The Shark

news! Orrick does like it said it would!

[Brian]

Some Shark readers may not regularly read Above The Law. Damn popular blog, yeah, but some days it’s also liable to scare you right out of your chosen profession. So if you missed it, bloggers there found it remarkable that, after announcing it would defer on-campus recruiting until mid-November, Orrick has started posting recruiting ads, right on time.

So much for all those whiners who say the media only reports when things go wrong. Read about Orrick’s return to campuses here.

Brian is a Cal Law editor.

ALERT, job available: internship opportunity with the ACLU in california.

[petra]

Don’t know what you’re doing next summer?

The ACLU of Southern California is accepting applications from law students interested in national security and immigrant rights litigation for its 2010 summer internship.

The ACLU office has nine lawyers total and brings in 15 to 20 interns each summer for a variety of cases.

Right now, attorney Ahilan Arulanantham, who directs the national security and immigrant rights projects, is looking for four to five candidates. He has a preference for second-years, but says he routinely hires first-years. Interns work closely with lawyers on cases.

“We’re relatively resource-poor; the people here tend to be the primary attorney in charge of a case,” he said. “The interns work directly with somebody who plays a big role in it.”

Last summer, for instance, an intern joined in on settlement negotiations with the government in a federal litigation challenging the conditions at an immigration detention center. Another intern, who was fluent in Farsi, worked on a criminal terrorism case, Arulanantham said.

Interns can be paid a modest stipend of up to $800, though Arulanantham says ACLU has only offered pay when a student had no other source of funding. Now, he said, most students get funding through their law school public interest programs.

Petra is a Cal Law reporter.

would you like fries with that? the disconnect between career services and students.

[dennis]

Law Week reports that things are bleak in Colorado:

In 2009, more people passed the July Colorado bar exam than in any other year this decade. But the boom in the number of new lawyers is happening during a bust in the job market.

About 35 percent of the University of Colorado School of Law’s class of 2009 had jobs at graduation, down from 55 percent the year before.

The school’s Career Office is probably embarrassed; good thing that it does not view itself as a placement office:

“I think that we have out of necessity had to rethink our role in career development,” said SuSaNi Harris, assistant dean for CU law school’s Office of Career Development.

Most law schools no longer have traditional “placement offices” that line students up with jobs, she said.

“We got away from that because no office is staffed to place, one by one, each of their students. But what we’re exploring here is sort of a pseudo-placement effort.”

Details are in development.

There is an expectation gap at many law schools: law students expect job placement, law school career offices expect only to provide job hunting skills.

Students tune out when they hear that the Career Office doesn’t offer anything more than resume critiques and a mock interview. I think that the majority of law students had some form of interviewing experience during undergrad (or during their previous careers) so the services offered by the Career Offices are pretty useless.

A student at my coworker’s law school was told by her career office that her grades were so bad that she should not bother with OCI. She was told that she shouldn't even go for practice because she was unemployable.

The student was so offended that she contacted the OCI employers, arranged her own interviews, and scored a job. She then returned to the career office and told them exactly what she thought about them.

But most students don’t approach the career office and say, “Hey, you are useless!” – they simply ignore the office.

Read Dennis's tale of woe and ineptitude regarding an interaction with his career services department, after the jump.

drexel dean "stoked" on recent bar exam showing.

[cynthia]

When Drexel opened a law school in 2006, the climate of the legal industry was much different than it is today. (How you like them obvious apples?) 

Back then, pressure from other schools and its own student body, who asked in the student newspaper, "what's taken you so long?" pushed Drexel over the edge into joining the ever-growing ranks of institutions looking to parlay undergraduate program success into a creation of a law school.

Of course, with a 2006 inaugural class, Drexel was right in the line of fire when the legal industry collapsed this year. More pressure was on for the school to produce prepared graduates, or, in a word, graduates who could pass the bar exam and put their best foot forward.

And amidst all that pressure, Drexel showed up. Or, its students did. The Legal Intelligencer is reporting that 90% of Drexel law grads passed the Pennsylvania bar exam in July. That pass rate was surpassed by only two other schools in the region: Temple and University of Pennsylvania. A resounding success for a baby school, one might say.

"It's particularly important in this job market to get students to pass the bar the first time through because it makes the job search" for places like small firms or government positions, where bar passage is often required, all the easier, Dean Roger Dennis said.

Dennis attributed this success to the school's focus on bar exam passage: the school has an in-house writing specialist to assist studying students, and a director of academic skills who triages with students who are showing signs of struggling and might be "in jeopardy of failing the bar."

our favorite stanford-educated hooker, sentenced to house arrest. time to telecommute?

[dennis]

My tax professor breaks our class time up by sharing current-events pieces that he calls “Tax Stories.”

And he certainly started the week off with a bang – “Let me remind you that illegal income is taxable. There’s a Stanford law graduate named Cristina Warthen who failed to report the income she earned as a high-end call girl.”

That certainly woke us up.

Silicon Valley’s Mercury News reports that Warthen was sentenced last week to home detention after she pleaded guilty to failing to pay taxes on more than $133,000 she earned as a prostitute in 2003.

Warthen gained notoriety when she was busted as a jet-setting call girl who sold her services to pay off her Stanford Law School debts. She got her law degree from Stanford in May 2001, but quickly began to run a steamy Web site with offers to jet off for liaisons with clients in cities around the country, including New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

According to East Bay News, the salary she earned as prostitute was a little better than many Big Law attorneys can command:

The 31-year-old alum allegedly boasted in an Internet posting that she paid off more than $300,000 in student loans by working as an escort. [Warthen's] Web site listed a rate of up to $1,300 for two hours of work.

Cha-ching!

