Merry Christmas From Harris Beach LLP

Figured I’d pass this along. I know it was only three contract attorneys and the firm isn’t a big player, but I just was dumbfounded by the fact that they called today to tell us the project is over. The firm is closed today. It couldn’t wait until Sunday evening. Or even early Monday morning?

Merry Christmas, eh?

"As I’m walking back into my apartment this afternoon, I heard the final few rings of the telephone and the answering machine turn on. A staff person from the attorney temporary staffing agency I’d been working for these past few months was leaving me a message telling me that the project I had been working on at Harris Beach PLLC on Wall Street was over effective immediately. The firm’s current advertisement hook is 'Lawyers you’ll swear by. Not at.' How funny. Real professional too. Well, I had a few choice words for those attorneys today, that’s for sure. It’s unconscionable to call someone on Christmas Eve, when the law firm is actually closed, to tell them that their job is over effective immediately. Great timing. Wonderful way to usher in the Christmas holiday. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry, right? It couldn’t wait until Sunday evening or even Monday morning?"

http://laidofflawyer.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/bah-humbug/

Happy Holidays From Quinn Emanuel

"Here are a few tales from the holiday season at Quinn Emanuel:

We all joined Quinn on an up-note. We were told we would be direct hires making $55/hour plus overtime and operating on California's generous overtime rules. The project was to be run by a heavily made up (think Jersey Shore) cheerleader and a crooked-nosed lurch from Fordham.

All went swimmingly for a week. We got our steady diet of indignity, but as it was served with a healthy dose of money, who were we really to complain. And so it carried on a week until the Wednesday before Thanksgiving when they gathered us all in a great big room to tell us that our pay had been reduced by $19 an hour, cheers, and have a great Thanksgiving. Also, you no longer work for Quinn, you work for a woman at Strategic Legal with a herpee on her lip. Oh, and a baleful "sorry" to those who had canceled their holiday plans, but our work wouldn't be entirely necessary this weekend as they planned to increase our hours later.

And so they did. The week after Thanksgiving was up to sixty hours. The week after that was unlimited, but do not bill too much lest you get tired. The apoplexy and abject managerial failure obtained in the instructions doled out assiduously by the Cheerleader in a flurry of daily emails reminiscent of Donald Rumsfeld's 'snowflakes.' In these emails were a delightful mix of perfect reversals in instruction with the necessary admonishments about how we should have known the entire time what she was thinking (though she didn't give us the production requests because drooling assholes like us wouldn't get such high falutin language); warnings blasted without even a scintilla of irony when people worked fewer than fifty hours the week after Thanksgiving about failing to live up to what we 'had agreed' to do; and perhaps my favorite, an email in which the Cheerleader (I'm sure to appease Lurch) lectured us children on the moral quagmire of billing while shitting. I was so shocked by the last bit that I forwarded it to a few friends with jobs at other firms.

To make the season bright, I get word today that the project looks to end Thursday. Christmas Eve. With no warning given either to those of us on the project since the Great Rate Cut or to those that started yesterday. What the fuck is this job I've got. I'm so grateful I couldn't have made plans for Christmas, seeing as I'll likely not be working after all."

Knee-jerk Positive Thinking Is A Mental Disorder

In her new book "Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America", social critic Barbara Ehrenreich lays out how an epidemic of postive American thinking from the Iraq War to the build up to the recent financial collapse has led to misery and brought us nearly to the brink of economic collapse.

Ehrenreich recently noted that, "two weeks ago, I was in Fort Wayne, Indiana, at a meeting where people who were about to be laid off told their stories. A woman next to me said that when her unemployment insurance runs out, she'll live in her car. Then, another woman said, 'Well, we have to remember to be positive, and that means don't watch the news, don't read the newspaper, just concentrate.'"

There is no shortage of postive thinking delusion when it comes to the law school scam. The Wall Street Journal for example did a front page story not long ago questioning the integrity of the post graduate career statistics at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. When it comes to delusion, facts and statistics apparently don't matter. Just last week the ass clown career center dean of the law school (Graham Sherr) gave a presentation to the unsuspecting 1L's in which he stated, "there are more jobs than there are of you, but you have to shun bitterness; bitterness is ugly." He then proceeded to demonstrate how positive delusional thinking would somehow reach out and magically bend the supply curve in the legal marketplace. Apparently, it worked because several minutes later the same fraudulent, puffed up career stat numbers that were criticized in the WSJ piece magically appeared on the overhead screen.

Labaton Suckaroo - Scrooge Of The Year

"Dear Tom,

I nominate Labaton Suckaroo for the Scrooge of the season award. I worked for them at their offsite Merrill Corp hellhole earlier this year and I blogged about the infamous Blondie who was the team leader at the site. I managed to find something else, but I have some friends who are still working on the same Countrywide project back at Labaton’s headquarters downtown. They related the following to me: Labaton promised their temps, who they made short temp attorney employees, benefits after six months of service. Last week, they were called into a meeting on their six-month anniversary and told by a nasty personnel troll that they would not be receiving their paid vacation that had accrued or be paid for company holidays, Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, for this year. Some of these short term attorney employees had already planned vacation days over Christmas and got it approved, but now were told that you are not getting paid for it and that you are not getting paid for the company holidays either, and it’s too bad if you made plans. Lousy Labaton postponed all benefits until 2010 in order to avoid paying their employees for Christmas.

You can imagine what this has done for morale in a situation where they expect their short-term attorneys to build a plaintiff’s case in a multi million-dollar lawsuit against Countrywide, which was acquired by Bank of America. This is not mere document review. They expect their ex temps to do substantive work for $32 an hour flat while temps who are doing the same work, but representing a co-counsel on the same case at Labaton are making $45 an hour. Also, they recently blocked Internet access because the sleazy Guliani type COO came down and observed a few people on the Internet; apparently the same greaseball was instrumental in stopping Christmas pay.

Well, I guess Labaton Suckaroo is following in the great tradition of other ambulance chasing plaintiff firms like Paul Weiss and Milberg Weiss. I suggest you also put Labaton Sucharoo in your hall of shame. I know that they are very conscious of their image, as Paul Weiss was when you embarrassed them before, and they do monitor this blog. Thanks for providing this forum to expose the hypocrisy and abuse of these toilet law firms. I know that your blog does make a difference; Blondie almost got fired last time.

All the best!"

"Synergy"

Hey Tom, a large project is gearing up with Synergy, a new gang of pimps in the doc review ghetto. Rate is $33 flat for 40 hours. Miserable does not begin to describe the situation. The incompetent old hags from Aronld & Porters DC office are running the "training gulag."

First you have to fill out a 12,590 page conflict form listing every firm, matter, and case you've handled since being admitted to the bar, as well as the name of your first grade teacher, blood type, and scores of other irrelevant and personal info. They have been bouncing the forms back again and again for even the smallest typo or discrepancy. Apparently the case involves Avon. Let me tell you, those Arnold & Porter hags sure could use some - they should lay it on like drywall spackle and then sand off the excess.

Anyway, only 2 days into training they already cut 1/3 of the 50 coders for "failing" a pathetic doc review test (maybe they're taking lessons from Lady Barasso). Now they're in scramble mode to replace them ASAP- so all coders beware! Stay as far away from this shitshow as possible- the in-house counsel and Arnold & Porter will be breathing down your neck like it was Alcatraz. The coder/straw boss ratio is like 2:1. I'd rather ride around on a garbage truck than push paper with these devils. A & P obviously have zero experience running this size review- I'm half tempted to write the Avon CEO and let them know that their "counsel" have their heads up their asses (or are their heads their asses- hard to tell!)

A Law School Carole

When you get a chance, you just HAVE to check out this computer generated cartoon that will be featured in the National Law Journal on Monday. While I got a kick out of the ghost Ralph Marley, the shadow of the (still alive, but might as well be dead) former law student who used to rent Steve's apartment and now does document review somewhere in New Jersey, my favorite scene has to be that of the Ghost of Law School Past, one of the most hauntingly disturbing and hysterical things I have seen this year.

Scroll through the videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-_wDwmOQ1U

Here's the article, including commentary from the vile crap diploma school deans and useless ABA:

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/12/14/spotlight-on-esq-never-writer-also-an-animator-a-latter-day-loyola-2l/

More Lexploitation

Earlier this year we told you that "Nora Moo Moo" (no, not King Kong) would be arriving in Los Angeles. Well, she has arrived and those previously nice California rates are beginning to plummet:

"Here is a Lexploitation posting on Craigslist. I know because I received the same e-mail directly from them, although they also mentioned that there will be no paid parking parking ($60/week).

On a positive note, Providus is staffing a project at 34/hr."

http://losangeles.craigslist.org/lac/lgl/1500640581.html

Another E-Discovery Shin-dig

"Hey Tom, Did you see this? Let's Gate-Crash the E-Discovery Shin-dig!‏

Listen to some of the podcasts! We have Diane Barasso, slave-mistress of Barasso, and the Panega-3 outsourcing crew! Sounds like quite a shindig."

Learn how to most efficiently downsize and outsource your legal work to India, followed by a presentation by Lady Barasso on how best to torture those Americans remaining through "non technology solutions designed to maximize efficiency, including ways to accelerate the review teams." I am curious as to what "non technology techniques" Lady Barasso has in mind to prod the teams along, especially when she oversees one of the most stifling, demoralized, low paid review camps in the NY metropolitan area. Maybe she will give a lesson in her infamous churn and burn mass firing techniques.

http://www.ediscoveryevent.com/main/?utm_campaign=MPPosse&utm_medium=banner&utm_source=exacttarget.com&utm_content=home&utm_term=discount&MAC=IUS_POSSE_#1

Matasar's Junk Bonds

In the unregulated Wild West fantasyland of the American Bar Association, you now have a dean of one of the most overpriced law schools in the nation (who has jacked up tuition 5x faster than inflation over the last 10 years) serving as the head of the Board of Directors of a private student loan financing company. Put this together with the fact that many of the bonds sold off into the ABS market by this financing operation are now going negative, and you have one fishy situation. Lucky for the investors in the FFELP trust, the American taxpayers will be on the hook for 97% of the principal and accrued interest AND PENALTIES in many of these garbage loans.

Thankfully for us, several reporters are interested in looking into this seedy situation, while the ABA sits back and promotes outsourcing and "how to get ripped off while setting up a solo practice" promotional blogs.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Fitch-Affirms-Access-Group-bw-809064258.html?x=0&.v=1

Snubbed By The "ABA Journal Blawg 100" This Year

Despite winning our category last year, it looks like we weren't recognized by the ABA editors this year. I guess our Congressional letter writing campaign and our nationwide call to defund the organization didn't go over too well.

Regardless, I urge everyone to vote AGAINST the "Strategic Legal Technology" blog for Prism Legal under the tech category. Thanks ABA for honoring an Indian outsourcer in one of the worst job markets for young lawyers EVER.

http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/third_annual_aba_journal_blawg_100

Another Angry Letter To A Law School Dean

"Dean Hiram Chodosh
Dean Reyes Aguilar

S.J. Quinney College of Law
University of Utah
332 S. 1400 E., Room 101
Salt Lake City , UT 84112

Dear Reyes and Hiram,

Gentlemen, on your school’s materials, it states that 98% of graduates from the Class of 2008 were employed within 9 months of graduation. And, according to the representatives from your school, this is based off of 100% response rate to the graduate survey.

The same material also claims that the median starting salary is $89,021 for the Class of 2008. Is this counting private and public employers? Is this also counting those graduates who are working in non-law positions? Does this median figure include those working as retail and insurance salespeople, school teachers, clerks, and research assistants?

Lastly, the school lists a starting salary range of $42,000-$215,000. So, does this mean that not one single graduate from 2008 found a job making less than $42,000? I find this incredibly hard to believe – isn’t there a large oversupply of lawyers and JDs in the U.S. ? Since your school publishes and presents these figures to attract more applicants, would you be willing to submit these figures to an outside, independent audit?"

1 Hour Notice

"This is my first MAJOR gripe about doc review in about 3 years. In July about 60 people were recruited by Lexolution to do a review for Dechert. The review initially went well. We did our job, had no complaints from the people upstairs and then all of a sudden we were told to pack our stuff because the project will be suspended until at least next week. We were given 1 hour notice on the eve of thanksgiving week! Some people actually need to prepare to take their belongings (e.g. tupperware, mugs, dinner, ipods, wires, etc.) since we practically lived there anyway and were all under the impression that the project was going to last through December

Its clearly obvious where we rank on the totem pole but they should've had the decency to give us more notice than 1 hour. To add insult to injury, we may also not qualify to file for unemployment until we find out whether in fact we are officially unemployed. We were told that we should know by Wednesday whether we're coming back. What a load of crap this is!

Of course, I'm not surprised that we were let go right before thanksgiving. After all, its not as if Dechert has any respect for social standards and to them we are a dime a dozen anyway. But at least have the decency to give us more notice than 1 hour! It is noteworthy that we were all let go on a Friday. Ya think this was planned in advance?

It just goes to show that there is no fraternity among the legal profession, nor are there any social boundaries. For the first time in my life, I'm thankful we have a penal code. Who knows, if murder were legal they would probably set the whole case room on fire just to avoid letting us have our unemployment benefits, which by the way, is not nearly enough to get by."

Return Of The Eunuch

BLAST FROM THE PAST, THE EUNUCH IS BACK!
"'The Eunuch' is back in the general population. I heard through a friend that he is on the Countrywide project at Labaton as a temp making a whopping $32 an hour flat. Apparently he is no longer with Anita's shit law firm. Also, I heard that he is trying to impress at Labaton and become a project leader. He does this by copying and pasting large portions of the document in the Attorney Comments field of the coding sheet thereby hoping to impress; of course, this dumbass provides no relevant comments of his own. But from what I hear, it doesn't take a lot to impress on the Labaton project. The Eunuch and Labaton: What a perfect duo!"

BLAST FROM THE PAST - http://temporaryattorney.blogspot.com/2006/01/anita-and-her-sidekick.html
http://temporaryattorney.blogspot.com/2006/02/hey-heyyo-yo-sidekick-has-got-to-go.html

A Happy New Year's Surprise: Unemployment Benefit Extensions Set To Expire By End Of The Year

Readers of your blog should note that the recent unemployment extensions do not apply to everyone. This is especially important for those laid off after July 1, 2009, as we go into the holiday season when temp hiring may slow down.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/us/19unemploy.html?_r=1&hp

Blacklisted By Lexolution

Wear it as a badge of honor. The arrogance and greed of those shysters is so great that they think they are immune from 19th century fire and labor code regulations.

