Category: News Feeds

If you’re an associate, you’re probably thinking, “What?! As if I have any control over my own schedule!” And you’re right, your ability to manage your time will never be perfect.

I understand. I was an associate myself for seven-plus years. But there are still some actions you can take to improve your use of time and cut out some of the unnecessary stress.

1. When you are given a new assignment, always ask right away what the deadline is. I can’t tell you how many times as an associate I failed to ask this important question because I said to myself, “This will take no time at all, I can do it right away,” only to have a more urgent task land on my desk — and I wished I’d asked upfront instead of begging for more time later on.
2. Many of us lawyers are Type A personalities, and we love that feeling of completing a task and checking it off the “to do” list. But I find the easiest way to prevent procrastinating about the next task is to start it right away. Just get three minutes in, then you can take that coffee or bathroom break. When I’m jumping back into an established rhythm instead of getting my mind around a new project, it’s much easier to get back to work.
3. Believe that there is no such thing as a huge, daunting project. Everything can be broken down into smaller, bite-sized morsels. Take on one mini-project at a time.
4. Put everything on your calendar. I assume I won’t remember anything. I include project deadlines and my to-do list items as 30-minute calendar entries. I have repeating calendar reminders to pay my credit card bills, renew my dog’s license annually… there is nothing in my life not on my calendar because the last thing I want to be stressed about is that I may have forgotten something I need to be stressed about!
5. I also block time for work (and personal) projects on my calendar. Even if I end up changing the start and end times multiple times, it helps me to be able to eyeball my projects for the day, estimate how long they will take, and plan accordingly.
6. Find ways to use your down time productively. What down time? Even law firm associates have down time. Mine often came at 1 a.m. as I was waiting on a senior lawyer to send me the next mark-up. But I was determined to reclaim this time for myself. So what did I do? I started a travel blog. It was a creative outlet I could turn to even at my desk in the middle of the night. So those late nights in the office were not a complete waste in terms of my personal life. I also made a point of having dinner with a work friend almost every night, even if it was for 10 minutes at their desk or mine. If you’re not inclined to start a blog or write a novel or screenplay, use your scarce breaks to update your resume and deal sheet, work on a business plan, keep in touch with contacts (build relationships!). Or research for your next vacation! Have a plan for how you’ll use your free time so it doesn’t go to waste.
7. Whatever your goal may be — hitting the gym a few times a week, putting together a business plan, catching up with one law school classmate each day — establish an accountability partner. It could be a friend, a colleague or even a journal. Keeping track will help keep you honest!
8. If you’re truly feeling underwater, ask for help. Firms are investing more and more into associate life and associate development resources. Even if you’re not comfortable talking with a partner, there is likely someone you can talk with. And you can always reach out to a trusted recruiter to learn what your realistic options might be for a new job offering a better work-life balance.

Making small changes to your daily routines may buy you only a few extra minutes each day at this stage in your career, but these actions will help you build good habits for when you do gradually take on more control of your schedule. I’d love to hear what time management tricks have worked for you!

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Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts from Lateral Link’s team of expert contributors. This post is by Abby Gordon, Senior Director at Lateral Link, who works with attorney candidates on law firm and in-house searches, primarily in Boston, New York, and Europe. Prior to joining Lateral Link, Abby spent seven years as a corporate associate with Cleary Gottlieb, focusing on capital markets transactions for Latin American clients in New York and for the last five years for European clients in Paris. A native of Boston, Abby holds a J.D., cum laude, from Georgetown University Law Center and a B.A. in government and romance languages, magna cum laude, from Dartmouth College. Abby also worked with the International Rescue Committee as a Fulbright Scholar in Madrid, Spain. She is a member of the New York, Massachusetts and Maine Bars and is fluent in French and Spanish (and dabbles in Portuguese and Italian). You can view additional articles by Abby here.

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Lateral Link is one of the top-rated international legal recruiting firms. With over 14 offices worldwide, Lateral Link specializes in placing attorneys at the most prestigious law firms and companies in the world. Managed by former practicing attorneys from top law schools, Lateral Link has a tradition of hiring lawyers to execute the lateral leaps of practicing attorneys. Click here to find out more about us.

