Lunch Meetings Lead to New Job as Partner After Baby Break

The Recorder

Naomi Gray was an associate at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker when she took maternity leave more than a year ago. Not ready to return to the 2,000 billable-hour grind, she resigned at the end of March. Her return to work this month, to IP litigation firm Harvey Siskind as a partner, came as the result of good contacts and lucky timing. Gray says conversations with Lawrence Siskind, name partner at the six-lawyer firm, began informally over lunch at the start of the year.

TOP JOBS

Pressure Builds for In-House Attorneys

The Connecticut Law Tribune

More work. Lower pay. Less help. That's what in-house lawyers have been dealing with as struggling companies figure out where to tighten the belt financially. "I can say that a majority of people looking to change jobs are doing so because they're overwhelmed" by the workload at their current job, says Elaine Kaiser, managing director of Kaiser Whitney Staffing, speaking about in-house attorneys. And legal recruiters say companies may have to start making changes or risk seeing lawyers burn out or leave.

The Challenge for Women IP Lawyers

The Recorder

Much has been written about how difficult it is for women who practice in the field of intellectual property and, in particular, why the growth trend for women attorneys in this area has not evolved as quickly as in other industries, notes attorney Karineh Khachatourian. But as the president of the Women's Intellectual Property Lawyers Association, she has a different viewpoint, having seen many of the success stories. She shares some of the important networking lessons she's learned so far in her career.

Task-Code Billing: How to Drive Big Law Counsel Insane

Fulton County Daily Report

Cost-conscious Big Law clients want more bang for their buck these days, like the legal fee equivalent of 20 percent more Fritos for free, notes the Snark. One way to get it is through a system called "task-code billing." The Snark is confident this system saves clients some money because it makes the timekeeper self-conscious about everything they do and every second they spend doing it, probably yielding some freebies for clients. Just for fun, the Snark imagines coding some non-work activities.

Survey Shows Large Firms Have Few Women Among Top Rainmakers

The Legal Intelligencer

For the first time this year, the National Association of Women Lawyers asked firms about key rainmakers -- and found very few were women. And according to NAWL's annual survey, in the four years the survey has been conducted there has been very little change in the data on the relatively small numbers of women in leadership positions and on management committees. "The results are astounding, even to those of us familiar with the dynamics of legal business development," NAWL said in a report on the survey.

Commentary: What Lawyers Can Learn From Sisyphus

Texas Lawyer

For having deceived Hades, the Greek god of the Underworld, Sisyphus was condemned to roll a heavy rock uphill, only to witness its descent after each day's labor -- the ultimate expression of the absurd. For lawyers, writes psychotherapist and professional coach James Dolan, it is all too easy to develop a sense of futility and the absurd in a world of seemingly arbitrary judges, unethical opponents, and dishonest parties and partners. Is the solution for frustrated lawyers to stop rolling their rock?

Professor Wants Law Students to Think Before They Tweet

The National Law Journal

Drake University Law School professor Melissa Weresh is on a mission to get law students and young attorneys to think twice about their e-mail, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. New technology has led to a widening gap in the way younger and older generations communicate, and differing opinions on what is professional and appropriate. So Weresh has been holding seminars at Drake and across the country to help young attorneys and would-be attorneys avoid mistakes in their electronic communications.

Progress Proves Elusive for Diversity in the Legal Profession

The National Law Journal

Five years ago, Roderick Palmore wrote "A Call to Action" -- a pledge signed by GCs at some of the country's largest corporations to make diversity a major consideration in their selection of outside counsel. Diversity efforts across the legal profession mushroomed, but real progress has been painfully slow. A sample of diversity advocates, law firm partners, GCs and law school leaders generally agree that the legal profession needs to make deeper, more collective changes to jump-start the stalled diversity movement.

Five Types of Corporate Lawyers Predicted for the Future

The Corporate Counselor

Richard Susskind, the author of "The End of Lawyers?," says that in the future, corporate attorneys who embrace emerging technologies and novel ways of sourcing legal work will continue to be successful, while those unwilling to change will struggle to survive. Susskind predicts that there will be five types of lawyers in the future: expert trusted advisers and enhanced practitioners, who will look much like contemporary lawyers, to be joined by legal knowledge engineers, legal risk managers and legal hybrids.

A Common Trait Among Lawyers? Talking Too Much

Fulton County Daily Report

Lawyers are a diverse bunch, but one thing they all seem to have in common is a love for the sound of their own voices, writes The Snark. This is not just a Big Law thing -- it's a lawyer thing. Lawyers especially love meetings where they get paid to share their wisdom with clients and colleagues in six-minute increments. But don't think that lawyers stay quiet at nonbillable meetings. Wondering if you have this problem? The Snark provides a short test to see if your love for talking is hurting others.

Commentary: Lawyers Should Be Recruited Like Doctors

The American Lawyer

The current oversupply of new associates has sent law firms scrambling to implement short-term adjustments, such as secondments and deferrals. But the legal profession needs more than temporary half-measures, writes Harvard Law School's Ashish Nanda. The new-associate recruitment market is fundamentally broken, he says, and it has been for some time. The market needs a structural fix -- a centralized matching authority, like the one that the medical profession has been using for more than half a century.