"I just walked off a LeClair Ryan document review gig. Although the fact that I was thankfully offered a better paying job at another firm and by another agency, the work conditions at LeClair were so ridiculous that I probably would have left anyway. Some of the random activities prohibited at this jokehouse: wearing earphones, making phone calls, text msging, doing anything with your phone, having a non document review related conversation with anyone near you, etc.

Despite promptly notifying my rep, I still was graced with a bitchy phone call about how unprofessional I am. Oh, I almost forgot, 15 dollars an hour. Parking not included.

I imagine I'm now blacklisted from Lexolution, but I'm so bitter I couldn't care less."

An Open Letter To Dean Richard "The Slimeball" Matasar

"Tom:

Attached is a copy of an email I sent to Richard Matasar at New York Law School. I'm forwarding it to you because I thought you might be interested in it, given your recent post on your blog about Access Group and Matasar.

Thanks and keep up the good work with the blog."


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From:
Date: Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 11:21 AM
Subject: Letter from an '02 almunus
To: rmatasar@nyls.edu

Dear Mr. Matasar:

My name Is . I am a 2002 graduate of New York Law School, and I am admitted to practice in both New York and New Jersey.

I am writing to encapsulate and memorialize my disappointment with both you and New York Law School in general. I'm terribly disappointed with how my legal "career" has played out in the seven years since I graduated, and I was shocked and outraged to hear that you concurrently serve as Dean of NYLS AND as Chairman of the Access Group (a CLEAR conflict of interest that should be addressed by the ABA and New York Bar Ethics Committee).

In short, my NYLS degree is not worth the incredibly high price tag that I paid for it, using student loan funds I obtained from your Access Group. I was unable to ever obtain a permanent legal job that would pay me enough to both service my student loan debt and put food on my table. This was not for lack of trying; I utilized Attorney Resume and paid top dollar to have my resume written and gain access to almost 1,000 law firms' contact information, only to be rejected by EVERY firm to which I sent my resume. (That's correct: almost 1,000 REJECTIONS - both affirmative rejections and "trashcan rejections," where they didn't write back. Not even ONE interview.)

I contacted the NYLS "Career Services Department" in 2003 (in quotes because it's not really a Career Services Department, but a farce). They apologized that I was having problems and directed me to a link on the NYLS website to TEMP AGENCIES, under the guise of "Legal Recruiters." "Lots of our graduates do Contract Attorney work to hold them over until they can find permanent employment," they said. Little did I know what "Contract Attorney" work entailed, how horribly and disrespectfully I'd be treated, and how I'd ruin even the slightest chance I'd have to secure a permanent job with the albatross of "Contract Attorney" on my resume. But this was supposed to "hold me over," as per your "Career Services" department's assertion.

Since I was desperately in need of income in order to eat and service my debt to your Access Group, I contacted the temp agencies and was soon put to work for approximately $30 an hour. The conditions were reminiscent of a Third World sweatshop; there were over 100 "attorneys" stuffed into a dingy, poorly ventilated basement that was infested with cockroaches! And there were an inordinate amount of NYLS graduates on this job; I don't have an exact number, but I would estimate at least 15 or so.

This project lasted approximately three months, at which point it ended and I registered with several other agencies. I quickly was placed on another project that was worse than the first one, at a very prestigious downtown firm. We were shoved into a sub-sub basement, surrounded by mountains of dusty and dirty boxes, and made to review the contents of these boxes. Now I have no aversion to getting my hands dirty, but this was ridiculous, given the abuse we sustained at the hands of our supervisors. I won't go into more detail, but it was a terrible experience. And, once again, there were and inordinate number of NYLS graduates working with me.

These temporary jobs continued for five years. For five years, I bounced from one temporary job to another, some lasting for a few weeks, some lasting almost a year. No opportunity for advancement, no respect, no benefits (or at least benefits that were too expensive for me to afford, given I was being soaked by the Access Group each month and had other bills to pay.) Then the economic crisis of 2008 happened.

I completed my last (and possibly worst) temporary project in November 2008. Since then, I have been unable to land another temporary project. That's right, Mr. Matasar: I have been unemployed for ONE YEAR!! For one year, I've been collecting unemployment benefits and struggling to make my student loan payments to your Access Group.

In the past year, I've been frantically trying to find work, to no avail. I've sent out hundreds of resumes, to no avail. I even have an interesting story for you:

A college friend of mine works for Cognizant, a mobile communications technology company. Upon hearing of my plight, he asked me to give him my resume so he could forward it to his friend in the legal department. I hesitatingly did so, knowing in my heart and mind that I would be quickly rejected and laughed at because of all the Contract Attorney experience listed on my resume. (It has been my experience that Contract Attorney experience is a quick way to get your resume thrown into the trash in record time. I've heard several interesting justifications for this, including that Contract Attorney experience is an indicator that the candidate "didn't really want a permanent position." Meanwhile, Contract Attorney work was the ONLY work I could get that would allow me to earn enough money to survive and pay my debt to THE ACCESS GROUP. Can you say CATCH-22, Mr. Matasar?)

My prediction came true: my friend called me a few days after forwarding my resume and told me his friend in the legal department determined that I "didn't have the skill set" they needed. My friend pressed him to define exactly what he meant by "skill set," and he said the following (my friend actually took notes):

1) New York Law School is a joke, a farce. They don't even consider NYLS graduates for attorney positions. He might be able to get me an interview for a paralegal position though, but it's a long shot. (Mr. Matasar. I AM A LICENSED ATTORNEY, NOT A PARALEGAL!! I SPENT OVER $140,000 TO OBTAIN MY J.D. FROM NYLS AND I'M ADMITTED TO PRACTICE IN TWO JURISDICTIONS!!)

2) Contract Attorney work is GARBAGE. It's document review and can be done by "monkeys." It's not substantive legal experience, and is indicative of my not wanting to get a permanent job. (Meantime, I couldn't get any other work, as I've said. My friend even told him this, but it went in one ear and out the other.)

3) There was no way my friend's friend could forward my resume to his superior without looking foolish and being repremanded for wasting his superior's time.

So, Mr. Matasar, there you have it. I spent top dollar, which I borrowed from your ACCESS GROUP, to get my J.D. from NYLS and pass two bar exams, only to be shunted aside, marginalized, and humiliated by the legal industry. I am on the verge of bankruptcy and as of next month, I will be unable to continue making payments on my ACCESS GROUP student loans. I plan on writing a letter when the next payment is due, explaining that I didn't get what I paid for and was mislead by NYLS's job statistics prior to enrolling (NYLS misleads potential students with employment numbers - you include temporary Contract Attorneys as being fully employed at large firms, which is not the whole truth), and I'm suspending my payments. I am prepared and willing to face the legal wrath that will occur when I default, and I see it as a golden opportunity for me to expose both NYLS's fraud and your unethical conflict of interest

I plan on expressing my outrage at your conflict of interest, namely that you are concurrently the Dean of New York Law School AND the chairman of the Access Group. You thus have a VESTED INTEREST in continuing to mislead NYLS students, convincing them to take on huge amounts of debt from your ACCESS GROUP, which means you personally reap a double benefit. It's not right, and it's not fair. I can't believe you think this conflict is acceptable. It's so wrong, so unethical, and it needs to be addressed on a much bigger level than this email.

Sincerely,

Fool Me Once

I received the following email from several ticked off people this week. If you have followed this blog for any particular length of time, you would know that a project offer from SkaTTTen is like receiving a vow of fidelity from Eliot Spitzer, or a promise from Barack Obama that taxes will not be increased on the middle class.

"Hello,

I wanted to update to let you know, with my deepest regrets and with Skadden’s deep regrets, that the project has now been postponed indefinitely. If anything changes, I will let you know as soon as possible. Clutch Group and Skadden both apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. I hope we have the opportunity to staff you on a project soon. Keep me updated as to your availability. Have a great weekend.

Elle

Recruiter
ClutchGroup
Smart solutions. No borders"

Did Hell Just Freeze Over? Never Mind

I almost dropped to the floor when I read that the ABA (the American Biglaw Association) was actually confronting reality and addressing the issue of crushing student loan debt head-on. When I actually read what they were proposing, however, it didn't take long to realize what they were really up to:

"The move would help the private loan providers, too, by helping borrowers to pay off their loans when otherwise they might default, Lamm added. 'The [private loan providers] should like this plan because otherwise there is a bankruptcy bath waiting in the wings,' she said."

It seems like Richard Matasar and his crony ilk in the Access Group are in over their heads and need a bailout. With the recent creation of the Income Contingent Repayment plan (ICR), what we would essentially be doing by converting private loans into federal ones is socializing the risk of worthless TTT law degrees and putting on the backs of future American taxpayers millions of dollars in guarantees in worthless triple rated "TTT" junk bonds. I say no way.

What we really need:
1. Create transparency and standardization in the publication of law school post-graduate career statistics.
2. Reallow private student loans to be discharged under the federal bankruptcy code. If Access Group can't underwrite credit worthy loans, they should go out of business.
3. Disallow law school deans from serving as CEOs of private lending companies. Clear conflict of interest.

That is all.

http://www.theposselist.com/2009/11/11/aba-proposes-law-student-loan-relief/

The "Distinguished" Legal Profession

At BYU, a law student shows up to class donning full military garb. In NYC, a distinguished Harvard grad tries to torch a church containing the remains of several 9/11 victims using teddy bears as kindling. In a certain document review dungeon that shall remain nameless, disgusting creatures fornicate with each other in filthy basement stalls. Across town, a legal staffing agency hungry for a profit neglects their due diligence and staffs a project with a sexual predator. When heading off to work in the distinguished profession of law, don't forget to bring your mace!

Happy Halloween

Or, for those in the Sullivan & Cromwell basement, just another Saturday in the office.

The Hudson Goon

Steve the program manager from Hudson who was in charge of the Cadwalder project is a true piece of work--while he was training us he was condescending, arrogant and few times during the privilege log review when he found himself lost he lashed out at us by saying: "you are the ones who will be doing this, not me." His level of nastiness was so apparent than even the associates at Cadwalder looked at each other and kept sending texts to each other in apparent disbelief.

His arrogance was met with utter silence.

The Return of "Lily"?

"I would just like to let you and your readers know that Hudson is trying to staff a long term project at Hughes Hubbard and Reed again. I don't know if this is for the Vioxx cases that didn't settle or a new case of the same magnitude. I also don't know if they will be reopening the offsite plantation. The Eggman was canned a while back, but Lily is still around."

For those newbies fresh out of law school who haven't had the privilege of running across Lily, you are in for a real treat:

"For those who don't know, 'Lily' is not her actual name. Her real name rhymes with Lily and I will use this psuedonym to protect the guilty.

Anyone at HH knows who she is. She is a grotesque 300 lbs, and her physical deformities are utterly beyond description. Her best friend is a bag of cheetos, and her fat, mangled fingers are often coated with their orange powder. She drives her slaves (this is the slang for 'managing' temps or 'contract attorneys') offsite in a basement in New Jersey. I believe there may be windows, but I have not been there myself to verify this fact.

Lily does maintain a presence in the New York office, rather unfortunately, and we see her rear her ugly head from time to time. Probably just taking orders from some non-equity partner in charge of the firm's various doc review projects. The sole purpose of this woman's existence is to squeeze every last drop of efficiency out of each slave, and to make their miserable lives as horrible as possible, all for $35hour."

Welcome to 2009! Same Lily, much lower rate!

http://temporaryattorney.blogspot.com/2007/04/lily-hughes-hubbard-horror.html

"Let Them Eat Cake" - The Great CLE Scam

"Every day, I get at least one email from the New York City Bar, almost always offering some expensive for-pay CLE program. Yesterday, I received an email titled Better hurry up last chance to register for CLE class! This reminds me of an Indian tout on the street trying to hook you to go into their shop to spend some dough. So much for the illustrious image of the Bar with their grand office on West 44th Street with plaques of all their famous members (100% from the big law firms of course).

I have accepted at this point that the New York Bar will never do a thing to help my career and that they will give a license to anyone who will pay their unconstitutional annual fees. But they could spare us these desperate messages for CLE money. And with it, their usual veiled threats about what happens if you don't pay for CLE and you will be disbarred.

Howard Miller, the new big firm head of the California Bar, said that his contribution will be to force more pro bono work on California lawyers. California has 225,000 lawyers and has very high bar testing and annual fees. So they throw another burden on the funeral pyre of all their thousands of unemployed lawyers. While Miller says, "Let eat cake". Since he is living off their millions in fees."

Juristaff

Tom,

Just an update. I am on that "junior" level document review that pays $23 an hour. Ironically, not one person on here is junior. Oh, well. Check out this email we received today:

"Please pick up the pace. They are expecting you to do about 80 docs an hour and all of you are less than half that. Changes will be made soon if this does not change asap."

What a dump this place is. Every week half the project leaves. We drew a little graveyard with tombstones and the grim reaper on it. Soon, it won't be able to hold all the contract attorney dead.

Paul Weiss: The Cartoon

Check out the following work from Kate Scurfield, an amazing cartoonist from England who amazingly captures the hell of the Paul Weiss basement. Thank you to the "Jobless Lawyer" blogger who posted this and pointed it out.

http://joblesslawyer.com/cartoons/101209-humor-print-1-document-review-monkeys/

The New York Bar - "The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas"

"Tom, the biggest issue in the New York bar association is whether to admit ex-cons. Since they admit non-J.D. foreigners and allow outsourcing, why not ex-cons?

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2007/03/08/new-york-sets-a-high-bar-for-convicted-felon/

Incredibly, the New York bar presented this to the newspapers as their having such a high standard, since New Jersey went ahead and admitted the ex-murderer.
Most of the people writing on the blog said he made one little mistake and should be admitted.

The New York bar will admit anyone. Despite their marble statutes and supposed grand traditions, they are all about collecting (high) fees. It's the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas that is not in Texas (even Texas has higher standards).

I once worked on a project where months into it one of the 'lawyers' was found not to have been admitted anywhere. Last bar exam, the New York bar boasted a 91% pass rate. Basically, anyone at all can be a lawyer in New York. The State Bar of California boasts on its website the constantly increasing number of lawyers. Last year I checked it was 200,000."