A sweeping antitrust settlement that would require Sutter Health to change its billing practices and negotiations with payers is nearing a close.  Superior Court of San Francisco Judge Anne-Christine Massullo gave preliminary approval to the $575 million settlement on Tuesday — more than a year after Sutter first agreed to the terms.

The case, first brought against Sutter by grocers’ union United Food & Commercial Workers, alleged that the health system used its market power to prevent health plans from negotiating for smaller networks, forcing them to sign “all or nothing” contracts to cover all of its facilities. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office joined the case in 2018. Sacramento-based Sutter has 24 acute care hospitals and 12,000 physicians, making it the second-largest health system in California.

After agreeing to settle in October 2019, Sutter sought to delay the settlement, citing “catastrophic” losses from the pandemic, but was ultimately denied by the court. A final settlement approval is set for July 19.

The sweeping settlement would require Sutter to pay $575 million to employers, unions and other in the class action suit. But the bigger impact comes from limitations to what Sutter can charge patients for out-of-network services, and requirements that it end “all-or-nothing” contracting deals with payers.

It also would have to permit health plans to give members pricing, quality and cost information — a response to allegations that Sutter used confidentiality provisions to restrict payers from sharing that information.

Finally, Sutter would have to set clear definitions for clinical integration, and would have to work with a court-approved compliance monitor for at least 10 years.

“The settlement makes clear that for Sutter to claim it has clinically integrated a system, it must meet strict standards beyond regional similarities or the mere sharing of an electronic health record, and must be integrating care in a manner that takes into consideration the quality of care to the patient population,” the California Attorney General’s Office stated in a news release.

In an emailed statement, a Sutter spokesperson said the ruling would allow the settlement approval process to move toward final approval, “which will ultimately help preserve our integrated network of care and is in the best interests of our patients and the communities we serve.”

Emma Hoo, director of value-based purchasing for Purchaser Business Group on Health (PBGH), said the settlement was “an important signal to the market that plans and providers should move quickly to integrate the transparency requirements and consumer protections spelled out in the injunctive relief into their contracts.”

Twenty of PBGH’s members joined the class action lawsuit. Monetary settlement aside, Hoo said, “The greater dollar value to employers, unions and families, lies in the injunctive relief, which establishes fundamental changes to Sutter’s business practices.”  

The case could open the door for other states to more closely examine negotiations between hospitals and insurers. Becerra’s nomination as Health and Human Services secretary is also notable. During Senate confirmation hearings, he said he would continue his work going after anti-competitive practices in healthcare.

  Photo credit: Mykola Velychko, Getty Images

A force like Bill Henderson can’t be contained by just one column. In my most recent piece, I discussed Henderson’s views on how top firms will learn to “productize.” This week, we tackle another topic we discussed in my recent interview with him: the evolution of law firm structure itself.

Teamwork Makes The Dream Work

I’ve long discussed the virtues of law firms embracing tools to measure profitability. As the American Lawyer recently pointed out, virtually every top-performing law firm has jettisoned antiquated models of paying partners based on their gross book of business: “A common driver of success in firms that outperform the market is that they increasingly use their compensation systems to reward partners whose books are accretive to profitability.”

But law firm profitability tools aren’t perfect. Henderson points out there are practical challenges associated with trying to manage book-of-business profitability. “[T]hat means you have to manage people individually. You have 300 lawyers, you have to manage 300 people, and you have to use carrots and sticks to get each one to produce.”

And with lawyers across the industry being notoriously argumentative and often having little understanding of basic business concepts, that management challenge can be significant.

Henderson’s solution to the problem is simple: start measuring profitability at a team-based level. “You put attorneys into groups of eight or 10, like little industry clusters, or little client type clusters and say, ‘You guys figure out here, your profit pool is going to be a function of how this unit works together here. So you guys better figure it out here because you’re stuck with that profit pool.’ And actually, it alleviates you from having to manage those people because that group will become self-managing.”

