Recently in Firm Life Category

They painted an enticing picture.  The law firm equivalent of blue-water beaches or endless rolling hills.  But here, the picture offered job security, leadership opportunity, hefty compensation, and maybe a corner office.  Ah, to make partner.

But for hardworking associates in the mix the question may arise, is the pinnacle of 'making partner' still the ultimate be-all end-all  goal?  Surprisingly, or maybe not at all, it depends.

Before applying to law school everyone tried to scare you about the LSAT. And then you took it.  Before starting law school everyone tried to scare you about the Socratic method.  And then you experienced it.  Before your first law job everyone is trying to scare you about the billable hour.  And now...

Well, now the model might be on the verge of changing.

The post title says what you need to know about our favorite stories this week.  Read on for more:

The Big Story of the Week

• The New York Times had a feature on the current challenges faced by BigLaw firms, with White & Case as the star.

How's Your Career This Week?

• Free podcast! About job-hunting! The ABA Journal has details.
• Here's the Texan take on the state of the law job market, courtesy of the Austin American-Statesman.
• Career options: the National Law Journal reminds you that your military is hiring lawyers.

Learning From the Best

• The case for BLS: Above the Law says that at Brooklyn Law School, you can learn from a real-life mob lawyer! How are these things not factored into the U.S. News Rankings?
• Also worth a read: the Village Voice piece that spawned the ATL story. Only in New York, indeed.

Over at Law21, Jordan Furlong has composed an elegy of sorts for the oft-scorned term "work-life balance." He suggests that, though the work-life balance movement was already receiving considerable criticism, the concept as such is a dead letter in the modern law firm, undone by an economy that requires would-be associates to accept pretty much any terms of employment that a firm is willing to offer. The debate ends when associates lack the leverage to make any demands at all of their employers.

To be sure, not everyone has received Furlong's message that the debate is, at the very least, back-burnered in the current recession. As noted here and elsewhere in the past few weeks, Gen Y-ers and Boomers, in the personae of Adrian Dayton and Scott Greenfield, have been engaging in an online slam-fest over why partners don't get Gen Y, how Gen Y is full of "slackoisie," the evils of old-school requirements like face time, and the partners' prerogative to use associates as profit centers.

You might see some old stories and recurring themes popping up in this week's links. What can we say? The great themes never change, and some discussions just have to keep on going and going...

Work Life: Everyone Is Still Unhappy

• Semantic Drift needs you to understand just how much effort is required for a 2L to land a summer gig this year.
• Above the Law expounds on Curtis Mallet's odd attempt at humor in explaining its business-casual dress code.
• The National Law Journal reports that would-be public interest lawyers are annoyed that so many deferred BigLaw associates, armed with firm-subsidized salaries, are taking their jobs. Who saw that coming?
• Generational debates never get old, and they never change: the young people today are always ruining it. Defending People has the latest entry in a Boomer/Gen Y dispute that we originally linked to two weeks ago.

Law School: Everyone Still Cheats

• Want to go to a public law school in Illinois? Get yourself a connection, as at least one would-be UI student did, according to TaxProf Blog.

Last week brought a flurry of legal-blog postings about a new (and Greedy-sounding) book by an attorney/author who goes by "ZZ."  China High: My Fast Times in the 010: A Beijing Memoir is ZZ's memoir of living large in Beijing in the early 2000s, indulging in a no-holds-barred sex-and-drugs lifestyle after being posted to Sidley Austin's Beijing office.  It may be a coming-of-age story, a fascinating expose of modern China, and a cautionary tale about the horrors of the Chinese prison system (where ZZ apparently has a brief stay during the course of the story), but what we really want from this book is a sort of combination career/travel guide for the aspiring international associate.