Paul Weiss Axes Staff Attorneys

Above the Law is reporting today that Paul Weiss is conducting a series of quiet layoffs in their staff attorney program. One befuddled tipster reported, "some of these staff attorneys have been there for seven and eight years and they are not even offering severance." Cry me a river. What do you expect from a bunch of despicable human rights violators who conduct mass retaliatory firings after workers contact the media about cockroach infested work environs and atrocious working conditions? After 8 years, Paul Weiss has thrown you out like a piece of trash, just as you have been complicit in treating countless souls like disposable trash throughout the years. Welcome back to the temp pool!

http://abovethelaw.com/2009/10/paul_weiss_staff_attorney_layo.php

Job Plunge

While there appears to have been a recent flurry of activity in the temporary document review job market, the overall American job market continues to deteriorate. They always say that an uptick in the temporary job market is a leading indicator of good things to come. Let's hope so, and pray that the red line doesn't continue to plunge off the cliff.

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/10/comparing-employment-recessions.html

Recovery?

"Tom,

Just wanted you to know that I started a large scale project today. It's the De Novo project in NYC. It's packed to the gills with over one hundred coders. Everyone seems to be in good spirits and thankful to be back at work. In fact, I think many of us are suffering from post-traumatic stress. Whether it was spending months unemployed wondering how we were going to feed our families, or having the fortitude to put up with the "gansta gang" at Sullivan & Cromwell which was oftentimes the only show in town, we have been through a lot. Let's hope this recovery is sustainable."

Labaton Suckarow Update

Here is an update on the Labaton project. I just want to make the point, again, how greedy these law firms are. They want all the rewards but none of the responsibilities for hiring attorneys directly. They get business from government entities and have licenses to do business in NY, but yet none of the laws that protect workers' rights are applicable because we happen to be attorneys. It is only in the USA among western countries that this would be allowed to happen because the idea of good corporate citizenship is anathema to these greedy bastards.


HAPPY YOM KIPPUR FROM LABATON

Labaton which hired a bunch of attorneys for its Countrywide project some months ago and paid them $32 flat per hour with absolutely no benefits announced that the firm will be closed for Yom Kippur and there will be no pay. How wonderful! I am all for respecting each others' religion, but I draw the line when it takes money out of my pocket. If you wish to take the day off, enjoy, but why should a company consider it okay to close down on a religious holiday, not a federal one, and screw their Countrywide "employees" out of a day's pay. Labaton, you suck. You are cheap.

One of the named plaintiffs in Countrywide is the NYS Comptroller, so you Labaton think it is fine to get business from a government entity, operate in New York City and then hire attorneys for a long term project while giving them no benefits whatsoever, and then to boot, impose a religious holiday on them. What the hell is wrong with this country? No wonder that it is so fucked up. It is one thing to get screwed by an agency, but you Labaton made us your employees. You want to pay us the minimum by cutting out the agency's take, and then you bill the client God knows what for our services, all the while providing no benefits in return. We can't even get paid overtime because of the bullshit professional exemption in NY. The cleaning people have more benefits and rights than we do.

Labaton if you had any decency you would pay us for Yom Kippur, if just to create goodwill, but of course you are too short sighted and cheap to do that. Instead you continue to operate your sweatshop, provide no benefits to your "employees," bilk the client for as much as you think you can get away with, and have a nasty bleached blonde police the caseroom in the hope of finding somebody eating a banana at his or her desk; I think that bleach has leaked into whatever little brain she has. Please deliver me from this hellhole.

More Elite Click Monkeys

In Chicago, only top tier, top 1/3rd of the class, former biglaw associates with 2+ years of litigation experience need apply (products liability associates preferred!). Unreal. Game over.

"Counsel On Call is currently interviewing attorneys with at least one year of solid electronic document review experience for a contract assignment in downtown Chicago. Must have worked as a litigation associate in a large law firm 2+ years. Experience with products liability litigation strongly preferred. Full time, requires a three month commitment. Top tier school and top 1/3 of class required. Please e-mail resume to julie.lehrman@counseloncall.com."

Tower Legal - $18 per hour

"Tom, your website is awesome. it is very informative and funny. im a recent nyc tier 1 grad awaiting admission to the bar in ny and nj. i got a call from tower legal staffing offering me $18 per hour, since it is ajd/paralegal project. I declined. She pressured me telling me that it is the going rate for unadmitted JD's. I assumed she was lying, but either way, I felt it was exploitative, since my cleaning lady earns $15 per hour with zero education and zero student loans to pay off. I just thought I would share this with."

Unfortunately, she wasn't lying. JD rates (for those few that are lucky enough to be offered work) continue to fall through the teens, and admitted attorney rates are dropping to as low as $23 an hour straight time. The situation is certainly exploitative, as we discuss on here ad nauseam. Trying to support oneself on twenty bucks an hour, after taxes, student loan payments, and non-subsidized health insurance is nearly impossible. Furthermore, the work is oftentimes unsteady, the agencies are increasingly engaging in bait-and-switch techniques, the positions are truly dead-end in every sense of the word, and the working conditions are many times less than ideal. Welcome to hell.

Dupont, Pioneer In Legal Outsourcing Slammed For Discovery Fraud

It looks like the Dupont Corporation was recently slammed by a Florida judge for allegedly providing inaccurate and misleading discovery responses. If the plaintiffs' attorneys really wanted to have a field day, they should examine the cadre of unlicensed foreign nationals that who are currently reviewing discovery documents by the sweatshop load.

http://www.abajournal.com/news/judge_strikes_dupont_defenses_in_benlate_case_due_to_fraud_on_court/

Document Review Elite

Tom,

Saw this posting recently for a 'top tier' document review project:

"Compliance LP is staffing an immediate document review project in Washington, DC. We are seeking recent '09 law review graduates or graduates from top -tier law schools, awaiting bar results. The project will require 50-60 hours per week for 5-8 weeks at a competitive rate with OT.

Interested and qualified candidates must be conscientious, posses a strong work ethic and be eager to wok in a professional working environment. Document review preferred, but not required."

Apparently not even document review is low enough for those of us from bad law schools anymore.

The ABA Section of Legal Education & Admissions to the Bar

Don't expect clear and transparent post-graduate employment statistics anytime soon. This committee is a complete and utter scam. It is literally packed to the brink with members of the law school industry cartel. Although the Section's bylaws mandate that only 50% of the council's seats be occupied by law school deans, faculty, and administrators, it is quite clear that the other half of the board is populated by lapdogs who are clearly not disinterested. A Harvard 2nd year as the representative voice for the entire national law student body?

Dean of New England School of Law: Vice Chair;
Dean of Univ of Montana School of Law: Member;
Deans of Hastings, Miami, American, Washington Schools of Law: All Members;
Harvard second-year law student: Student Member;

The committtee on its website brags that "in order to acheive its goals of improving the quality of legal education, character and fitness assessments, and bar admission standards, the Section works closely with the Association of American Law Schools, and the Access Group..... among others." In the past year and a half, the Section has granted provisional approval to the Elon, Charlotte, and Drexel Schools of Law, and has granted full approval to the Florida A&M and Western State University Schools of Law. They have also granted acquiescence for the scam school Ave Maria to get up and move across the country, and have also removed Golden Gate and Whittier Schools of Law from probation. The committee is also mulling the idea of allowing certain of these scam school to do away with the LSAT, and has put out a proclamation declaring that swine flu is a bad thing. No word from them yet on the fraudulent and disingenuous marketing materials put out by many of these law schools, reports which have recently surfaced in a large number of recent mainstream media articles.

Although it was announced last month that there was a vacancy on the committee, and while it would be nice to have the perspective of a working class lawyer on that board, good luck achieving that in reality. For one thing, in order to be eligible to serve, you are mandated to pay dues to the ABA criminal syndicate. Actually reaching the board is another thing entirely. The rules say that, "the president of the board will activate the process in the Section Bylaws to fill a vacant seat." The "Section Bylaws" are a complex, byzantine set of regulations that probably haven't been revised or read since the 19th century. In reality, the seat will in all likelihood go to someone who the chair picks out of his preferred rolodex. Even if a member could be chosen who could adequately represent the interests of the overwhelming majority of working class lawyers out there, he/she would be so out of place that it wouldn't even be funny. It would be like a drunk transgender stripper showing up to a Southern Baptist Convention.

I am sure that the other ABA committee that put out that ridiculous "let's ship all the legal work to India" opinion is the same way.

The Push For Better Job Information For Incoming Law Students

Professor William Henderson is the lone responsible voice in a pack of ivory tower theives. Indiana is lucky to have him. In NY, we are surrounded by such low life scumbag "educators" as Dean Matasar, Joan "King" Wexler, and the Valvoline Dean.

http://www.abajournal.com/news/aba_should_publish_better_job_info_for_naive_law_students_prof_says/

Don't count on sensible, independent law school employment reporting coming any time soon. As Professor Henderson so accurately notes, "Regarding jobs in private practice, how many are working as contract attorneys? Nobody really knows, and the issue is not on the section's agenda. If these data are published, some law schools would probably go out of business.”

More importantly, as an astute commenter to the NY Times article noted yesterday, "It should be noted that the ABA leadership is composed of big law lawyers whose firms benefit greatly from the oversupply of lawyers because it allows the big law firms to pay rock bottom prices for the huge numbers of temp doc review attorneys they hire for large cases. Of course, these same firms then turn around and bill their clients top dollar for the same temp doc review attorneys that they are paying the lowest possible wages to. It is a win win for the big law firms. The fools who have been defrauded into persuing a law career wind up as debt and wage slaves for the benefit of big law and the banks who have offered the wage slaves loans backstopped by the government." In that vein, we have ShitStaff Staffing Agency offering this morning a pathetic, benefitless $23 an hour rate. The misery goes on.

Lock The Law School Doors

Great article.

Love the description of the Joan King (see tab on right) phenomena:

"Take, for instance, the employment statistics posted on the Web sites of three low-ranked law schools in New York City, the country’s biggest market for legal employment. All three advertise that 45 to 60 percent of their 2008 graduates who reported salary information are making a median salary of $150,000 to $160,000.

Now, of course there must be some way of slicing and dicing the numbers to yield that magic result. But what happens, in practice, is that prospective degree-purchasers enroll in these $43,000-a-year programs believing their chances of landing that Big Law job are about one in two. Tempting odds."

ABA utterly out of touch:

"The American Bar Association, which continues to approve law schools with impunity and with no end in sight, bears complicity in creating this mess. Yet a spokeswoman, citing antitrust concerns, says the A.B.A. takes no position on the optimal number of lawyers or law schools."

A whole future generation of low wage sweatshops coming down the pike:

"Meanwhile, as job opportunities abate, law school matriculation rates rise unchecked. Each year, the number of students who enroll at one of 200 law schools approved by the American Bar Association inches closer to 50,000."

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/02/hold-for-tues-pm-another-view-lock-the-law-school-doors/

More Solo Cheerleader Shysters

Look at what I received from the State of Texas Bar "job agent" today (below). Looks like there is a huge proliferation of shysters trying to make money off the unemployed by setting you up as a "solo." LOL!

"Job description:

We work directly with the Placement Centers of many of the State and Local Bar Associations across the nation. It is our common goal to help our members develop their careers and income through placement and counseling services. As you can imagine with this slowing economy, there are many incredibly qualified and talented attorneys seeking career assistance. Whether you are a recent law graduate, associate, or former partner; law firms are making it very clear that unless you can bring a considerable book of business with you, the chances of the firm extending an offer is greatly reduced until the economy improves greatly. So what do you do until then?

- Quit practicing law?
- Just keep looking until the economy improves?
- Build your Book of Business as you continue your search

For an attorney, "quitting" is never an option and unless you have deep resources, waiting 8-24 months for the economy to turn might not be economically feasible either. We believe the most important and successful approach for your career is to develop your own book of business (working) while you continue your search and to keep your resumes work history active as an attorney. This means "Going Solo" and establishing your law practice while you search. That might sound a little scary, lonely and perhaps even costly to most attorneys coming from an established firm, but it doesn't have to be if you go about it the right way.

We would like to recommend a new and cost effective solution for attorneys who are looking to "Go Solo" as an interim solution to their employment situation. It is GoSoloEsq.com.

GoSoloEsq.com provides attorneys with the ability to establish a Solo Practice and complete Virtual Law Office for as little as $129 a month. That includes the Virtual services, Office services, and Networking services. Below is a list of included services:

- Virtual Law Office (available in over 400 US cities)
- Professional address, call/mail center, client meeting rooms (all while working from home)
- Access to client meeting rooms as needed on an hourly basis
- Free meeting room office vouchers valued at $1,100
- "Lawyer to Lawyer" Case Referral (receive or refer with fee sharing)
- Mentoring Services (ask or offer your services to other members)
- Contract Attorney Work (take on contract work while you grow your client base)
- Ask The Experts Forum (interact with other solo attorneys by topic or specific area of law)
- Access to virtual or onsite staff (paralegals, legal secretaries, word processors)
- Online links to state forms, practice forms, templates and tools

* We guarantee you will receive referrals from the service each month or membership is free.

Click here for a full review of their services!

We understand that this might not be a solution for everyone during their employment transition, but if you find yourself contemplating "quitting" or "waiting" then at least take a look at what we have to offer. You might find "Going Solo" is just what you need to keep your career fresh, your talents sharp, your work history active, your employment value high, and your cash flow positive.

Take a moment to visit us at www.gosoloesq.com and see why "Going Solo" no longer means "Going it Alone."

Help Wanted: Assist Office Tiger In Outsourcing American Jobs Overseas

"Tom,

Here is an interesting job opportunity that was posted on craigslist this morning:

"Serve as a Records Analyst to one of our global clients for a major records management initiative relating to our client’s safety, health and environmental documents. The goal of this project is to identify, review, index and categorize these records in accordance with new records categories being developed by the client. The scope of this project will include all of our client’s plant sites in the United States and has an unknown duration, but approximately 1-2 years. This position will be responsible for visiting plant sites and identifying, reviewing, indexing and categorizing applicable documents at such plant sites. We are looking for an individual that is willing and able to travel each week to various client sites for document review. This travel would be US based only."

http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/lgl/1351296089.html

Don't be fooled! The ad says that you will be working for RR Donnelley, which is a respected business print company. If you do a little research, you will learn who you are really working for, none other than that bottom feeding LPO firm known as Office Tiger. Office Tiger is hiding behind the respected name of a large American Fortune 500 company. Why aren't they using their own name? Can someone please call Lou Dobbs? If I could venture a guess, you will be collecting documents so that they can be sent back to India to be reviewed by low wage, unlicensed professionals."