To those that would protest that Prof. Henderson’s idea is a nice academic theory on paper, but impossible in practice, Henderson had this to say: “That was Goldman Sachs in 1960. They moved all their comp to team-based production. The partners said ‘I’m good at generating business, you’re good at servicing internal demand, why don’t we just merge our credits together here? And that totally revolutionized the firm, because it got everybody to focus on growing the pie as opposed to growing their piece.” He added that Goldman Sachs has more in common with law firms than we might initially think: “Goldman Sachs is in the same type of business that we are, professional services. They got people to solve their own problems and get creative, and also alleviated the burden of management. They were managing 30 teams instead of 300 people.”

A Recipe For Experimentation

Does the Goldman Sachs model make sense for law firms? Analyzing performance at a team-based level could certainly ease the burden on management and compensation committees –– freeing them to focus on deeper strategic matters while more tactical decision-making was pushed down to empowered practice group managers. But more than that, this kind of team-level profitability thinking could break a firm free from the billable hour mold in new, exciting, and more profitable ways.

When you tell every attorney in a firm they’re going to be measured on the individual dollars they bring in, you’ve incentivized them to bill hours and make dollars, yes, but you’ve also incentivized them away from efficiency, or from helping others improve their numbers. There’s no “carrot,” or time available, to think about much beyond billing. Everyone has to sink or swim on their own.

If team profitability is the metric, however, then perhaps not every attorney in the pod needs to be constantly billing. Attorneys could be freed up to specialize, play to their strengths, and focus on individual components of a practice group, whether those tasks are billable or not. Teams can diversify, specialize, and reform in new and unexpected ways. A billable-hour practice might suddenly make more sense as a client-pleasing flat fee model. Lawyer-led, long-term projects like Closing Room can be prioritized and developed. Moving to team-based performance analysis could enable the productization efforts that Henderson believes will be necessary to remain relevant as a firm in the coming years. Presumably, of course, all of these efforts will lead to more profit for everyone.

The Problem: That Pesky Market

But there’s a problem. Virtually every Am Law 200 firm pays partners on individual performance. If a bold — or naïve — firm tries this model, won’t competitors simply snatch skeptical rainmakers? You can easily imagine a recruiter’s pitch: “A team-based approach is way too risky for a superstar like you. Don’t waste your time –– or jeopardize your livelihood. Keep doing what you’re doing and let us pay you for it.”

Because of market forces, getting buy-in from rainmakers on a team-based profitability approach could be difficult or impossible. The current per-person profitability model is likely working well for them, and this sort of change could be perceived as threatening their share of the pie. Rainmakers will have to be convinced that team-based metrics will allow that pie to grow. Some who don’t like the idea may end up leaving.

If firm leadership could figure out a way to get buy-in, however, a team-based profitability approach could be a great retention tool. As a firm builds up a practice group’s infrastructure to support its experimental new systems, it’s quietly ensuring that the clients who love those new systems stay with the firm itself. It’s also a lot easier for a single rainmaker and a couple of associates to lateral than it is to move a 15-person team relying on firm-developed software and hardware solutions. Savvy firm managers will find ways to make the practice groups cooperate and develop interdependence on one another, both to offer new and better client services and to further enmesh their teams with one another. By investing in team-based thinking, firm managers can increase profitability, reduce the risk of attrition, and help develop that elusive sense of camaraderie and firm culture all in one motion.

Playing Catch Up

It’s telling that we can consider a Woodstock-era management practice as a revolutionary step in the legal industry, but that’s the culture we’ve built for ourselves over the decades. As Goldman Sachs was trying out team-based compensation in the 1960s, virtually every large law firm was adopting lockstep compensation systems. Firms embraced this model to promote a team-based culture, but the unappreciated downside was that automatic raises until you retire doesn’t incentivize a business-minded approach. It does the opposite, and we’re still living with the consequences of that today.