Things only got better for Mrs. Warthen after her high-income year in 2003. The next year she married Ask Jeeves cofounder David Warthen. She also became a model and (according to some websites) posed for magazines including Maxim and Playboy Lingerie. There really is no end to what you can do with a law degree!

Her website (not school safe) suggests that she plans to go on tour, after her home detention of course.

Read more here. Or, check out a link to the complaint over at ATL.

summer associates like the idea of keeping their jobs.

[cynthia]

If you haven't checked out the massive number crunching that's going on over at Law Shucks, you probably should.

The blog uses compiled layoff data (the Layoff Tracker) to chart the decline of the legal industry in a graphical way that's easy for everyone who is doped up on Xanax to understand.

Couple the tracker with the summer associate survey results from our sister publication The American Lawyer, and you've got an easy way to back up the following general statement: summers are happy to be at firms that haven't done layoffs. 

I've borrowed a few screencaps to show you below, but be sure to check out the full post here.

The top 10 firms according to summer associate satisfaction, of which only two have done attorney layoffs:

And the top 10 firms according to Law Shucks' layoff data, contrasted with their ranking among summers:

We here at The Shark will have more from the American Lawyer Summer Associates Survey throughout this week.

deferral extension season: indefinite winter?

[cynthia]

I've been working on updating the 2009 start date deferral table (not to be confused with the 2010 table) with all of the recent outpouring of info on start date deferral extensions and offer revocations. 

A lot of firms are pushing would-be associates back even more (we're now at, like, full body's length, rather than just arm's length). Some notables: Arent Fox, Chadbourne & Parke, Baker & McKenzie... the list goes on. 

Check out the table, which I'll endeavor to keep updated for as long as this "season" lasts. Please also email me with any updates, corrections, or thoughts of your own.

Chins up.

skadden offer day: comes and goes.

[cynthia]

In case you didn't notice, yesterday was Skadden Offer Day. The firm, responding to changes in OCI schedules at schools across the country, issued all of its offers in one day, regardless of office or campus.

I was skeptical of this tactic, and thought I smelled a ploy to get students to accept other offers, therefore limiting the Skadden pool to accommodate its shrinking summer class sizes.

So how'd Skadden Offer Day go, anyway? The AmLaw Daily reports: 

"...the firm says it is happy with the results. In fact, fewer 2Ls than usual turned down Skadden offers because they had already committed to another firm, says Howard Ellin, Skadden's hiring partner.

The firm managed to just barely escape losing all of the top law school talent to other firms, by carefully scheduling the offer day.

"Industry guidelines mandate that firms give candidates 45 days to decide whether to accept an offer. For an offer to have expired before Skadden Offer Day, a firm would have had to extend the offer in early August--before on-campus interviewing started at most schools."

Well played, Skadden. You scheduled your big holiday early enough to manage to hold on to the T14 kids, but late enough to ditch the more mediocre talent that snapped up the first offer made! You laugh in the face of death, don't you?

webinars for the deferred. you've got a lot of time on your hands, don't you?

[cynthia]

The AmLaw Daily is reporting that NALP and The Association of Pro Bono Counsel have produced a new webinar for deferred associates interested in picking up public interest fellowship work. 

"Public Interest Perspectives — An Introductory Training for Private Attorneys in Public Interest Placements" helps train biglaw refugees on the differences between firm jobs and working for organizations, to make the transition smoother for everyone involved. 

"We're working hard to make deferred associates' time at public interest placements as rewarding as it can be, so that they and their firms will see the value of time spent doing public interest work," says Vigil. "We're hoping to take them from zero to hero as quickly as possible," said Baker & McKenzie's director of pro bono Angela Vigil.

(No mention by Vigil of how many heroes they're looking to create - Baker has still not revealed its plans for hiring to its deferred associates, causing rumors of revoked offers to fly.)

The webinar is available publicly here so you, too, can learn how to parlay your biglaw dreams into an illustrious pro bono career. I'm sure the firms aren't praying you'll never try to come back or anything.

why are T2 and T3 schools so good at training judicial clerks?

[cynthia]

Earlier this week, US News released a list of top clerkship feeder schools. I came across it this morning, and I have to be honest with you. A couple of things made me go "Hmmm."

Here's the top 15 (and here):

		Percent employed in all judicial clerkships	Percent employed in a judicial clerkship by an Article III federal judge
Yale University  New Haven, CT		41.4%	37.0%
University of North Dakota Grand Forks, ND		28.0%	25.0%
Stanford University  Stanford, CA		24.0%	23.0%
Harvard University  Cambridge, MA		20.6%	18.2%
University of Wyoming Laramie, WY		19.0%	16.7%
University of St. Thomas Minneapolis, MN		17.0%	16.0%
University of Michigan--Ann Arbor  Ann Arbor, MI		14.2%	14.0%
Brigham Young University (Clark)  Provo, UT		14.0%	14.0%
University of Maine  Portland, ME		13.0%	13.0%
University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA		13.6%	12.5%
New England School of Law Boston, MA		12.5%	12.5%
Duke University  Durham, NC		13.5%	11.7%
University of Texas--Austin Austin, TX		15.0%	11.0%
Cornell University  Ithaca, NY		15.0%	11.0%
Western New England College Springfield, MA		11.0%	11.0%

Does anything seem weird about this list?

I know that there has been news of incorrectly reported/tabulated data (with the schools blaming US News and US News apparently not altering its list), but the news from University of North Dakota and Western New England College that their data is not accurately represented does not really seem to account for the overwhelming presence of Tier 2 and Tier 3 schools. Neither does anything else I can think of, like "small class sizes at T3 schools" or "loyalty of fly-over state court judges to their local regional schools." Maybe a perfect storm of all of those things? Or maybe something else?

After consulting both other people who should know and Underneath Their Robes, I still have no answers. 

Share your theories, or insight, with me in the comments section.