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Howrey LLP will employ a novel strategy for some of its first year associates arriving in September that will save the firm money and allow it to both keep the flow of new talent coming in and train the new associates as they go.  It will also allow the firm to forego the deferrals that have raised the ire of many law school graduates and tarnished the once-golden reputations of many of the elite BigLaw firms.

The firm will lower some of its first years' salaries and place less of an emphasis on billable hours.  Instead, the firsties will "spend only one-third of their time in their first year on billable client work. The rest will be spent on pro bono work and training programs," according to the JD Journal.

In its ongoing series on the effects of the economic meltdown on the legal industry, the Legal Intelligencer postulates that many lawyers currently at large, international firms will jump ship and move to smaller, more local firms.

This represents a potential coup for mid-level firms, as they can jump in and recruit come top talent away from the AmLaw 100. 

It's hard to keep business these days, even when the founder of the firm is the father of the client's founder.

That's right, K&L Gates, the firm named for Bill Gates' father (also Bill Gates), has lost its status as a preferred law firm for Microsoft, according to a report in the Seattle Post Intelligencer. 

Everywhere you look these days, it seems like someone's getting busted for running a Ponzi scheme. 

Not to be left out, an internet-based law firm has apparently decided to get in on the action, according to a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Every lawyer knows that a good fee agreement is essential: it helps avoid disagreements between the attorney and client down the line, lists what the fees will and won't cover and clearly defines the parameters of the work to be done on the case.

They can be a chore to set up, though, and it's tough to know exactly how to set them up.  Here, at least, is a cautionary tale showing that there are some types of fee agreements you definitely should not enter into.

The 2009 Am Law 100 is in, and the first line of the report sums it all up rather well:

"Last year was the worst for The Am Law 100 since the early 1990s."

They're talking way early '90s - 1991 to be exact.  And, because of the cutoff date for gathering data for the report, the dismal results don't even fully capture how horrendous the state of BigLaw has become.

Most troubling of all, the report predicts that the worst is yet to come.

San Francisco, CA, April 28, 2009 - To broaden service offerings in the rapidly diversifying intellectual property marketplace, global law firm Morrison & Foerster LLP and Northern California-based Ovidian Group, LLC (Ovidian) announced that they are collaborating to meet client needs. We believe this is the first collaboration of its kind.

Ovidian is a newly launched IP asset management and business advisory firm that provides services to companies, investors and entrepreneurs around the world. Ovidian offers services such as IP portfolio management, strategic IP business consulting, structuring and outsourcing of corporate IP departments, and assistance in dealing with the range of new IP investment firms, brokers and risk management vehicles that have arisen in recent years. Ovidian was established recently by Joseph Siino, a prominent Silicon Valley IP attorney who most recently served as Yahoo!'s senior vice president for global intellectual property. Previously, Mr. Siino built and ran the IP strategy and technology transactions practice group at law firm Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison in San Francisco.