The pendulum has now swung the other way, and smart firms have been heavily, and smartly, focusing on attorney profitability as their driving metric. Although that shift has been an overall improvement, there is certainly room to further develop law firm compensation culture.

Henderson’s approach may be a smart way forward, and I suspect there’s a way for firms to have their cake and eat it too. There are already good metric systems in place at leading firms to measure individual profitability, and nothing says those metrics need to go away. By adding team-based metrics to the equation, firms can get a better picture of both an individual’s accomplishments and their contribution to the overall team. If we can enable experimentation and team-based thinking while keeping the individual accountability our current systems are already good at, could we unlock new, better, and exciting ways of doing business?

The law is populated by strong, smart, passionate people steeped in a tradition of individual brilliance. We’re told stories of great attorneys, great judges, and great professors, but rarely of great teams. The rest of the business world has moved on to a more complicated, productive narrative where group performance outweighs individual heroics.

It’s time we caught up.

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James Goodnow is the CEO and managing partner of NLJ 250 firm Fennemore Craig. At age 36, he became the youngest known chief executive of a large law firm in the U.S. He holds his JD from Harvard Law School and dual business management certificates from MIT. He’s currently attending the Cambridge University Judge Business School (U.K.), where he’s working toward a master’s degree in entrepreneurship. James is the co-author of Motivating Millennials, which hit number one on Amazon in the business management new release category. As a practitioner, he and his colleagues created and run a tech-based plaintiffs’ practice and business model. You can connect with James on Twitter (@JamesGoodnow) or by emailing him at James@JamesGoodnow.com.

It’s not necessarily surprising, but the American Lawyer reported this week that Boies Schiller Flexner will all but certainly be dropping out of the Am Law 100 this year after 2020 revenues dropped 38 percent and profits were off 54 percent. The firm may still be delivering big compensation for associates, but the partners took a hit with profits per equity partner falling from $3.37 million to $2.29 million.

The firm told the Law.com outlet that the firm’s financial hit stemmed from the COVID-related slowdown in litigation, given BSF’s heavy mix of contingency fee matters, with roughly 25 percent of its hours wrapped up in long-tail matters that don’t pay without resolution. Though when they do pay, they can more than make up for years of effort. Meanwhile, American Lawyer was quick to note that the firm has seen heavy partner departures, many taking big-ticket clients and correspondingly significant books of business with them out the door. The two are in many ways related, with the firm’s contingency work making up a big portion of the portfolio in part because more “Biglaw like” work for clients like Apple left the firm. Losing some millions in billables in a year is still losing some millions in billables in a year, no matter how you slice it. On the other hand, revenue per lawyer — the number some cite as the more important figure in gauging firm health — was actually up almost 5 percent in 2020 so there are positives in the data.

Can reorienting the firm around this mix of business succeed? I typically infuriate the firm’s champions and detractors alike by responding, “I dunno.”

During the firm’s relative youth, it grew fast in a lot of different directions and with that growth came a lot of competing visions among the partnership for what the firm would become. Should it become a new Biglaw behemoth, a nimble mid-size, merge into an existing full-service firm, or cut back to a much smaller core? There’s a case to be made for and against each path and the firm had in its DNA the building blocks to potentially go down any of them. The “best” move is really only knowable in hindsight.

But I do know that I’ve never understood American Lawyer’s fixation on this talking point:

Others have left in part due to Boies’ controversial representations of disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein and defunct company Theranos, which particularly rankled the firm’s West Coast clients, sources have said.

That seems gratuitously negative. On the other hand, legal media is reporting on turmoil at Roche Freedman and every headline calls it “Boies Schiller spinoff.” BSF can’t avoid negative headlines in stories about other firms. On the other hand, the arrest of Joshua Schiller on a domestic violence charge and the subsequent revelation that he continued drumming up business during the firm imposed leave of absence is firm business that observers actually need to take seriously.

