Tag Archives: law firms

I usually don’t care for Lawyerist, but this

Aside

I usually don’t care for Lawyerist, but this post hit it right on the nose:

So, he added, it’s natural for a young idealistic lawyer to try to improve the situation [in a big law firm] (or fight the power). But his advice was to not do that. Instead, he revealed his next page. It read, “FIND the power and SUCK UP!”  A few nervous giggles bounced around the room for a moment. He smiled, knowingly.

If you’re thinking about going to law school so that you can work at a large firm, or if you’re already in law school and have the same dream, then you should read the whole thing.

-Michael

The Future of Law Firms: The Electronic Whip

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Former Big Law partner Stephen Harper loves to complain about law firms’ increasing tendency to focus on “metrics.”  Having enjoyed the good life by jacking up “billable hours” and “collectibles,” many big firm partners are trying to find new ways to squeeze more productivity–and thus more money–from their leveraged model.

I fear they may find their answer at Disneyland.  A recent piece in the Los Angeles Times details how Disney has begun cracking the “electronic whip” on its employees:

In the basements of the Disneyland and Paradise Pier hotels in Anaheim, big flat-screen monitors hang from the walls in rooms where uniformed crews do laundry. The monitors are like scoreboards, with employees’ work speeds compared to one another. Workers are listed by name, so their colleagues can see who is quickest at loading pillow cases, sheets and other items into a laundry machine.

…

Isabel Barrera, a Disneyland Hotel laundry worker for eight years, began calling the new system the “electronic whip” when it was installed last year. The name has stuck.

…

Employees in the Anaheim hotels are required to key in their ID when they arrive, and from then on, their production speed is displayed for all to see. For instance, the monitor might show that S. Lopez is working at an efficiency rate of 37% of expected production. The screen displays the names of several coworkers at once, with “efficiency” numbers in green for those near or above 100% of the expected pace, and red numbers for those who aren’t as fast.

…

According to Barrera, the whip has led to a sort of competition among workers, some of whom have tried to race to the head of the pack. But that has led to dissension and made other employees worry that a reasonable pace won’t be enough to keep the boss happy. Barrera and Beatriz Topete, an official with Unite Here Local 11, said employees have been known to skip bathroom breaks out of fear that their production will fall and managers will demand an explanation. They say they felt bad for a pregnant employee who had trouble keeping up.

It’s easy to see how this kind of policy could be implemented at a law firm. Associates could have an application running on their desktop that tracks their billable hours in real time. Or perhaps the program could show how much “collectible” work the associate has done over some period of time. The program could then compare all associates’ performance in a ranking system, showing associates exactly where they stand and whether they need to pick up the pace. For a group of people already prone to competition and angst, that could provide quite the motivation to work harder. Maybe they could even have their status delivered straight to their Blackberries, where the numbers are there to “encourage” them at all hours of the day.

Nevermind that such a program could generate a spirit of competition amongst associates. Or that it might drive some people to work too much, just as the board at Disneyland encourages workers to skip bathroom breaks. I still have a feeling that we’ll be seeing this kind of tool put in place at some law firm somewhere at some point down the line.

-Michael

You Can’t Spell “Shpoonkle” Without “Poo”

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Update: At some point after I wrote this post, Shpoonkle took down the blog post I discuss below. I suspect that one could pick apart many of the posts on the site in the same fashion, but I simply don’t have time to do so.

Shpoonkle is a reverse auction site for lawyers, where clients post their legal problems and lawyers bid to provide the cheapest solution. The site was founded by a recent New York Law School graduate who couldn’t figure out what to do after law school. Above all else, this little web project is an awful idea with a terrible name. And now, a new blog post on the Shpoonkle website provides reason to question the competence of the people behind this project. I suspect folks using Shpoonkle are meant to be comforted by the fact that the managers of Shpoonkle are lawyers. But apparently, lawyers they ain’t.

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“The Pink’s Paradox” and the Lure of Big Law Firms

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Over at Concurring Opinions, David Fagundes recently discussed the “Pink’s Paradox,” a confusing pattern of behavior seen at Pink’s Famous Hot Dogs in Los Angeles:

… Pink’s doesn’t just have a 15-20 minute wait at meal times like many local eateries. Rather, at almost any time of day, the line to get a Pink’s chili (or any other) dog snakes through a few switchbacks, up La Brea, and back into their parking lot, frequently lasting a good hour.  At peak times, the line has been said to approach 1.5 or two hours.

… I can understand waiting in line for hours, say, to obtain critical medical services, or in a bread line in Soviet Russia where the only alternative is starving.  I can even imagine waiting in line for a couple hours to get tickets for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see your favorite performer appear live.  But for chili dogs?  No way.  Something more than simple preference satisfaction has to be going on.

So what explains the Pink’s paradox?  Why is it that demand for these chili dogs continues to grow, even as the experience costs and actual costs associated with its food increase at an even greater rate (and appear to swamp the benefits of eating even the tastiest chili dog)?  And what does this tell us about the rationality (or irrationality) of line-waiting generally?

Fagundes suggests several reasons for people’s willingness to wait so long in line: (1) the long line is a product of group think; (2) the long line signals that the food is good, helping people sift through the overwhelming number of food choices in Los Angeles; (3) the long line provides some intangible benefits; or (4) the long line indicates the food is unique. I think he’s definitely onto something here. But Fagundes’ theories don’t just explain why people wait a long time for hot dogs; they also help explain why people are willing to to bear an unreasonably high “cost” for another good: BigLaw attorneys.  In fact, every one of Fagundes’ theories could be employed to understand better why people pay extraordinarily high rates to big law firms.

