FIRST CLASS OR COACH?
The leaders of big firms across the country, forced by an invisible hand to bump their associates’ salaries by 20% to 50%, have granted raises to all their associates. Crazy socialists. Then there’s Piper Marbury Rudnick & Wolfe L.L.P. Thinking like rational economic actors, partners at the firm offered 31% raises to venture capital and emerging technology associates, and tossed only 7% crumbs to the rest. The firm decided that pay inequity within the junior ranks was preferable to tightening billable-hour requirements, the path other firms have taken. “It’s almost like these firms are recruiting auto mechanics guaranteeing incentives for this many extra tuneups and brake jobs,” Francis Burch Jr., Piper’s Baltimore-based chairman told Legal Times (a National Law Journal sister publication). “You’ve got to be careful not to turn a law firm into a piecework operation.”
ALIEN-ATED:
Adam Ciralsky claims that he was a victim of ethnic profiling in the Central Intelligence Agency. The 28-year-old lawyer handled terrorism cases until his security clearance was taken away for a supposed susceptibility to recruitment by Israeli intelligence, and he then was fired for undisclosed reasons. A CIA counterintelligence document referred to Mr. Ciralsky’s “rich Jewish friends” and his “wealthy Daddy.” In an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes, he said that his interrogators were interested in his teen-age summer camp stint in Israel but not his summer living in authoritarian China. “They could [not] have cared less whether I was associating with known Communists, but they were incredibly concerned about who sold me a falafel sandwich,” he said.