As to those past matters, I’ve never heard those cited even from partners I’ve spoken with who left the firm. The recurring theme I’ve heard from those partners is that they thought the firm should have chosen a different strategic path. Which is fair! And had the firm gone down that alternative path, a different group of partners would have departed over the last two years. Everyone thinks that their preferred strategy would have been able to hold the whole firm together, and maybe they’re right but that seems presumptuous. I’m more inclined to believe the firm was going to shrink into something new one way or the other.

With COVID clearing up over the second half of the year, we’ll get an inkling of whether or not the firm is stabilizing into its new form next year around this time.

Earlier: Despite Changes To Their Compensation System, Associates At Boies Schiller Can Still Take Home HUGE Bonuses
Biglaw Partner Arrested On Domestic Violence Charge

Shaken by Departures, Boies Schiller Flexner Saw Revenue Plummet 38%, Profits Down 54% [American Lawyer]
Atty Says Boies Schiller Spinoff Ousted Him To Seize Crypto [Law360]

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is certainly wrestling with some weighty, difficult matters right now: climate change, cryptocurrencies, diversity (on which, of course, it is not alone) and the very structure of the markets its oversees. But it’s also helpful to remember that a lot of what the SEC does—possibly even most of it—is very, very easy, such as busting the most blatant and ill-concealed frauds, and urging ordinary people not to do things with their money that they very obviously should not do.

* The CEO of Marvel claims his DNA was stolen from a water bottle during a deposition. This sounds like a pretty strange origin story… [Property Casualty 360]

* The inspiration for a lawyer in the film Erin Brockovich has lost his law license. [Wrap]

* A lawsuit about the departure of the St. Louis Rams to Los Angeles has been delayed until 2022. [NBC News]

* Ghislaine Maxwell is allegedly selling her London home to pay for legal fees spent defending her criminal case related to Jeffrey Epstein. [Wall Street Journal]

* The Indiana Attorney General is in hot water for allegedly receiving thousands of dollars for advisory roles. Guess he’s having a hard time making ends meet on a government salary… [Indianapolis Star]

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Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

Georgetown Law Prof Caught On Zoom Making Shocking Statements About Black Students: It… does not go well.

And, Just Like That, The Offending Professor Is Out: That was… very fast.

Speaking Of Racist Bullshit At Elite Law School: This Harvard Law prof also throws in some sexism… so there’s that.

Law School Deans Respond To Whiteness Of School: There’s still… a lot of work to be done.

Protecting Kids From Cursing: This is a… bizarre interpretation of the First Amendment.

Jenny Cudd admitted to storming the Capitol on January 6. Thanks to the miracle of Facebook streaming, this isn’t really in dispute. In February, she displayed a superhuman level of chutzpah by asking the court to allow her to go on vacation while pending trial for joining a violent revolt that left five people dead. And then the court granted the request.

Respecting the maxim that if you can take an inch, you can take a few thousand miles, Cudd and her attorney are now asking Trump-appointed judge Trevor McFadden to further pad his future D.C. Circuit resume by moving the criminal proceeding to West Texas because…

The facts of this case center around Donald Trump and his supporters. The facts of this case include political statements that are favorable to Donald Trump and adverse to Democrat political interests. The evidence in this case is emotionally political in every respect. But the jury who would hear the facts in Washington D.C. is the most politically prejudiced jury in the entire country.

“Democrat political interests.” They certainly know they’re pitching to the Federalist Society choir busting out the most overused and grammatically incorrect shibboleth of the MAGA world — Democrat as an adjective. Cudd is represented by Virginia DUI lawyer Marina Medvin, an ASSLaw graduate who wrote for Newsmax wannabe Townhall.com, and she’s clearly juiced up this filing with every buzzword that would fire up a committed fellow traveler.

The response in modern Democrat culture to “white supremacists” has been uniform: termination from employment, public shaming, and “getting canceled,” a colloquial term denoting social pariah status. There is a social expectation of punishment for anyone accused of being a “white supremacist.” In Washington D.C., people have been readily “canceled” for being politically conservative and for their public support of Donald Trump.

Oh no, not canceled! For someone facing jail time, perhaps we could bring this motion back around to something approximating criminal law instead of whining that overt displays of racism aren’t as popular as they used to be. Maybe?