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A New Kind of Burger War: Steptoe & Johnson v. Rogue States

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Lately, it seems like Dupont Circle has been overrun with trendy burger places:  BGR, the Burger Joint; Rogue States: A Burger Grilling Company; and (soon) BLT Burger.  When I’m hankering for a burger in my neighborhood, I’ll often head to traditional favorite Five Guys.  But if I’m in the mood for a fancy-pants burger, my pick is Rogue States, which has late night hours, tasty brews, and awesome fries (which include some very addictive flavored mayo).

My favorite trendy burger now faces a new foe:  powerful D.C. law firm Steptoe and Johnson.  Apparently, Steptoe is getting a little too much delicious flavor from Rogue States, in the form of fumes overrunning its offices.  BLT: The Blog of Legal Times (unrelated, of course, to BLT Burger) explains:

Steptoe & Johnson LLP is fighting with a high-end hamburger restaurant in a building near its Northwest Washington offices over whether fumes from the restaurant are causing health problems for the firm’s employees.

Steptoe and the owner of its office building have asked a D.C. Superior Court judge to issue an injunction barring Rogue States, a Burger Grilling Company, from continuing to emit smoke and odors. Judge John McAdam Mott is expected to make a ruling on that request this afternoon. The owner of the building where Rogue States is located was also sued.

In the firm’s complaint, which was filed on March 10 by Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman partner Deborah Baum, Steptoe contends that the exhaust system at Rogue States’ 1300 Connecticut Ave. N.W. location, which is near the firm’s 1330 Connecticut Ave. N.W. office, dumps smoke and fumes from the restaurant into the firm’s air-intake system. As a result, the complaint says, “Steptoe employees have reported health-related effects in connection with the smoke and food odors, including but not limited to headaches, nausea, dizziness, watery and itchy eyes, drowsiness and distraction.”

Drowsiness?  I know I get sleepy after eating a big burger, but not after just smelling one.

Regardless, things are not looking good for Rogue States.  At a hearing in D.C. Superior Court yesterday, Judge Mott declined to issue an injunction against the delicious-but-noxious-fume-generating activity going on at Rogue States.  But he did say he would issue a later ruling that would likely end grilling operations if the parties cannot reach an agreement by August 10.

If this issue goes to trial, I would recommend Rogue States hire local beef litigation specialist attorney Arthur C. Burger.

-Michael

Update: A commenter at the ABA Journal provides a limerick for the occasion:

Odiferous fumes from defendant were oozing
and caused, said the plaintiff, our snoozing!
But having won an injunction
wondered head partner, at luncheon
Have we any other excuses for losing?

Edit, by Susan: Rogue States could also hire P. Hamburger, Esq..

Or maybe they should just go with the Hamburger Law Firm, they’ve got to be experts in this kind of litigation.

This is What a Forged Check for Half a Million Dollars Looks Like

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There are quite a lot of scams out there that specifically target law firms. Most of them are variations on the 419 scam, and pretty obvious too boot — such as the business offers from wealthy princes in Nigeria — but apparently there is a slightly more sophisticated version going around right now. Here is a description of the how the scam starts:

The email memo arrives at the law office, and sounds like many others that arrive during the day soliciting legal services. A potential commercial client, albeit located overseas, needs some legal assistance collecting on debts from their customers located in the U.S. They may be willing to pay on a contingency fee basis or hourly basis. They explain that generally their slow paying customers will pay once counsel is obtained in the U.S. and a little bit of pressure is applied. It makes sense, the law firms sends off a client fee agreement and it comes back signed. Later names and addresses, and perhaps telephone numbers of several customers located in the U.S. arrive at the law office. Due diligence performed by the law firm on the internet indicates that the new client is a major manufacturer in Europe or Asia. The web pages of the customers are similarly impressive. A telephone call indicates that the slow paying customer is willing to pay the client via the law firm. The cashiers check arrives shortly. It seems to be a potentially lucrative client for the lawyer.

And apparently a few firms out there have fallen for it, or at least enough for the FBI to see fit to issue a warning about it.

This happened to my firm last week. We were contacted by a potential client who claimed something very much like the above — a foreign company was looking to collect on a Virginia company, and needed to retain counsel. We were immediately suspicious, primarily because it was a foreign client contacting us without a referral, but there was nothing to blatantly mark it out as a fraud. So the firm did respond, and we started up a correspondence with the company.

Of course, just a couple days later it was made abundantly clear that it was all a scam, when the “client” informed us that, after they had emailed the website bios of two of our attorneys to the would-be defendant, the company had been so thoroughly intimidated that that they immediately agreed to settle. For a million dollars. And that a check for the full amount would be arriving shortly.

Yeah, that sounds plausible. Really.

True to the scammer’s word, however, a check did in fact show up in the mail. Not for the full million promised, alas — the check was for just under $500,000. We were soon informed, however, that this was only half of the settlement amount, and that a second check for the rest of the funds was on its way.

But the forgery on the first check was pretty darn impressive:

I’m pretty sure that if I hadn’t known it was a forgery, I wouldn’t have picked it out as one.

-Susan