Ex-Toyota Lawyer Alleges Destruction of Evidence In Rollover Suits

"The story says Biller’s suit has 'electrified the plaintiffs bar, where some lawyers involved in vehicle cases have long voiced suspicions about foreign automakers withholding evidence.'"

http://www.abajournal.com/news/ex-toyota_lawyer_alleges_destruction_of_evidence_in_rollover_suits/

Outsourcing discovery work to India is a great idea. If you think foreign corporations are good at withholding evidence, just wait until you see what the LPO's do. Oh, I forgot: the ABA says that a 3rd world sweatshop factory is okay as long as one American attorney is "supervising" the work. Too bad that "supervising" attorney is off having a nervous breakdown!

The Outsourcing Cheerleader Crew

Someone sent me the following link from Susan Cartier Liebel, wanting me to respond to some hit job offered by an anonymous contract attorney criticizing the "victimization" mentality offered by this and the "Big Debt Small Law" blog.

Frankly, I see no need to respond to the Susan Liebel, Carolyn Elefant, and Lisa Solomon crowd. Responding and arguing with those hacks would only provide them with greater visibility to sell and tout their worthless books and online solo university seminars. This blog generates ZERO in terms of ad revenue, and frankly running it has become more aggravation than it is worth. Take from it what you like.

http://buildasolopractice.solopracticeuniversity.com/2009/08/19/ota-response-to-atls-momma-dont-let-your-babies-grow-up-to-be-contract-attorneys/

"In case anyone fails to feel their full measure of shame over unemployment, there is an entire shame industry to whip them into shape: The career coaches, self-help books, motivational speakers and business gurus who preach that whatever happens to you must be a result of your own "attitude." Laid off and coming up empty on your job search? You must be too "negative," and hence attracting negative circumstances into your life. To paraphrase one career coach I encountered during my research for Bait and Switch: We're not here to talk about the economy or the market; we're here to talk about you.

Shame is a potent weapon, but it should never be used against the already-injured and aggrieved. Instead, let's turn it against the aggrievers: Shame on Ford and GM for putting all their eggs in the SUV basket and then laying off thousands. Shame on the CEO's who make eight-figure incomes while their lowest paid employees trudge between food banks. Shame on Congress for leaving us with an unemployment insurance program that covers only a little more than a third of the laid off."

- Barbara Ehrenreich

Plan "B" - Scrounging For Solo Work

"Tom--

I've got a good one for you--mandatory pro bono assignments. I just got off the phone with some bureaucratic drone who's about to stick me with one, so I'm fit to be tied.

I've been temping for almost nine years, but in order to keep my head above water, I also handle real estate closings, municipal court work and anything else I can scare up. In New Jersey this means I've got to have an office--not just a mail drop and a telephone answering machine. So like a lot of other attorneys I have a home office.

Here's the catch--if you practice law in New Jersey and you maintain an office, you're subject to being screwed by the legal establishment yet again by being assigned a pro bono matter, usually from the Family Part of Superior Court. Like a lot of attorneys in my position, I haven't been able to afford malpractice insurance for years. Plus, I haven't handled a family law matter in least 15 years. Not to mention the time I've got to take off from an assignment to meet with my client in this shotgun marriage and represent them in court.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that the legal establishment is incredibly hypocritical about this. Law is the only profession with this type of imposed slavery, and the Big Law partners and corporate counsels never do their own pro bono assignments--they just buck them down the line to the junior guy on the totem pole. I know this for a fact because I used to work in a corporate legal department, and we juniors had to handle not only own pro bono assignments, but the Big Guy's, too."

Scam, Scam, Scam! Peak's Concordance Training Session

For contract attorney purposes, what you need to know about the Corcordance system can be taught to a blindfolded chimpanzee in about five minutes. So-called "career counselors" that try to take advantage of the unemployed by claiming that they are conveying knowledge that offers some kind of competitive edge in these difficult economic times is truly despicable. Please, do not pay a nickel to these bozos.

"Peak Discovery is offering a series of 'Concordance Fundamentals' training sessions. Solid knowledge of Concordance, the industry’s mostwidely used document review platform, can provide an advantage to Staff of Contract Attorneys looking to secure their next role in a challenging market. This one-day course, the first of which is scheduled for September 26th, 2009, will be facilitated by Chris Ricker, Peak Discovery’s Director of Project Management and a Concordance Certified SoftwareTrainer (CCST) and Concordance Certified Software Administrator(CCSA). The course cost is $199 plus $25 materials fee (50% less than competing courses). Course benefits:

• Achieve Concordance end-user certification
• Acquire a thorough understanding of the industry’s most widely used document review platform
• Gain advantage over other candidates when competing for Staff or Contract Attorney positions"

Slave Labor

"Bad enough secretaries and some receptionists make more than a lawyer, but look at this...they expect someone starting out with over $100k in law school debt to work for free...and sad part is they will likely get a stack of resumes!

Entry Level Attorney (Midtown East)

Manhattan Personal Injury firm seeks entry-level attorney. MUST be admitted to NY bar. Foreign language skills a plus.
Salary- there is no salary the first 3 months. After 3 months, the salary will then be $25k. You will get great experience and learn how to take a case from inception through trial. You will get to handle your own caseload. Expect trial experience within 9 months of start date."

Recession Red Tape Being Outsourced To India

http://twitter.com/nbcnightlynews/status/3452956163

The ABA Isn't Amused

Above the Law and even Ann Coulter seemed to have gotten a kick out of Law Is 4 Loser's new blog.

http://bigdebtsmalllaw.wordpress.com/

Apparently, the ABA isn't such a big fan.

"Wow, that didn't take long. I posted ONE link to "Big Debt, Small Law" in the comment section over at the ABA journal website and it was quickly censored and scrubbed. I was sent the following email from those jackals just minutes ago:

I gave you a pass when your post, with blog link, was on topic, but
you're now in the realm of spam and self promotion, which violates our
comment policy.
This and similar future posts will be removed.
Best,
Molly

Guess I'm too much of a "Legal Rebel" for our pals at the ABA, eh? Did you guys catch the pathetic video of the dork who's running this new "legal rebels" farce? He's about as "rebellious" as Ralph Malph from Happy Days the time he borrowed Fonzie's leather jacket and pretended to be a biker to lay some chick. It didn't work for him, did it?

The proprietor of this website (and his many followers) are the true legal rebels. We were saying this shit when these coddled ex-Biglaw pansies and Above the Law geeks were still in diapers."

Update The Moderation Policy?

"Hi Tom -

I am writing to you because someone posted a comment about me on your blog on the ------ ------ thread. It is the last comment. I know that the spirit of a blog is to voice experiences, gripes, etc. freely, and I'm not trying to censor your blog in any way. It's just that I'm a private person, and the thought of this circulating about me has kept me up at night. I am in the early stages of pregnancy, and, as you can imagine, I need to keep stress and anxiety to a minimum. I am asking you to please delete this comment. I don't know if you normally do this, but I am asking that in my case, you do. If you decide not to, please at least do not post this request on your blog."

The Upton Sinclair Of Temp Lawyer Hell

I just learned that anonymous poster "Lawis4Losers" has started his own blog. I have always admired this poster's writing style, but his most recent entry is nothing short of brillant. Please pass this new blog around to as many people as possible.

On Paul Weiss:

"At Paul Weiss, for example, they crammed 120 people into a basement room that NYC fire code rated for 80. This was in 2005. Like steerage passengers on the Titanic, we labored in the bowels of the building, right alongside the boilers and HVACequipment. Lacking air conditioning and adequate ventilation, many came down with colds that went untreated due to the lack of healthinsurance. A cockroach problem soon erupted due to the crumbs and food garbage strewn about the cellar floor, which was treated with multiple Raidroach fogger bombs. The morning after the exterminators finished, dead roaches littered our keyboards and even crawled, stunted but still living, from the floppy drives and servers!

We were paid $21 an hour, straight time, and required to work from 9 am to 11 pm seven days a week. Forbidden to use the firm’s lavish upstairs restrooms, they had all 120 of us split a pair of airplane sized-bathrooms that were on the Concourse level under the Rock Center, open to the public and a favorite bathing spot for the homeless. One affable homeless chap named “Bones” would use the lone toilet in there as a foot bidet, rinsing his diabetic ulcer in the excrement-caked shitpot and yelling “I’m in here motherfucker!”every time one of us coders needed to relieve himself. Most of us just went next door and used the Heartland Brewery’s bathroom (did I mention that restroom breaks of over six minutes had to be deducted from one’s timesheet? As a coder, bowel movements can quickly cut into the bottom line).

Paul Weiss also blocked the fire exits with box upon box of the corporate shit-paper that arrived daily by the truckload like grist to a mill. Had a fire broken out, we would no doubt have burned to death in a modern day Triangle Shirtwaist incident, engulfed in flames while helplessly beating on box-blocked doorways. To work there was to truly feel expendable, utterly worthless and really just downright sub-human. The partners should all be ashamed of themselves."


On Sullivan & Cromwell:

"The next stop on my vagabond coding career was Sullivan & Cromwell, that whitest of the white shoe firms. This dump has three levels of sunless, underground bunkers where the temp attorneys and their documents are warehoused, far away from the skyline corner offices where the serious shitpapergets pushed. It’s like those alternative communities of urban legend that one reads about online: the subway’s “mole people” and such. You are instructed by your temp agency pimp to meet in the lobby of 125 Broad Street at 9 am sharp, where you assemble as a group to be marched upstairs and “processed” like that busload of inmates from The Shawshank Redemption. Told to dress in a “suit and tie” for the first day, they soon march you downstairs to the dungeon where the “coders for life” toil in pajamas and sweatpants, chanting “new fish, fresh fish, we got new fish today” at the suit –clad newbies who are starting the first day of the rest of their lives. Many start openly weeping into their spiffy leather Perry Ellis portfolios, some even freshly monogrammed as recent law school graduation gifts. Many start bleating mindlessly for the mothers, returning to an infantile state as the overwhelming sadness and abject disappointment slowly seeps in. As I said, welcome ye to the first day of the rest of your life!

It’s not too bad there, after you get “on the beam,” as they say in prison. Sullivan is to disorganization, chaos, and complete systemic dysfunction what Elvis was to rock n’ roll: the original master. It’s a bit like that old Cold War joke: An American and a Russian are killed together and both go to Hell. The devil greets them fiendishly and says “Gentlemen, you have two choices. You can either go to American hell or Russian hell.” Curious, the American asks the Devil what the difference is. “In American hell,” says the Devil “you have to eat one shovel full of shit each day.”

“What about the Russian hell?,’ queries the Russian in his thick accent.. The Devil replies, “Comrade, in the Russian hell you have to eat two shovelfuls of shit each day.”

The American naturally chooses the American hell; yet tellingly, the Russian opts for the Russian hell. Two years later, they cross paths and begin sharing their experiences in eternal damnation.

“Comrade, you really screwed up big-time,” says the American. “In my hell I eat my shovel of shit first thing each morning, and do whatever I want to the rest of the day.” Satisfied, he gloats and scoffs at the hapless Ruskie, who replies: “My dear friend, it is you who choose poorly. In our Russian hell, half the time there’s no shovel, and the other half the time there’s no shit!”

So goes a document review project at Sullivan. Due to their colossal ineptitude, lack of common sense, and probably outright fraud, squads of coders arrive for the mandatory 14 hour “workdays” only to be kept idly waiting for hour upon endless hour as documents are loaded, clarifications are sought, software is configured, the moon rises in Taurus and Orion descends into autumn, etc. It’s rare to squeeze more than 45 minutes of actual coding time into a 14 hour day. Not knowing the Sullivan drill, many newbie coders turn down Sullivan gigs because the long hours rightly terrify them. But us veterans know the old “Clownshop” (as the temps call it) all too well. The waiting coders nap, play cards, vandalize the workstations and so on while waiting for documents and instructions that rarely arrive. Some even operate wire fraud scams and lotteries on the S&C computers, thus “double dipping” and making real bank. A cool Nigerian coder even once used the break-room hot plate to cook us all an authentic African ox-tail stew, which ended with a dessert course provided by raiding the partner’s pantry freezer and ripping off a case of ice-cream sandwiches that were meant for some lame Merrill Lynch client meeting or whatever.

Of course, the clients are billed regardless, since firms of this caliber are as immune to the ethics rules as Typhoid Mary was to disease. It’s always some solo ambulance chaser who ends up disbarred for screwing up a $1500 fender bender whiplash case, while Sullivan and the other white-shoe thieves rip off Fortune 500 client’s cash by the wheelbarrow load withtime-wasting make-work and pointless re-reviews of the same irrelevant documents. A few weeks at this place really removes any doubt about what the “practice of law” has devolved into circa 2009: a soulless, money-grubbing scam that is socially toxic, utterly pointless, and rife with insecurity and adolescent pettiness. Did I mention that licensed attorneys below the associate level are not even referred to as “attorneys” by the insecure dolts who run this glorified sewer? The sub-associate level lawyers are called “case analysts” and are essentially perma-temps, installed to babysit the coders and squeal on them like the “straw bosses” of 19thcentury coal mines. Chosen more for their ass-kissing and willingness to rat out slackers than any legal ability, some of these folks are notorious on temp message boards, like the dreaded geek “Clovester” and well-fed “Big Mamma.” Keep an eye out for them. Another SullCromscam is to fill the temp ranks with minority lawyers, thus tooting the “diversity” trumpet and looking good on paper to their corporate, hand-wringing whore-masters. Naturally, the partner-level ranks are as white as a wedding dress soaked in Clorox."

http://bigdebtsmalllaw.wordpress.com/

Lexolution's Southern Sweatshop

Lexolution is using a legal loophole to exploit desperate, unemployed legal workers, carrying enormous student loan debt and attempting to make a living somehow, because Lexolution DOES NOT PAY OVERTIME TO ITS WORKERS IN VIRGINIA and may not in DC – this is EXPLOITATION AT BEST AND ALL FIRMS DOING BUSINESS WITH THIS COMPANY UNDER THESE CONDITIONS SHOULD BE EXPOSED AND BOYCOTTED by their clients. Any firms outsourcing to foreign workers abroad should also be boycotted because they are taking legitimate jobs away from Americans. The laws allowing this continued exploitation must be changed immediately. PASS THE WORD.

In the heart of the confederacy and the slave capitol, you will be low balled and paid less than in the DC market always. You will never get $35 - $40 an hour, plus overtime down here.