For example, Cleta Mitchell resigned from her D.C. law firm, Foley & Lardner, after “a massive pressure campaign in the last several days mounted by leftist groups against me, my law firm and clients,” due to Ms. Mitchell’s association with President Trump.

Leaving the partnership of an international law firm for participating in a call that raised serious questions of attempted voting official intimidation! It would seem that Cleta’s gotten off relatively easy compared to someone facing federal criminal charges. If anything, this example seems to prove that society is actually judicious about when it does and does not think behavior rises to the level of criminal sanction.

Is she gonna do it? I think she’s gonna do it. Let’s see if she goes there….

The mere accusation of “white supremacy” or “racism” is sufficient in modern society to “hang the witch,” akin to the 1600’s accusatory hysteria in Salem.22

And the footnote for the Salem Witch Trials for the chef’s kiss of bad law review note legal writing. Bravo.

It’s difficult to stress how many non-sequiturs are shoved in this filing to bait Tucker Carlson into inviting Cudd or Medvin on the show. “Democrat” and “cancel culture” for sure, but the reader is also treated to asides to “antiracism,” “white privilege,” and a cavalcade of namechecks of MSNBC personalities. There’s a truly bizarre screenshot of Dr. Jason Johnson explaining the innocuous fact that there’s a difference between civil and criminal liability seemingly thrown in just to highlight that he’s Black. You probably think I’m exaggerating, but no, the brief quotes Johnson noting that the civil system can secure monetary damages for wrongful conduct even when the criminal system cannot get a conviction, but throws in a picture to add absolutely nothing to the analysis.

The legal argument, when it finally arrives, turns on the Skilling test, a multipronged test of venue prejudice considering: “(i) the size and characteristics of the community; (ii) the nature and extent of the pretrial publicity; (iii) the proximity between publicity and the trial; and (iv) evidence of juror partiality.”

There’s a superficial case to be made that D.C. may not provide a fair trial to Cudd under this test, but that ignores the factual context of the recent fair trial jurisprudence Medvin cites herself. Timothy McVeigh blew up a building in Oklahoma killing 168 people — a devastating impact on a small community — prompting a relocation to Colorado. The other recent case she cites is United States v. Awadallah, which rejected the claim that 9/11 rendered the Southern District of New York an unfair venue. Hell, even the Skilling case that sets out the standards concluded that a venue change was unwarranted.

The whole motion boils down to “D.C. residents might have a bias against people committing crimes in D.C.” which may be true as far as it goes, but it’s not a valid basis for moving a trial.

But where you know the bravado is hitting fever pitch is when, after claiming D.C.’s predominantly “Democrat” voting record justifies a move, the filing eschews seeking a battleground venue like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania and jumps straight to the Western District of Texas, specifically the Midland-Odessa region that voted for Trump by roughly 60 points. As the Washington Post succinctly put it, she really is “saying a more Republican-friendly jury would decide her guilt or innocence more fairly.”

Guilt or innocence of charges based on an action she publicly confessed to committing.

But maybe this is crazy like a fox. If she’s arguing that the pool is biased based on negative coverage of the judge approving a pre-trial Mexican vacation, maybe this is just an effort to gin up more deserved media outrage to claim that the pool is even more biased.

Courts usually aren’t inclined to reward defendants for creating their own predicaments, but after Judge McFadden’s last foray into this matter no outcome should surprise us.

Earlier: Judge Lets Trump Rioter Go On Vacation To Mexico Despite EVERY OPPORTUNITY TO DO THE RIGHT THING

Jan. 6 Capitol defendant wants trial moved to west Texas, calls D.C. too anti-Trump, politically correct [Washington Post]

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day!

According to data collected for ALM’s Go-To Law School Ranking, what percentage of Biglaw firms that responded to the survey said they delayed the start date for at least some incoming associates till January 2021 — or later?

Hint: COVID-19 was the reason so many new associates had to wait before starting their Biglaw career.

See the answer on the next page.