Posts on ‘February 23rd, 2009’

The use of wikis in law firms follows an evolutionary path from indifference to skepticism to adoption. The rate at which a firm moves along this continuum depends on how quickly legal professionals embrace the concept that collaborative authorship can produce high-quality materials.

While Bernard Madoff has the able counsel of Dickstein Shapiro litigator Ira Sorkin, lawyers for many of the disgraced investment manager’s alleged victims are in the process of organizing an international network to coordinate future legal actions. On Feb. 17, the first meeting of the “Global Law Firm Alliance” was held at the offices of leading Spanish firm Cremades & Calvo-Sotelo in Madrid.

Lawyers are like hounds on a hunt: Sometimes one just isn’t enough. And solo practitioner Paul Schorn says just because solos are lone wolves, it doesn’t mean that every now and again, they can’t run with the hounds. Some cases call for a joint venture, where a team of lawyers can come at the problem from different directions to ensure success. Solos are well-suited to joint ventures due to their flexibility, but Schorn says there are some questions to ask before solos decide to don their running shoes.

Simpson Thacher & Bartlett is sending some of its associates to year-long stints at nonprofit organizations, with the expectation that they’ll return to the firm afterward. The firm is offering fellowships to 15 associates and paying them $60,000 up front. They will not remain firm employees while they work for the nonprofit, although they can keep their insurance benefits, says Simpson Thacher partner William T. Russell. He said that the move was not a result of a decrease in work for the associates.

There’s at least one law office that still has more transactional work than it can handle. Since October, lawyers at the Treasury Department’s Office of General Counsel have completed $306 billion worth of deal work stemming from the Troubled Assets Relief Program. In a few short months, they’ve closed 418 separate transactions. The work marks an unprecedented transformation for the office, which traditionally focuses on supplying policy advice and interpreting law for Treasury’s other divisions.

Thompson Hine has told its associates and other non-partner lawyers that it will impose an across-the-board $17,500 base salary reduction. Those lawyers will, however, be able to earn back some or all of that sum as a bonus if they bill at least 1,750 hours this year. The firm also announced layoffs, eliminating the jobs of 12 associates, five paralegals and 29 secretaries. Thompson Hine is the second Am Law 200 firm in recent days to cut salaries, following Wolf Block’s 10 percent reduction in associate pay.

The number of deferred and nonprosecution agreements between the U.S.
Department of Justice and corporations declined by 60 percent in 2008 –
from a historic high of 40 in 2007 to 16 last year, according to a
forthcoming study. Despite the lower numbers, violations of the Foreign
Corrupt Practices Act continued to dominate the subject of those
corporate pretrial agreements, with seven of the 16 agreements last year
resolving FCPA violations.