To be avoided at all costs LeClair Ryan in Richmond, VA unless you are truly, truly desperate and can endure slave-like working conditions. Some allegedly brilliant, clueless idiot thinks people are more productive working 10 – 12 hour days if they are not allowed to talk, have no access to their cell phones (to view, answer or make any calls), and are limited to a 30 minute, unpaid lunch break in which to conduct any of their own personal affairs and eat a lunch when they are working through the regular business hours of all legitimate companies and businesses. If you are off the computer for more than a six-minute interval you are required to bill it administrative time, so if by law you are entitled to a fifteen (15) minute break for every four (4) hours you work (IN ADDITION TO YOUR 30-MINUTE LUNCH), how does that equate to being legal??? Furthermore, their database and computer systems are a complete disaster because they never seemed to work properly causing workers to do the same work over and over, or be aware of the latest changes (occurring every 5 minutes it seemed and if you happened to be out of the room at that moment, you were out of luck and doing the document review incorrectly and ever so slowly).

They have so many petty, juvenile rules you feel like you are back in elementary school where the teacher is watching over you every minute and admonishing you for the least infraction, like eating a non-candy item while sitting at your computer. There is no parking provided in the downtown area and you are strictly forbidden from entering certain areas of their offices (as if anyone wanted to go anywhere, but home once they arrived at this office). Their total disregard for the intelligence and professionalism of contract attorneys working there was made evident by the fact that they announced at the end of the work day when many attorneys had already left for the day that they would not begin working until 9:00am the next day, instead of the regular 7:00am starting time, so anyone coming two hours early (and many people did) they would not be paid and were forced to wait around without pay for two hours. Note that the firm did apologize for failing to notify Lexolution to call their people and inform them of the change in starting time --- great consolation to people who lost money, sleep and were enormously inconvenienced by that oversight!!! But that wasn’t the final icing on this cake folks, after being assured that all of the contract attorneys would be coming back to work the following day by a LeClair employee and relying to their detriment on that assurance, Lexolution emailed most people the very same evening and instructed them not to return to LeClair, to mail in their security card and that they would make arrangements to meet us to get any items we may have left at LeClair.

Scumbag Slave Driver Elli Gottesdiener Is At It Again

This time he is incognito.

This is based on communication from Eli Gottesdiener ( www.gottesdienerlaw.com ) based on a blind craigslist ad.

In subject line, he wants to know your school, your degree, your graduation date

Then Eli wants to know what you are doing, what you did at work, what your earning was (hourly or salary), and why the opportunity is appealing.

In follow up to this, he was silent on a raise timeframe, silent on benefits, and silent on O.T.

Salary starts at $20/hr. Work is in Brooklyn.

Obviously uninterested.

FirstLawJob.com Is A Scam, Scam, Scam

Hey Tom, a new company has opened to prey on the hordes of TTT losers who just took last week's NY Bar. There name is FirstLawJob.com and they spamming the job boards.

These scammers have been around in various mutations and forms since the late 1990s. Here's the deal: They tweak your TTT resume and cover letters a bit (like putting your Touro Sports Law Journal experience in boldface type), pull a 1996 Martindale directory out of a dumpster, and mail-bomb a bunch of marginal (and often defunct) shitlaw firms, many of whom haven't hired anyone since the Nixon administration. Of course, they've never actually gotten anyone a job, but the desperation and hopelessness of this market often lulls TTT grads into falling for this scam. They're a bit like the "after-scammers" who phone Ponzi scheme victims and claim to be able to recover their lost investments for an upfront fee. Smart move. After all, if someone was dumb enough to fall for the law school scam, why wouldn't they also fall for this "secondary" charade? This website was alive and well in 2006 when this year's crop of lemmings marched off to the NYC diploma mills. They all thought they'd "beat the system," and now are stuck in a lifetime of non-dischargable debt with no hope of finding ANY job, period. Ain't happening in this market.

Actually, the word "market" is a misnomer when applied to TTT grads, or even bottom half of marginally decent schools like Fordham. There is no non-biglaw legal "market" and hasn't been for years. All there is is hordes of desperately indebted losers begging for whatever gutter job they can scrounge, often under-bidding each other in the process. It's like a reverse auction: "I'll do no-fault for 35 K, 35 K going once, going twice...wait, I'll do it for 33 K. 33 K! Gavel bangs. "Sold!" One no-fault job at Melli Guerin to the 'Bozo grad in the red necktie for 33 K!"

The recent agency postings here calling for unadmitted 2009 grads are telling. These sweatshops want to exploit the false hope of the recent group of lemmings, lulling them into thinking doc review is a "resume booster" and shows initiative, etc. As the old saw goes, "if you're afraid of getting a rotten apple, don't go to the barrell. Get it off the tree. If they let anyone other than 2009 grads into this gulag, word would quickly spead about the dead-end nature of the job and kill morale like a pestilience.

We are at the end of times. Back in 2005, an unadmitted JD could toil in the Paul Weiss cockroach pit for $21 an hour + unlimited OT and $10 a day for food. Now, almost 5 years later, the same shitwork is paying $1 an hour LESS. Just you wait. There's nowhere left to stash these over-leveraged lemmings anymore, and a shitstorm of very pissed-off people are going to start speaking out more and more. You can't have 85-90% of a law school class unemployed and not expect some serious repercussions to follow.

American Bar Association Annual Meeting

No comment.

"Lifer" Need Not Apply

More Age Discrimination:


******************************************************************************************************************
Urgent and IMMEDIATE need...
Downtown Manhattan law firm seeks 2009 JD/law school graduates who just sat for the NY/NJ BAR for Monday 8/3/09 start for 1 month document review.
Will work on timely litigation. 2009 GRADS ONLY.
$20/hr hours are 10 am to 6pm plus OT
*******************************************************************************************************************


* Compensation: $20/hr plus OT.
* Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
* Please, no phone calls about this job!
* Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

Admitted Attorney Going Rate - $10 An Hour

Hi Tom,

I worked as a temp for about 4 years and now I have been unemployed
for about 6 months off and on collecting unemployment.

Yesterday, I applied for a job on craigslist for an attorney
position in queens. I will attach the part of the email with out my
name as to save myself embarrassment as I know people who read your
blog. $10 a fucking hour, I could make more working at McDonalds.


"Dear Candidate,

The starting salary is $10 per hour, $15 per hour overtime, but
will increase upon demonstration of capability. If you are interested,
please email us back the dates that you are available for an interview
this week.

Wang Law Firm"

Nostalgic For The Update Legal Girls

Lately, the news around here has been downright depressing. No more Lex-Pollution. No more Sara Kim, Scott Krowitz, Nora Plesent, or Diamond Staffing Agency. It almost makes me nostalgic for the days when the Update Legal girls ruled the roost around here.

Are You Dizzy Yet? Lexpollution Pulls The Exact Same Crap In New York

Lexolution, paired up with Hogan & Hartson, has been stringing us along with a project we were “selected” for. First, on Friday, July 17th, at 4:30 pm, we were sent the following email:


Hi Everyone,
I wanted to let you know that we are a definite go for Monday. Please come to 750 Third Avenue (b/w 46th & 47th) at 9:00 am. Tell the person at the security desk that you are there for the Lexolution/Hogan & Hartson project, and they will direct you to the appropriate floor. Please remember to bring a photo-identification. The dress code for the project is business casual, but please err on the side of business for the first day. Scott Krowitz and I will be there to greet you.
PLEASE REPLY TO THIS EMAIL UPON RECEIPT SO THAT I CAN CONFIRM THAT YOU HAVE RECEIVED THIS INFORMATION. Also, please be sure to check your emails throughout the weekend for any potential updates. Many thanks-see you Monday,
Kim


Despite, the “definite go” at four thirty, at eleven o’clock that same Friday evening, we received another email telling a different story:


Hi Everyone,
The Hogan & Hartson project WILL BEGIN ON TUESDAY, JULY 21 AT 11:00 AM, not Monday. All of the other information is the same, but it’s repeated below. Sorry to ask you to do this again, but PLEASE REPLY TO THIS EMAIL UPON RECEIPT SO THAT I CAN CONFIRM THAT YOU HAVE RECEIVED THIS NEW INFORMATION.
Date: Tuesday, July 21
Time: 11:00 am
Place: 750 Third Avenue (b/w 46th & 47th). Tell the person at the security desk that you are there for the Lexolution/Hogan & Hartson project, and they will direct you to the appropriate floor. Please remember to bring a photo-identification.
Dress Code: Business casual, but please err on the side of business for the first day.
Kim


Needless to say, the project did not start Tuesday. We were then told it would be Wednesday or Thursday. Then Tuesday night, we receive the following email:


Hi Everyone,
I just wanted to let you know that it’s not likely that Hogan will start tomorrow (but check your email before you go to bed tonight and first thing in the morning just in case). If you don’t hear from me tonight or tomorrow morning, I will be in touch at some point tomorrow to give you an update.
Thanks again for your patience.
All the best,
Kim


And, no, it didn’t start Wednesday. Or Thursday either. See below:


Hi Again Everyone,
I just wanted to let you know that I am still waiting for more information from Hogan, but it doesn’t look like it will start tomorrow. They have assured me that the project will start, but the documents are not getting loaded as quickly as they anticipated, hence the delay.
Again, I apologize for this, and appreciate your patience.
Many thanks,
Kim


On Thursday, at eleven at night, we received “reassurances” that the “technical problems” would be resolved soon, though we would not be starting Friday:


Hi Everyone,
I just wanted to touch base again and let you know that we are still waiting on a start date from Hogan. The client has been in touch several times a day and I do believe the project will start. Hogan is using Attenex, a database they have not used before, for this project, and it seems they are having problems coordinating everything to load the documents, but they fully intend to move forward with the project once everything is figured out.
I understand your frustration (I really do), and appreciate your patience. I think we will have a start date soon. Thanks again for hanging in there.
Best regards,
Kim


Late Friday night, Lexolution claimed to have “good news” for us:


Hi Everybody,
Some good news-the project IS going to begin next week. Hogan is going to start people off in staggered groups of 5-10. On Monday I should be able to give you a better idea of exactly when you can expect to start, but please check your email over the weekend in case anything changes.
Thanks again for your patience, and have a great weekend.
Best regards,
Kim


We heard nothing over our “great weekends.” On Monday, we learned that both Lexolution and Hogan are indeed full of shit, and the project would not be starting for another couple of weeks, if ever:


Hi Everybody,
I just got off the phone with the people at Hogan, and they expect that it will take at least 7-10 days for the rest of the documents to finish loading. I know this is quite a bit longer than any of us initially anticipated. At this point, I cannot honestly say when the project will be fully up and running, and I don’t want you to miss out on any other opportunities waiting for this. Obviously, it will be great if this works out, but I will completely and totally understand if you need to take something else.
I know it doesn’t help, but I am truly sorry about the delay. I will continue to keep you posted about this project (and any other projects that come in), but I truly understand if you can’t wait anymore.
Please feel free to call or email me with any questions you may have.
All the best,
Kim


So, in other words, we have been expected to check our email around the clock for weeks on end, for a project that may not even materialize. Some of us tried to stick it out and give Lexolution and Hogan the benefit of the doubt. You feel like an ass for believing them and turning down other work, or even applying for things, because you are being assured every day that any day you will be starting. Obviously, we can not believe a freaking word either has to say at this point. Regardless of the economy, no one has the right to take advantage of and shit on people this way.
P.S. They were paying $32/hr straight for a mandatory 50-60 hr. workweek.

The Lexolution Horror Show Arrives In Los Angeles

Lexolution is AWFUL in LA. They, coupled with disgusting Dickstein, jerked around about 10 contract attorneys for months about the project starting back up. Dickstein in LA is also disgusting and offensive - they sent e-mails to the contract attorneys requesting that they stop the chattering, stay in designated areas (ie., not allowed to use the vending machines) and had set hours to make sure people were there the entire time. They also frequently sent out e-mails stating that if ONE privilege code was missed, it was grounds for IMMEDIATE termination. I will send you a couple more of these disgusting e-mails from Lex.

-----------------------------------------------------

From: "Nathan Khalil"
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 22:35:13 -0400
To: Nathan Khalil
Subject: Dickstein - Project/Schedule Update

Hi Everyone,

I hope that this message finds each of you well.

We just learned today that there was some sort of development on the case, and Dickstein will not need you to come in to the office on Monday or Tuesday. I will be in touch with an update early next week, probably Monday.

Please reply to this e-mail to confirm receipt.

As always, thanks for your hard work. Have a good weekend.

Best regards,

Nathan Khalil

-----------------------------------------------------

From: Nathan Khalil
Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 7:09 PM
To: Nathan Khalil
Subject: RE: Dickstein - Project/Schedule Update

Hi Everyone,

We just got another update on the project.

A development in the litigation has caused a lull in activity, and a potential change in the direction of the case. It now appears that the lull and uncertainty will carry through the week. (I have already spoken with the two of you who will be returning this week to review the documents of a particular custodian previously allocated to you.) Dickstein has informed us that they will monitor developments through the week, and will be in touch with updates, perhaps later this week, or perhaps more likely next week. We’ll be in touch as soon as we know more. I won’t venture a guess in this e-mail as to the likelihood of the project continuing on; I will say only that it is entirely possible that all of you will be asked back for the project. We hope that, if asked back, you will return to the project. That said, we understand if you need to begin to explore other opportunities. Please just keep us in the loop.

Also, I just received additional feedback from Dickstein on the review. They have thus far been very pleased to work with all of you remaining from the Lex team, mentioning and complimenting each and every one of the 7 of you by name.

As a thank you for your great work on the project (which I know may have times been stressful), I was able to get approved a $300 bonus from Lexolution for each of you. It will appear in a paycheck next week.

Please feel free to contact me with any comments, questions, or concerns.

Best regards,

Nathan

-----------------------------------------------------

From: Nathan Khalil
Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 4:03 PM
To: Nathan Khalil
Subject: RE: Dickstein - Project/Schedule Update

Hello Everyone,

Unfortunately, we still do not have anything specific report. I am, however, still expecting at least partially good news. I expect to know more tomorrow. Thank you for your patience.

Please feel free to contact me with any comments or questions.

-----------------------------------------------------------

From: Nathan Khalil
Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 12:26 PM
To: Nathan Khalil
Subject: RE: Dickstein - Project/Schedule Update

Hello again everyone,

We are told that we may get an update on Friday. As we await word, it is absolutely fine (perhaps in most cases preferable) to leave remaining any things you left at your work station, since it is entirely possible that you will resume work on the project in the near future. But if any of you has left anything that you need urgently, please let me know, and we will make appropriate arrangements. Thanks.

