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Howard Rice Delays Several Associates' Start Date by a Year
The Recorder
July 01, 2008
With too little litigation work to support all of its next associate class, San Francisco's Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady, Falk & Rabkin has asked three incoming litigation associates to defer their start date by a year.
Hiring partner Jonathan Hughes confirmed the news, first reported by the Above the Law blog on Monday.
"The place we have some softness, in the amount of work, is for the most junior litigation associates," Hughes told The Recorder.
First-years at the firm are paid $160,000. Hughes said the firm had made offers to eight first-year associates, seven of them litigation associates and one a business attorney. Those who won't be starting at Howard Rice in September will get an undisclosed stipend and help in securing positions in public interest organizations that the firm has close relationships with, such as the ACLU of Northern California, Hughes said.
He insisted the decision was not a cost-cutting measure but a new policy that will ensure that all lawyers at the firm are busy.
He noted that the recruiting done for the fall 2008 class has taken place over a three- to four-year period, and that the cropping up of clerkship and fellowship opportunities can make it difficult to anticipate how many people the firm will need.
"This is not an expense issue. ... This decision is to respond to the amount of work that our most junior litigation associates will have in the fall," Hughes said. "What we're confronting here is a fairly significant influx of litigation associates, and we certainly don't have the influx of work to accommodate them."
The firm offered similar reasoning last fall when it cut about 20 nonlawyer staff. At the time, executive director Michelle Johnson said: "We had too many people for the functions that were required for the law firm for 2007. No matter what prism I looked through, we just needed a reduction."
Since then, at least six partners, many of them longtime Howard Rice fixtures, have left. The firm, which had about 140 lawyers in 2002, now counts 110.
Los Angeles legal recruiter Peter Ocko said that firms are more flexible about their start days these days and calls it a temporary sign of the times.
"They would rather be in a position to keep the associates within the office busy, satisfied and productive as opposed to having too many people there and risk harming a firm dynamic," he said, though he added that there's a big difference between starting in October and starting next September. "While these types of moves are not ideal, they also prevent the potential for an even more uncomfortable situation."
Abovethelaw.com has previously reported that DLA Piper instituted a nationwide start date of Oct. 1 and that some other firms have delayed start dates until October or even later. The Recorder reported in March, for example, that Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner was pushing first-year start dates from September to January.
Citing privacy matters, Hughes declined to say how much Howard Rice's stipend would be, or to name the three deferred associates. He said that one of them will actually start in 2010 because they'd already lined up a clerkship beginning in 2009.
There are no guarantees the recent grads will land public-interest jobs or that such positions would cover the entire year being deferred.
"Law firms are not athletic creatures, but everybody expects them to make agile maneuvers in the face of rapidly changing conditions," Ocko said. "For the first time, certain firms are facing some hard decisions that are now getting public scrutiny."
