, according to The American Lawyer magazine. Then weigh these thousands of summer associates after their summer programs, before they head back for their final year of law school. The aggregate weight gain represents a decent measure of the economic health of the legal industry (and, by extension, the broader economy).  read more »

In the 1980s sitcom Mr. Belvedere, the mother of the family, Marsha Owens, worked for a time in a shopping-mall law firm called Legal Hut. It seemed like a good gag at the time—a law office that was part of a big chain, located in the quotidian precincts of a shopping mall, basically a business like any other.

But could it really happen here? What if New York’s biggest corporate law firms went public?

At the moment, it’s not allowed: American legal ethics rules prohibit lawyers from sharing fees with nonlawyers. But rules are made to be broken—or, at the very least, amended.  read more »

Where in the world is Carlos Spinelli-Noseda? Nobody seems to know.

Mr. Spinelli-Noseda, a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, was a young and well-regarded partner in Sullivan & Cromwell’s Latin American practice, as well as the firm’s hiring partner. At some point in the past few weeks—it’s not clear exactly when—his staff bio was removed from the firm’s external and internal Web sites. A cached version of his bio was available for a time through Google, but now it, too, has vanished.  read more »

L’Affaire(s) Spitzer may be old news, but New York lawyers won’t stop talking about it. The Harvard Law School graduate and former attorney general left the law for politics when he assumed the governorship, but based on what I’m seeing and hearing in person, in print, and online (a search for “Spitzer” and “prostitute” on a law-blog search engine returns almost 1,000 results), it’s clear that lawyers still harbor a sense of ownership of his disgrace, a feeling that his fall was at least in part “our” scandal.

Why does the Spitzer implosion rankle Big Law lawyers? Of course, there’s the hoary (sorry!) comparison of the learned profession and the oldest profession, but given the particular confluence of these threads in this story, it’s worth a closer look.  read more »

Last week was my worst week ever. Okay, maybe not ever, but definitely my worst week in 2008.

The trouble started on a Tuesday night. Shortly before I entered a bar to meet a friend for drinks, I updated my Facebook status on my BlackBerry, with an opinion about the upcoming Clinton-Obama debate.

As soon as my friend and I parted ways, I immediately whipped out my BlackBerry to check Facebook again. (Yes, I’m one of those people.)  read more »

If the major presidential candidates were top New York law firms, which ones would they be? It’s not an easy question to answer. Unlike their Washington counterparts, which are unsurprisingly more political—e.g., WilmerHale skews leftward, Wiley Rein leans right—New York firms generally lack strong partisan allegiances. This city is driven by transactional work and commercial litigation, which don’t lend themselves to politics as naturally as, say, Supreme Court and appellate litigation. But even law firms have personalities, don’t they?

Hillary Clinton: Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison

Everyone talks about the former first lady and junior senator from New York, but nobody wants to be her. When asked which firm best embodies Mrs. Clinton, the most common response was, “Not mine.” So whose is she?  read more »

In the days leading up to Thursday, Jan. 10, the offices of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft were wracked with anxiety. Something was about to go down at the white-shoe law firm with a knack for attracting both celebrities and bedbugs. But nobody knew what.

The availability of conference rooms at Cadwalader is visible on the firm’s intranet, and observant associates noticed that Mitch Walsh, Cadwalader’s executive director, had reserved an entire floor of conference rooms on that Thursday. Patti Ellis, the firm’s head of Associate Development and Recruitment, had reserved another half-dozen conference rooms for the day.  read more »

We’re barely a week into the new year, and you know what that means: almost 12 whole months without a raise for New York’s most beleaguered six-figurines, Big Law associates. Yet despite the jump to $160,000 a year for first-year grunts (and don’t forget those bonuses, kids!), a culture of complaint—and, sometimes, litigation—was the Big Law zeitgeist for 2007. Whence the whine wars?

As you plan your first dinner party of 2008, we round up this battle’s commanding officers, and consider whether you should have them over.  read more »

Law firm holiday parties aren’t what they used to be. In bygone days, the booze-fueled blasts yielded up tales of M&A lawyers making out with each other in darkened corners, partners dancing drunkenly with paralegals young enough to be their daughters and similarly dubious behavior.

In recent years, however, stories of scandal have become less common. Perhaps guests are more afraid of public embarrassment, now that cellphone photos of carousing legal eagles can be uploaded to the Internet in minutes.  read more »

First things first: Who’s getting what? Well, it seems you don’t have to be a Supreme Court clerk anymore to leave those black robes in the dust.  read more »

So exactly how much did it cost Sullivan & Cromwell to make Aaron Charney go away?  read more »

White-shoe firm welcomes bedbugs, celebrities, and purple-clad man of mystery.  read more »

A big-budget movie about a senior associate, starring George Clooney … who’d have thought?  read more »

Distracted lawyers waste billable hours yakking on Facebook.  read more »

Is the former federal judge and attorney general nominee an advance guard for New Yorkers in the capital?  read more »

Each autumn, Portfolio Boys and Girls descend on New York’s top law firms, applying for jobs as summer associates. Who is this fall’s “It” Firm?  read more »

Big Law escapees—a writer, a baker, a stand-up joke-maker—discuss life on the outside.  read more »

Are the country’s top law firms going the way of the dinosaur?  read more »

Picture a character like Entourage’s Ari Gold or Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko.  read more »

Picture a character like Entourage’s Ari Gold or Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko.  read more »