Best regards,

Nathan

-------------------------------------------------------------

From: Nathan Khalil
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2009 1:55 PM
To: Nathan Khalil
Subject: RE: Dickstein - Project/Schedule Update

Hi Everyone,

Sorry, it appears that we are still in limbo. We just got an update from Dickstein. They have informed us that, as they await to see how the situation develops (and with at least part of the team over there very busy next week), there will be no need for our team on the project again next week, but the need could re-arise after that.

So we will continue to wait and keep you apprised of any developments.

Thank you for your patience, and apologies for the uncertainty! Alas, it’s the nature of the beast.

As mentioned before, we understand if you need to explore other opportunities. Please just keep us in the loop. Also, please let me know if you would like to pick up any belongings from your workstation. There is no need to do so since we are still in limbo, but please let me know if you would like to make arrangements to pick anything up at this time.

Have a good weekend.

Best regards,

Nathan

---------------------------------------------------------------

From: "Nathan Khalil"
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:40:28 -0400
To: Nathan Khalil
Subject: RE: Dickstein - Project/Schedule Update

Hi Everyone,

Unfortunately, we are still in limbo. We were in touch with Dickstein today. They continue to evaluate the situation, and hope and expect to have an update for us next week. It remains the case that a need for the team could re-arise in the near future. Apologies for the continued uncertainty. Ditto to my previous e-mail below: please let me know if you would like to make arrangements to retrieve any personal items at this time. Also ditto to my previous e-mails: we understand if you explore and pursue other opportunities. Please do just let us know if you secure another position and/or if you reach a crossroads.

Also, please remember that the information you have learned about the substance of the case and about its status is extremely sensitive and confidential. Please remember that you are bound by confidentially not to disclose this information to anyone (including friends, family, and potential employers). Thank you.

As always, please feel free to contact me.

Have a good weekend.

Best regards,

Nathan Khalil

--------------------------------------------------------

From: Nathan Khalil
Date: Fri, May 1, 2009 at 3:58 PM
Subject: RE: Dickstein - Project/Schedule Update
To: Nathan Khalil

Hi Everyone,

We just heard from Dickstein. Unfortunately, we remain in limbo. Alas, such is the world of litigation and contract work. They hope to have a better sense next week. I will be sure to get in touch as soon as we know more. Thanks.

Have a good weekend.

Best regards,

Nathan

---------------------------------------------------------

From: Nathan Khalil
Date: Fri, May 8, 2009 at 6:14 PM
Subject: RE: Dickstein - Project/Schedule Update
To: Nathan Khalil

Hi Everyone,

We heard from Dickstein today. Sorry, we remain in limbo. For what it’s worth, the project resuming remains a real possibility. Have a good weekend.

Best regards,

Nathan


This was the last anyone heard of the project. It was staffed by both Lexolution and Providus. I guess the Providus people were told immediately that the project was over. I hope you enjoyed the $300 bonus.

What else is amazing is that earlier that week, there was a "meeting" with the associates, partner and K attorneys and the partner estimated the work would last until or through July.

If you think it is bad now, just way until nasty Nora "Plesent" arrives and sets up her ramshackle chicken coop similar to the one on East 40th Street in New York.

Markup Scam

Hi Tom:

Did you see the article that Professor Lester Brickman wrote in Forbes Magazine that highlighted the enormous markup that plaintiff lawyers are using of about $35 to $40 per hour paid to the contract lawyers which is then billed out at $300 and up per hour as a scam in class action lawsuits.

Check it out at:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/23/tort-lawyers-class-action-opinions-contributors-lester-brickman.html

Mayor Scammarano

Hey Tom, the mayor of Hoboken, Peter "Scam-arrano," who was arrested today and charged with 5 counts of accepting bribes is a 2002 Seton Hall grad.

Hilarious! He learned fraud and corruption at the knee of master scammer Pat Hobbs, known as Seton Hall's infamous "Valvoline Dean" for his oleaginous, used car salesman persona and shameless molestation of salary/employment data. Scammarao (the Hoboken mayor) even had a Traffic Court Clerkship under his belt!

Watch a few YouTube videos of Cammarano, and right away you'll all know the type: the "gunners" who raised their hand for every case, who fellated the socially inept dork professors and fed their sick egos, the kind of people you always wanted to punch right in the fucking teeth. Have fun in Federal pound-me-up-the ass prison, Scamaranno! Maybe you can help Bluebook briefs for the other sorry cons trying to litigate their way out of stir.

How much you wanna bet he blames his bribe taking as an attempt to pay off massive law school debt? He'll go down hard, though. Unlike Hobbs, who has the criminal enablers at the ABA and NALP stooges covering his tracks, this doltish dork will be hung out to dry all by himself.

This kid should've just followed the other Seton Hall losers on to the document review floor at Barasso and been happy with the $29 an hour shitrate. Document review would be a good prep course for prison life: inedible food, petty and randomly enforced rules, favoritism, ass kissing, and extreme stretches of soul-crushing boredom. Bet the Valvoline Dean is boiling right now at seeing one of Seton Hall's few "rising stars" crash to earth in a flaming wreck! One less "success story" to add to the glossy admissions brochure!

Here are some choice excerpts from the FBI wiretap of Camarrano:

"Defendant Cammarano then stated “this is the way Mr. Schaffer and I both see the world through the same lens, right. In this election, hopefully, we, we, we, you know, we get to the point where I’m sworn in on July 1st, and we’re breaking down the world into three categories at that point. There’s the people who were with us, and that’s you guys. There’s the people who climbed on board in the runoff. They can get in line. . . And then there are the people who were against us the whole way. They get ground . . . They get ground into powder.”

Wow. In true Seton Hall fashion, Cammarano is not only a shiftless crook but a complete mental retard. The undercover agent (a corrupt rabbi) offering the bribes was already under FBI investigation via a deferred prosecution agreement, as a quick Google search would have revealed. And here is Scamarrano taking envelopes full of cash in a diner parking lot and offering quid pro quo on tape to a man who peddled other people's kidneys for profit! This is bush league even for the rancid, festering sewer that is NJ law and politics. Maybe Scamaraano was too busy Bluebooking toilet law review articles and studying Rule of Perpetuites puzzles to catch a few episodes of the Sopranos. This wanna-be gangsta assclown didn't last 30 days in office. Besides that, he had already lied about an out-of-wedlock child from some chick he knocked up at age 18 and had to lie & cover his ass during the campaign. Typical Hoboken hair-gel moron. He better sing like a canary to the Feds or his backside is gonna be thumping like a bass tube at Bar One!

BTW, I believe one of the partners at the "election law" firm that Camaranno worked at is an adjunct at Seton Hall. There's no doubt these "biglaw wanna-be's" at his former boiler room joke of a "firm" will have some explaining to do as well. This kid won the election under suspicious circumstances that involved "missing boxes" of absentee ballots that mysteriously popped up a few days after the runoff election. Voter fraud, anyone? Hopefully that cesspool of a school will somehow be dragged into this mess and embarrassed/humiliated and exposed for the corrupt diploma-mill dump that they are. We cannot rest until the Valvoline Deans of the world do the perp walk right beside the shiftless satan-children they have spawned. The one bright side is that Scamarrano will make more money pressing license plates in the prison foundry than the typcial 'Hall grad ever will as an insurance defender or doc review coder in NYC!

As If California Didn't Have Enough Problems.....

Now this. I just received an obnoxious email from Lex-Pollution announcing that "Lexolution Co-Founder Nora Plesent is Now the Managing Partner of Lexolution's Los Angeles Office"

It says: "Lexolution is thrilled to announce that Nora Plesent, a leader in the temporary legal staffing industry for more than a decade, has permanently taken up residence in Lexolution's Los Angeles office. Nora helped found Lexolution in 2001 and has been an instrumental force in Lexolution's rise as a leading provider of temporary attorneys and paralegals in the New York, Washington, DC, Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay Area metropolitan regions. Lexolution has extensive experience staffing experienced attorneys in virtually every area of legal practice and managing large electronic discovery projects."

But then the key words come in: "We strategize with law firms and corporations about ways to significantly reduce costs through the use of our temporary attorneys."

Now, note this does not say that Lexolution does anything to present more qualified people, or that it is doing anything in the interests of its temps. No, it says that they "strategize" with the enemy, the law firms and corporations, to squeeze all the juice out of the lemons (lemmings) (both in terms of taking their best years and paying them nothing for their time).

Thanks Lexolution, for bringing your wrecking ball to the Los Angeles legal market after helping to screw up New York.

Philadelphia Market Shriveling Up & Dying

35 people laid off at Dechert's 2 Logan location in relevance two weeks ago.

5 people laid off in privilege, as above

5 more people laid off in privilege last week.

Some people had been there as long as 4.5 years. Some say scores were settled.

Staff attorney hours also seem to have been cut back among many as well.

This is the pharmaceutical litigation site.

Project is believed to be engaged in end-stage activities.

The Axiom Legal Identity Crisis Continues

"After the second round of exposure in 'Bullshit Time' below, Axiom changed their bogus website - for the third time in a month!

After ditching 'The road less lawyered' and 'Lawyers you like', they now change to the more mundane but no less fart-inducing 'The Big idea in law.'

They then say how they are 'inspired by a big idea: to be the first real alternative to the traditional law firm'. They cut out a lot of the other B.S. (but still some in there, like how they help lawyers exercise 'self-determination', because if they cut this it would be a blank orange page like an empty table at McDonalds).

I have actually gone from throwing up at Axiom to being worried about them. Their obsession with their image on this website and ability to change their whole shtick overnight is scary!

Earth to Axiom: you still don't have it right. You are not an alternative to a law firm, except to the extent that checking into a mental hospital is an alternative to working in a law office. By your own admission, you just send temps to in-house jobs, i.e., you're a frigging/temp placement agency like all the others."

The ABA's Fake "Legal Rebels" Campaign

Let the institutional denial and counter-propaganda campaign begin.

As one commentor so aptly put it, "the REAL online rebel movement among lawyers online is the movement to expose the law school scam and how the legal establishment such as the bar associations are enabling the law school industry to lure hundreds of thousands of law students into 6 figure debt when there is a huge oversupply of lawyers already."

For years, the legal elites have benefited from this drastic oversupply and the cheap labor generated by these nasty unsanitary debt repayment mills. But now, however, even a shitty benefitless secretarial wage is too much for them to handle. Hence, this year we have seen the devastation unleashed by the ABA's opening of the floodgates to a massive wave of foreign outsourcing.

http://www.legalrebels.com

Kirkland Drops The Shit Bomb On The Sheep

"On June 28th, an ad appeared on DC's Craigslist for unlicensed JD's for a 1-2 month high hour (10+/7days) document review project. Today they learned that Kirkland will be performing this work "in house." Aside from this obvious ploy to shitrate a large group of recent law grads they obviously thought NOTHING of stringing the 100+ lambs along for 3 weeks before dropping their shitbomb on them. Welcome to the late great world of document review."

P.S.- They probably outsourced a good chunk of the work to India as demonstrated by the Michelle Vega piece.

Peak Legal: "Go Find Your Own Health Insurance"

From: "Frank Barone"
Date: July 17, 2009 11:02:10 AM EDT
Subject: Medical Plan

We regret to inform you that effective September 1, 2009, The Peak Organization will no longer be offering the Empire BC/BS HMO Plan to temporary employees. Our enrollment in this plan no longer meets the minimum participation required by Empire BC/BS as shown below.

Letter from Empire BC/BS:

“This is to advise you (The Peak Organization) that your HMO healthcare plan contract is being terminated effective 09/01/2009.”

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and will make available on our web site information regarding Empire BC/BS NY individual medical plans within the next two weeks.

The dental plan does remain in place.

Thank you very much.

Michelle Vega: Touro's Finest

Michelle Vega spent more than six years as a litigation associate at Kelley Drye & Warren in New York before leaving the firm to care for a sick relative. When Vega started looking for a job a year later, she wanted to take her skills in a new direction.

A friend at a legal staffing company told her about an opening that offered management experience outside the law firm environment, but required a one-year stint in India. Vega was immediately intrigued and asked the friend to submit her résumé. When outsourcing company Mindcrest Inc. offered Vega a senior manager job in May 2008, she accepted and moved her life to Pune, India, by month's end.

"I like to travel and have always been interested in the world outside New York," said the 35-year-old Brooklyn native, who is still living in Pune.

As a senior manager at Mindcrest, Vega oversees the work of about 450 employees through 25 direct reports. Her work ranges from researching briefs in support of motions to drafting discovery requests to responding to subpoenas.

Vega, who graduated from Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, said she enjoys using her litigation knowledge to guide the young Indian attorneys who do the company's legal research, document review and contract management work. Training Indian employees often means putting things in context for them. For instance, she might have to explain the relative value of a building on Park Avenue in New York by comparing it to an upscale street in Mumbai, Vega said.

http://www.nylj.com/nylawyer/news/09/07/071609a.html

Angry Lady

"Charlotte Gelfand (chaarlottexx@yahoo.com)
Sent: Mon 7/13/09 10:23 PM
To: tomthetemp@hotmail.com

Dear Tomthetemp,
I think your article on David Gelfand is disgusting. Mr. Gelfand is a respectable lawyer in New York, and most likely one of the highest ranked lawyers in New York as well. You have no idea what this man is like, and your sitting on your computer coming up with these nasty, untruthful accusations and putting them up on the internet. Mr. Gelfand is a very kind, intelligent, funny man, who cares about his partners and fellow employees at Milbank. Get your facts strait before you write another FALSE story.
Yours Truly,
Diane"


Dear Diane,
I apologize if you were offended by last year's David Gelfand posting. Your right, I have no idea what this man is like. While I agree with you that what was written was certainly nasty, I disagree with your assertion that it was in anyway untruthful. The posting merely repeated reporting conducted by Above the Law claiming that Milbank and Mr. Gelfand were less than forthcoming in their disbandment of their staff attorney program. While all this was going down, I merely commented on the fact that I found it curious that Milbank was contemporaneously attending conferences and instructing other organizations on how to best outsource legal services to low-cost, foreign labor centers. Certainly, it can't come as a great surprise that such a story would generate a firestorm of nasty comments on a blog populated by former, laid off staff and contract attorneys. Again, I apologize if any of my readers offended your sensibilities.
TTT

http://temporaryattorney.blogspot.com/2008/04/david-gelfand-worst-person-of-week.html

Lady Sara Kim Of Yorkson

Tom,

If you are worried about people committing suicide, I would suggest that you tell them to stay away from Lady Sara Kim of Yorkson. I heard rumors that she was nasty, but I didn't realize how nasty she was until I recently dealt with her myself. Talk about a Jeckyll and Hyde personality. When she needs you for something, she's all sweet and butter. Most of the time, she's extremely condescending, tries to make you feel guilty for not buying into one of her low ball sewer rates, and will literally hang up on you mid-sentence. Either Yorkson has one of the worst techncial telephone service in NYC history, or the Lady of Yorkson is just an extreme B.