We admit that we have not read China High yet, but, in true blogger fashion, we are willing to speculate wildly based on whatever meta-information we can glean from the internet, which in this case means book reviews from Bloomberg and the Far Eastern Economic Review.  Here, then, are the questions we would be most interested in if we were actually sitting down to read China High:

OK, that's not true.  In fact, we calculate that at least 72% of these links do not relate to the Supreme Court in any way.  You're welcome.

Firm Life: Win Some, Lose Some

• It was just another superhero Friday in the life of The Namby Pamby.
• Texas firms are definitely cutting the summer entertainment budget, notes Texas Lawyer.
• Good news for some laid-off associates at Mayer Brown, for whom, JD Journal reports, the firm found in-house placements with clients.
• Bad news, though, for some not-laid-off associates at Mayer Brown's Chicago office, where Above the Law reported a swine flu appearance.  (Not that we wish to fuel the swine-flu hysteria.  Here, as a counterweight to this scare item, is the CDC's H1N1 infection stats page.  We're lawyers, not doctors, but those death numbers do not look scary-big to us.)
  

Law School: What Is It Good For?

The ABA Journal is really on top of the law-school beat this week:

• In its Question of the Week, it asks lawyers: if you had it to do over, would you still go to law school?
• Then it notes that law school grads apparently have no clue about the business of law.  Shocking!

What's the first thing you did at the office this morning?

Before checking any e-mail, before starting the billing clock, you probably kicked off your day by procuring a nice mug or cup of a coffee-based beverage.  Maybe your firm still has plenty of good, free stuff on hand.  But maybe they've used the recession as an excuse to cut back, or maybe you've gotten yourself firmly into an espresso-based-beverage habit.  In which case you're making a daily stop at a coffee shop or kiosk to get a little latte or cappuccino love.

If that's your game, then get ready for a new coffee war.  Venerable fast-food purveyor McDonald's is now touting its McCafe coffees, which are apparently aimed squarely at Starbucks: cappuccinos, lattes, and mochas will soon grace the menu of a Mickey D's near you.

But should you ditch your current coffeehouse of choice and begin getting your A.M. fix at McDonald's?  The good news is that, out here on the internet, someone's already got a pretty well-formed opinion to share, and at Greedy Associates, we have an absolute obligation to call to your attention any significant developments in this most important daily work ritual.

There's a little something for everyone in this week's links.  Just find the heading that best describes you, follow the links, and learn:

Summer Associates

• Lawyerist says the summer program is on its way out.
• The WSJ Law Blog thinks it's about time summer programs stopped being fun.  In other news, the WSJ has never been a big fan of fun.

Junior Associates

• Old lawyers and young lawyers gleefully overgeneralize about each other in a panel discussion.  (WSJ Law Blog)
• Time, like everyone else, can't quite believe how much a new BigLaw associate can make for not coming to work.
• E-mail gaffes you don't hear about every day: according to Above the Law, this first-year associate actually meant to reply-all when he decided to call out a firm partner over his choice of legal causes.  In a supposedly unrelated development, said associate is fired the next day.

Sartorially-Challenged Associates

The ABA Journal reports on two sides of the courtroom-fashion coin:

The week ends, as usual, with a sampling of links, presented today with no general organizing principle.  You'll have to find the meaning in all this on your own:

• Leading off, a reminder of what you should be doing right now instead of screwing around on the internet: getting yourself named Illinois Young Lawyer of the Year, like this second-year at Winston & Strawn.  There is public service work to be performed, people.  Let's get right on it.
• In case you weren't clear on the concept, the NYT reminds you that Justice Antonin Scalia is always good for a colorful quote.  (You might call him the Supreme Court's own . . .  glitteratus, I think.)
• Legal Blog Watch has this week's career alternative: supplement that marginally-useful J.D. with . . . a nursing degree?  I did not see that coming.
• Greed Goes Global: The Am Law Daily's headline is all the explanation this link needs.
  
• USA Today reports on the persistence (and non-dischargeability) of student loan debt.  Take heart, though: at least your federal loan debt will be cancelled when you die.