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"