Robert "One-Fifth" The Pay

"Dear XXXXX,

We know you are diligently looking for your next job opportunity and we want to be the best resource for you. However, we are all experiencing the effects of the economy. Many clients are unable to afford the rates they’ve paid in the past. In order to meet their new budget restrictions, I am trying to gauge if you would be willing to work at a rate between $10 and $17 an hour.

Our goal is to keep people working and this is one way to do so. These pay rates are a temporary response to the current economic market. As the market improves, we will look to increase our pay rates accordingly.

If you are open to working for this rate on a short or long term basis, please email me and let me know. I look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes,


~Kelli"

Bullshit Time

Since exposing them below on your website Axiom Legal Temp Agency has changed its website from the oleaginous "The Road Less Lawyered" to "Lawyers you Like".

Get ready to throw up, here it comes!

"We know it's ironic.... but one of the radical things that can be said about Axiom is that our clients and attorneys like us. Axiom is an entirely new kind of firm rooted in the belief that everyone benefits when given the ability to exercise self-determination. An approach so simple it's reshaping the legal profession and so powerful it just may make lawyers likable again."

Then it has these bullshit profiles of its supposedly happy likable temps:

"My son's a talker. He's a negotiator. He'll make a great lawyer... I'd like to think he gets that from his dad."

Marc Field


So in reaction to being complained about on the Temporary Attorney blog, where they are one of the top temp sweatshops, they now try to show how "likable" they are and how "happy" the miserable wretches who work for them are.

The pretension of this nothing temp agency knows no bounds, to the point if you wonder that they have brainwashed their toady slaves so much or whether they are actually starting to believe their own bullshit.

Axiom has these Update types calling clients day and night slutting around their temp services.

Say thank you to your temp agency Strategic and DeNovo that you don't have to deal with this kind of mind control and self-worship of Axiom's nonqualified lawyer owners!

Pope Says Outsourcing Is Immoral

"The pope laments the decline of the social welfare state and praises the 'importance' of labor unions to protect workers. Without stable work, he notes, people lose hope and tend not to get married and have children.

But he also wrote that 'The so-called outsourcing of production can weaken the company’s sense of responsibility towards the stakeholders — namely the workers, the suppliers, the consumers, the natural environment and broader society — in favor of the shareholders.'"

Enter The American TTT Law School At Your Own Risk!

One positive note in all of this horror is that word is finally getting out about the law school scam machine. Let's hope that as the economy recovers these numbers plummet even further.

"Law school applications were up overall this year, but they didn't surge the way many had predicted. Conventional wisdom holds that more people seek out graduate programs during bad economic times to avoid a tough job market. According to the admissions council, law school applications increased nationally by 4.3%.

"We certainly haven't seen the double-digit increases we saw in past recessions," said Yellen, who theorized that the high cost of law school and the news of law firm layoffs might have dissuaded some people from applying." - New York Law Journal, 07/06/09

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tom check out the turd on craigslist.

3-5 years pharma experience for the old $35 shitrate. Unreal.

How many registered nurses, engineers, pilots, dentists, or MD's resort to begging for sub-poverty level shitjobs on craigslist just to eat? Make no mistake, the recent death of doc review was a watershed in this industry. The Seton Halls and Brooklyn Law Schools of the world have no where left to stick the hordes of angry, desperately indebted losers. Just think of the old days of the Hudson Newark ghetto gig, the Paul Weiss cockroach gulag, and the Vioxx petri dish. Those thousands of second-tier and lower grads who once clicked out semi-decent paychecks are now cast into the gutter with no worthwhile experience (and no jobs available even if they did have "experience"). Schools know that the jig is up: Joan King recently exited stage left and now the Valvoline Dean Pat Hobbs of Seton Hall is sucking around for the NJ AG job if his buddy Chris Christie wins the governor's race. No way these charlatans are sticking around for the coming meltdown. Like oil slicks, they'll wash up on some new beach in a few years with new scams and more insincere, fraudulent posturing.

Even better, in three short weeks the next gaggle of hapless lemmings will sweat thru the bar'zam in Albany and the old Javits Center, regurgitating the useless BarBri drivel on houseburning v. arson and 14th century property law like good little JD's. Then come August they'll burn in the summer heat of the worst legal job market (or job market period)in American history. Shit, both Hudson and De Novo are now only registering people with over a year of coding experience. Small firm insurance defense shitlaw "firms" are getting 100+ resumes for sub 40 K shitjobs that we know have no future anyway. As most veteran coders know, the "experience" card is an old shark's trick, designed to sucker newbie JD's into taking illegal-alien level wages with the empty promise of building "experience." Yet as most of us know, "experience" in insurance defense is like getting cooking experience from McDonald's: one may lateral to Burger King or Wendy's, but you sure ain't gonna be head chef at the Waldorf. Pushing bales of fender-bender shitpaper just leads to more crappy jobs pushing fender-bender shitpaper. Almost 5 years out of school, every friend I have in insurance defense has yet to see 75 K.

Maybe they can try the comical "alumni networking" events. Print a fresh batch of resumes off on that rich, creamy 80 lb cotton weave Staples resume paper, and shove them in the face of every gray-haired, drunken loser at the alumni cocktail hour. I went to one of these for Seton Hall back in 2005 and the assistant dean asked if I'd considered moving to the Midwest because "the NY and NJ markets are pretty saturated." I then asked her why Seton Hall operates a $43,000/yr private law school in NJ if the market has no jobs, and she excused herself to get another shrimp cocktail. Typical.

It's over, kids.

Skadden Farts aka Law is 4 Losers

De Novo Legal: Houston

"Let me begin by saying that De Novo's Houston office once had a respectable reputation amongst document review contract attorneys. However, there is a new project manager at the Houston office (A. F.) and she is running the office into the ground. Beware of accepting a document review position at De Novo: Houston because you may be signing up to work in a modern day sweatshop. While working there on a project that averaged between 50 and 100 attorneys (the number of attorneys on the project fluctuated weekly) I experienced and/or observed the following:

1. A complete lack of respect for contractors as individuals;

2. Internet access was removed from each computer workstation;

3. Approx 100 attorneys had to access the internet through only 1 computer;

4. Talking was not allowed and seating arrangements were often shuffled in an effort to discourage conversation between attorneys;

5. The work schedule was sporadic at best. Some days you worked, other days you were laid off, then you would be called back to work, only to be laid off again...and sometimes all this would happen in the course of a week and there was at least one occasion where this happened during the course of one work day.

6. Some days there would be no water to drink and the project manager's response to that would be that it is not De Novo's job to make it's contract attorneys comfortable.

7. Attorneys were told to close the blinds in their room, because the project manager did not want them looking at other attorneys through the window. One contract attorney made an effort to simply waive hello at the other attorneys she could see through her window and the project manager closed the blinds and scolded the attorney for communicating with other attorneys.

8. Some attorneys had to work in small conference rooms with NO AIR CONDITIONING during June in Houston. There were other workstations available for these attorneys working without air conditioning, but because of De Novo's desire to keep talking to a minimum the attorneys had to work without air conditioning for several days...that's right...a modern day sweatshop....contract document review attorneys working without air conditioning in the HOUSTON HEAT !!!"

Lex-Pollution Chicken Coop Is Now Open For Business

The good folks at Lex-Pollution have re-opened the infamous "chicken coop" over here on east 40th st. The new $32 an hour shitrate applies, and hours are capped at 40. Yesterday, the geeky Dechert associate came and took the internet off all the computers. Nice, huh? This pathetic dork is probably terrified of getting axed himself. Restroom is filthy and inadequete, break room has a major mildew problem, and a nasty flu is going around already. Might as well just give up coding for good at these embarrassing rates and abysmal working conditions.

The Bloomberg Bandit

To show how little respect Bloomberg people have for their colleagues, here is the copy of an e-mail sent to everyone today (Tuesday). This guy had no idea who stole from him. It could have been a contractor, someone from the cleaning crew, or even one of his precious fellow Bloomberg buddies. He then proceeds to send this bullshit e-mail to people who are not working on this project out of choice, but out of necessity. People with bills and student loans to pay, and kids to feed. These are admitted attorneys who have already been belittled by accepting $20/hour when "legal assistant" positions are posted on craigslist for $18. These are not lazy or incompetent people. They are attorneys trying to make ends meet like everyone else in this shitty economy and they should not have to be subjected to e-mails like this. It disgusts me.

"This message is for all the Broad St. contractors. At some point today, one of
you appropriated the cup of loose change sitting on my desk. Probably no more
than a few bucks in it - maybe enough for a Starbucks iced coffee (mmmm...iced
coffee). But now you will enjoy that frosty beverage on my nickel. Literally.
Frankly, if you felt that intense a level of need to take the change off my
desk then I do not ask for its return - you clearly should keep it (how much
therapy three bucks will buy, I don't know - but I urge you to investigate).
But seriously - we're stealing now? Come on, people. You're better than that.
And to the perp: you're an interesting one. There was a cup of pennies next
to the cup of other change that you took. But the pennies weren't good enough
for you, so you left them. A scoundrel of discerning taste? The Penniless
Bandit? Oh - I like that. That's my new garage band name. I digress.
Let's not have ANY other items go missing from anyone. Period. -DS"

In Case You Missed It.....

Above the Law did a story on our friend DiscoverReady, yesterday.

"The Charlotte Observer reports that a legal services firm is poised to hire 100 Charlotte based attorneys:

Unfortunately, we're talking about document review attorneys:

DiscoverReady, which analyzes e-mails and electronic documents for law firms and corporate legal departments, is opening the office on Trade Street uptown in mid-June. The company has already hired about two dozen workers and will hire others in waves throughout the year, said Jim Wagner Jr., DiscoverReady's chief executive officer."

Surely, truly awful jobs are better than no jobs, but several commenters point out just how awful working for DiscoverReady can actually be:

"This is the temp job from hell. DiscoverReady and Shawn Treadwell at Strategic Legal repeatedly lied to the contract attorneys about the job, assuring us that we would start working the next day, then telling us at the last minute that there would be no work tomorrow. I quit the project, and still haven't been paid a month later. You're better off being unemployed."

"Don't get your hopes up. After being out of work for months following law school, I signed on with DiscoverReady to do doc review. I worked for 4 days, was told I did a good job, then never heard from them again. The pay rate is good, but not if you work 4 days every 6 months. I got a real job finally and then got an email asking if I was interested in working again, 6 months after having worked. Didn't bother replying."

"I have to add that when I asked the project manager at DiscoverReady (Andrew Mayer) if I could print out the timesheet that Strategic Legal had emailed me, he told me that I couldn't use their printers, but if I needed to print something, I could go to the Kinko's down the street."

DiscoverReady temps jobs are a horrible way to make a living, but an excellent way for the government and law school industry to mask how truly staggering and dismal the job market really is.

http://abovethelaw.com/2009/06/law_jobs_in_charlotte_kind_of.php

Labaton

"Dear Tom,

I emailed the below complaint to the powers that be at Labaton at 140 Broadway on Friday, and by Monday there was a big change in attitude at 225 Varick Street, the offsite location where we work. No more having to go search for a staff attorney to input your time four times a day. In fact, now you write your time yourself for when you arrive and depart for the day; you do not have to notate a lunch break on the timesheet. Staff Attorney is trying not to be an animal, but it's hard for him not to act like a dick. Stay tuned. Hold these people accountable if they mistreat you.

Thanks for making your blog available so that we can fight back against these abuses.


From: @rocketmail.com>
Subject: Countrywide Project
To: @labaton.com, @labaton.com, @labaton.com
Date: Friday, June 19, 2009, 2:30 AM


I believe you should know what is going on at 225 Varick Street. I am an experienced contract attorney and I have worked under some horrible conditions in my time, but your treatment of your so-called short-term attorneys ranks as one of the worst experiences I have had in my career. On any project that I have worked on, if you have to sign in and out when you arrive and leave for the day and notate breaks as well, you do so yourself. However at Varick Street, I have to locate one of your two staff attorneys who could be in any of the four rooms in order to inform them when I arrive in the morning, when I leave at night or when I take a break for lunch, both going to and returning from lunch. Then after I locate one staff attorney, I may be told by him or her that I have to track down the other one because the timesheet is with that person. Do you realize how time consuming this is when you have about fifty attorneys doing this, each doing it four times a day? Do you understand how demoralizing it is to be micromanaged like this? And you have the nerve to label us as employee attorneys on your website. This is insane! Why can’t we just input our time on the timesheet ourselves? Why does a staff attorney have to input our time?

How about these other rules? You can't eat at your workstation, not even a candy bar or a piece of fruit; you have to take an elevator and go to another floor. You can't use the microwave or the kitchenette on the floor; you have to take an elevator and go to another floor. You can't answer your cellphone and step out of the room to answer a call. You have to ignore the call and again take the elevator and go to another floor. It seems like that you are riding the elevator all day in order to do basic everyday activities. All this we are told because we can't offend Merrill Corporation. Who or what is this entity? I have worked at the top law firms in the city and they never subjected me to this kind of nonsense.

Do you think that when you treat attorneys so disrespectfully that they will do a good job for you and be conscientious in reviewing documents? I don’t think so!

It is bad enough that you are paying attorneys a pitiful rate, but they will not put up with lousy treatment for long combined with your low flat rate. You will have a mass defection when a decent project comes along. Also, your treatment of “employees” will be exposed in blog world and your law firm will be embarrassed.

In addition, your staff attorney John B, is nasty and unprofessional. He fosters a negative work environment and he has no people skills. The attorneys who work on your project there despise his pettiness. He should not be managing a doc review of a high profile case. He does not even dress in a professional manner and you expect your short-term attorneys to dress in business casual.

I suggest you make some changes before this project gets out of hand."

Never Mind That All The Document Review Has Been Outsourced, Ann Israel Tells NYC Unemployed Law Grad To "Stay Positive" And Go To Iraq

"It seems like Hester Prynne would have an easier time finding work right now wearing a scarlet letter A for her act of adultery than an attorney with a juris doctor degree from a low-ranked school on his or her resume.

But a lawyer newly admitted in New York and New Jersey who makes that complaint to legal consultant Ann Israel in a New York Lawyer column gets scant sympathy.

Rather than focusing on her 'obscene' law school debt and likelihood of a lower post-law-school salary, in real dollars, than she made in an interim think-tank position between college and law school, 'Hester' should pull up her socks and figure out what her best options are now, Israel advises. With her joint bar admissions, she certainly has some, both inside and outside the legal profession.

Among the practice possibilities to which Israel points is a gig in the military."

http://www.abajournal.com/news/hester_prynne_seeks_advice_about_jd_from_low-ranked_law_school

SkaTTTen, SkaTTTen, SkaTTTen

Two weeks ago, we learned how Skadden will literally jerk you around night after night for weeks on end without pay while twiddle dee and twiddle dum try to figure out how to load documents into a computer.

Today, we learn how Skadden nearly destroyed the career of a young staff attorney. In short, staff attorney, sponsored by the Skadden pro bono program, undertook representation of a poor divorcee. The staff attorney's representation turned out to be nothing short of disastrous. Staff attorney didn't seek an iota of financial disclosure from the husband. Wife was later informed by staff attorney that she didn't "have the experience nor the time to handle a lengthy relocation trial," and that she could pretty much could forget about relocating to Florida with her child, after which Wife broke down in tears. The Skadden representation was found to be so bungled that the court had to undo the stipulation of settlement. You can follow the horrifying chain of representation below.

In the order dissolving the settlement agreement, the judge explicitly set out who she felt was to blame for this horror show of events:

"The Court is not using the actual name of the wife's former counsel so as not to embarrass her. . . The court attributes any errors in her representation of the Wife not to staff attorney's own lack of skill or judgment, but to inadequate training, supervision and oversight by Skadden and by InMotion."
- Justice Ellen Gesmer, NYS Supreme Court

Despite the judge's finding, two short weeks after the ruling, the biglaw media propaganda machine kicked into high gear smearing the reputation of this young staff attorney by prominently displaying her name at the front end of an article. Any future employer can easily google the name of this young woman and learn what an incompetent dolt she was. Skadden meanwhile pretty much gets off scott free.

http://www.nylj.com/nylawyer/adgifs/decisions/061809gesmer.pdf

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202431553713&src=EMC-Email&et=editorial&bu=Law.com&pt=LAWCOM%20Newswire&cn=NW_20090618&kw=Failure%20to%20Supervise%20Pro%20Bono%20Attorney%20Dooms%20Divorce%20Pact

Last One Out Turn Out The Light

"In a move that is sending shudders through the global BigLaw community, Rio Tinto has hired a team of Indian attorneys in an effort to cut by 20 percent its annual legal budget of about $100 million."

And it's not just contract attorney work anymore.

"Although outsourcing legal work to India is far from a novel concept, Rio Tinto is bypassing law firms and outsourcing legal work directly. Plus, not just legal processing but substantive legal work is being handled by the Indian attorneys it retained through CPA. Thus, the Rio Tinto move represents 'a fundamentally new way of working,' the Times article explains."

http://www.abajournal.com/news/biglaw_firms_shudder_as_rio_tinto_retains_legal_team_in_india/

Sallie Mae Is Satan

End your bondage in these awful cockroach-ridden sweatshop basements by lobbying for student loan reform.

Check out the following posting I pulled up on JD Underground. How succinct and so accurately put! Sure, there is a lot of trash and nonsense on these boards, but a jewel like this makes it all worth it:


"First of all the banks... disadvantaged? Who gives a fuck? The banks never loaned out their own money. The lenders are lending out free money from the FED. When people default banks make a FREE 30k on the default which the GOVERNMENT Guarantees. And on top of that they write off the losses...

And let's be honest, if corporations / lenders do go under.. they can go BANKRUPT. They can start over.... Which is something that student loan borrowers can NOT do. The people who work at a corporation that is not ran well can just close up shop and start a new corporation, or go through BANKRUPTCY and reform the exact same corporation without their debt just like a number of major corporations are doing RIGHT NOW here in America, or in the worst case scenario the people who poorly ran that corporation into the ground can go get a job some place else.

The problem is that student loan borrowers can NEVER escape from the problem. That's just UnAmerican. The fees and penalties which are stacked on top of their debt, by lenders who have never really done anything (except fill out some forms for the Government) are taking advantage of other people's hard luck.

Talk about a free lunch. I guess a free lunch is fine if you are a corporation,.... but a free lunch for the middle class well that is EVIL. What a bunch of hypocrisy.

How about this pay your fucking taxes and have a real education and health care system like they do in Europe instead of forcing young people to take out massive loans for college AND THEN putting them into default and making a ton of money of their hardship when their business fails. How about that huh?

And I don't think anyone is talking about a free ride anyway. What we want is the right to go bankrupt... a right which EVERY bank and corporation in America has. It's also a right which EVERY American had up until 1998....

Our country worked fine until 1998. It's a fucking sewer today. The mantra of personal responsibility for the MIDDLE CLASS (but not for corporations) has been an abject and total failure in the real world. It might work fine on Fox News, but it does not work on Main Street.

People need to be able to go bankrupt just like every corporation in America can. Bankruptcy allows people to get back on their feet and start over. That's the American way. Risk makes the system work. Without risk the system fails.

If you really want personal responsibility start at the top. Make corporate executives PERSONALLY responsible for losses of the corporation and make it impossible for them to go bankrupt. Turn them into slaves if the corporation fails. I bet the idea of bankruptcy wont be seen as a free ride then."


Or sentence them to ten years in the hellish basements of their biglaw whore counterparts!

If you haven't done so already, join the facebook group:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=46657437878

Slip Of The Tongue?

Apparently, this former Coleman Legal Staffing clown didn't get the memo. Biglaw won't be bringing in Native American Indians to do the work, but rather will be outsourcing all the work to Indians on the Indian subcontinent.

"Firms aren't going to go back to the same level of hiring for partner-track associates. Firms still need to hire for the traditional associate track because they will be future leaders of the firm, Robert Nourian said, but there won't be as much of that hiring.

Instead, firms will focus on staff lawyers with credentials maybe only half a step below the traditional associate level to help in a support capacity.

'There's chiefs and there's Indians,' Nourian said. 'Somewhere down the pyramid you can have some folks who maybe aren't Ivy League grads.'"

New York Lawyer, 6/17/09

Axiom Legal

"Axiom Legal" is a temp agency masquerading as something new, so cool, and so different. But actually it's 10 times worse than any agency with the bullshit you have to put up with.

Axiom was started several years ago by a former Davis Polk associate who claimed to hate the legal business and who thought he could compete against them with "a new kind of firm". It was to be based in a loft office in Soho with all sorts of cool people. Like the Spiderman song, "Be yourself in a world that's crazy and cool". I'm soooooooooooooooooooooo Axiom!

Axiom said no more big law firm B.S. with the partners raking in big margins off associate work. They went to various big firm type clients like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to offer "the same service at a better price".

They then interviewed people, who had to fit their cool, mod-squad image. Any independent thinker or non-clone was definitely off-the-list. No they had to have a lot of artists and aspiring models.

Their key interviewer was Don Carlson, a smirk-face asshole from Harvard and Goldman. Kiss his prematurely bald-headed butt big time or you'll never get through the door!

Well lo and behold, Axiom brought in a private equity fund hedge fund to buy their shares a la Update.

While hyping themselves as something so trendy and insisting how they are not a temp agency, that's all they are, as they now gigglingly admit.

If you love kissing ass and love working in a Soho loft with a bunch of loser wannabes, then Axiom is the place for you!

Wise Counsel

"Tom,

Heads up! There is a new bottom feeding agency in town. The person who is complaining about Wise Counsel is spot on. Although the agencies are all fly by night (on a broomstick), Wise sub-let some tiny rabbit cage space on Third Avenue. They sent me for a total waste interview in Garden City, Long Island at a nothing firm. They then started asking me if I wanted to sub-sub-let some space in their office to operate a private practice. You see, these agencies will find any ways and means to skin you alive. You don't have a job - and they don't have anything for you - so they try to get rent money out of you.

The second of the Big Three has to be Helene Diamond. Every temp has dealt with her agency, Peak, at some point offering the lowest possible rate and the worst jobs, usually in places like Bridgeport, Connecticut with no commuting allowance. (This is a real experience I had with her.)

The third and winner of the Booby Prize goes to Sean Treadwell, who has called every temp but never returns their calls or emails. There is always some non-existent position with him. He wins the resume-collector of the year award. He's just fishing around to see what's out there and to get everyone's resume so he can claim to be their massa'.

The new and up-and-coming power player of the week is Sara Kim of Yorkson, also famous for touting non-existent jobs and being very nasty."

SkaTTTen Strikes Again

"Tom,

Remember the article you had about SkaTTTen? Well, Kelly is staffing a project at Skadden, and not only is the pay rate the "new reality" (33/hr) but the work has been irregular. I am on the project and was told on Monday not to come in on Tuesday. Then on Tuesday night, I was told not to come in Wednesday. And finally, tonight/Wednesday night, I was told not come in on Thursday. Each of the last two nights we had to wait to find out whether or not come in the following day.

This is especially frustrating not only because we don't get paid (obviously) for our days off, but because we have also had to work weekends at times. We may still have to work weekends in the future. I know that this is a temp job, but I've never been on one where it was so on-and-off. I think if there were more opptys out there many of us would leave...."

Wake Up, People!

I have been reading the most recent string of comments. Which is better? Update, or the Tower staffing agency? Who cares? Stop trying to compare dog shit with cow shit. Even I who has been writing about this snake infested industry for years now has time and again fallen prey to the fake, poodle charlatan lapdogs. Make no doubt about it, there is nothing "professional" about these posturing, Verscace-clad monstrosities. If you aren't blacklisted from at least a half a dozen of these horrorshops, you are clearly doing something wrong. May God help us.

Update Legal To Contract Attorneys: "Shove It!"

"Update Legal announced on Tuesday that they would not be reimbursing for expenses, including those from the previous week. The total expenses for all of the attorneys on the project from the week before is probably less than $500, the average being about $20 per attorney. Almost all of the people working on this project have been here for more than a year meaning we have billed in excess of 2800 hours on average per year. This means even if Update only made a $1 per hour (what a load of crap that would be) it would have cost them .7% of the revenue we generated for them to cover the expenses. The lesson here is to never forget to bring the Vaseline when dealing with your overlord; I mean agency."

The Hudson Legal Snitch Line

Tom,

Hey good news! Hudson finally set up a confidential line so that doc reviewers can rat each other out.

Doc reviewer solidarity!


"To create an environment where employees have the knowledge and support to protect our values and promote lawful and ethical conduct, Hudson has established the Integrity Line. This toll-free, third-party help line provides a safe, confidential way for contract employees to report financial misconduct. Call the Integrity Line to report concerns such as:

Timekeeping abuses
Improper expense reporting
Financial fraud
The service has several important features:

Confidentiality: Employees have the option to report information anonymously.
Around the clock availability: Integrity line operators are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Protection from Retaliation: You will not be subject to retaliation for bringing a good faith issue or complaint to the company's attention, or for assisting in an investigation.
Follow up: All participants will receive a follow-up date for reporting progress.
To report your concern, call:
1 866 313 9349"

Document Review Hippies

Want to work in San Francisco? If the below posting is in anyway legitimate, get ready to jump through some not so ordinary hoops in the application process. One of the people that alerted me to this ad wasn't very pleased:

"The hypocritical smelly ex-hippy that posted this ad needs to get a life. There are already enough alleged "creative" types on these document review projects, we don't need more. Scrounging for work in crowded, bug infested basements to pay off Sallie Mae, an organization which needlessly funds the extravagant lives of useless "progressive" law professors and administrators is not my idea of urban chic, it is just plain dumb. This job listing is an insult to us older folk that depend on these positions to feed ourselves. Here's the posing:

"Is document review more like a Tweet, a Digg or sex? (West Coast)

---------------------------------------------------------
Reply to:docreviewrocks@gmail.com
Date: 2009-05-28, 10:37PM PDT

*****THIS IS A LEGITIMATE POSTING, SOMEWHAT IRREVERENT, BUT LEGITIMATE*****

Why do we want to know?

Well, we're building a team of highly disruptive document reviewers and want to know if you're the kind of legal professional who would do well with our brand of mayhem.

Here's what we can tell you:
You will be respected.
You will be trained.
You will be paid.
You, in return, will rock.

You may rock legal document review high.
You may rock legal document review low.

But, you WILL rock.
Because you will be one of the Chosen Few.

So, draw some analogies, use a few metaphors, knock yourself out with philosophical smoke as the legal spirit moves you, --so long as it's 3 paragraphs or less.

Then, attach that resume to us in TEXT format.
No PDFs. No flippin' Word documents. Just plain old text....???...
OK: "text" means, you can either include your life story plus considered analysis in an email,-- or you can attach a .TXT or .RTF file.

Don't know what those are? Look it up.
We expect you to have more than a modicum of initiative...."modicum"???...Look it up.

And, no bullshit, OK? Because we're gonna find out what you're made of before we put you on one of our document review projects.
So, if you're stoked to reduce thousands of documents to a series of intelligible narratives, we want to know you're out there looking for work.

If you're one of the few who effin' get it, then let's do this thing!
Right now, we don't care where you are. If there are enough of you in any one city, we'll come to you.
Send us the stuff here, and we'll get back to you.

Like soon."


Another reader's proposed response. Very creative:


"My response: Document review is defintely not like sex unless you're into staring at blank walls. It's more like a bad relationship. Most of time, it doesn't come through. When it does, it feels so good. Call me the Super Doc Reviewer of the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm lightening fast and highly accurate. Clicking through docs and checking boxes may not be most folks' thing. However, I get a natural high when I find docs that can really help my side's case. But here's the deal. I can't allow mere common folks to know my secret identity. The only ones who get this privilege are the document review temp agencies. So if you happen to be a real agency, send me your name and Web site. Then I'll send my resume that will reveal my real name."

Viacom Presents..........

Hell on earth.

"Asking about horrible places to work, Viacom is the worst of the worst.

Working in a small, overcrowded room under the worst possible conditions with no benefits. The case manager was like an animal.

Before the weekend we were asked who wanted to work and who didn't (strictly voluntarily). The people who didn't work were called over the weekend without warning and told not to come back. There was no indication there was any price to not working the weekend.

This is why Viacom is consistently rated one of the worst companies to work for.

Lest you think they only treat temps like shit, last December "the dreaded Viacom" laid off 850 people without warning.

Sumner Redstone famously said "Viacom is me" and fired people like Tom Cruise, Dan Rather, and Les Moonves at the drop of a hat. He's a senile bully."