Law Firms

DLA Piper informed all of its U.S. partners on Friday that it will reduce pay for most of them by 11.5 percent in 2009, while strong performers will get more money. The firm projects revenue will decline 7 percent in 2009 and profits will drop 6 percent, said U.S. Managing Partner J. Terence O’Malley in

The job market for lawyers, hit hard by the recession, seems to reach new lows every day. But that has not done much to discourage the thousands who are lining up to become the next generation of attorneys. In seeming defiance of logic, many law schools are surging in popularity. At Washington and Lee University

United States defence lawyers are appealing against verdicts in two cases because the jurors made comments about the trials on social networking sites. In some cases social networking sites such as Facebook have assisted the legal process. For example, it’s recently been used to serve court orders. But in the two cases, US lawyers argue

U.S. law firms, including Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, Shearman & Sterling LLP and WolfBlock LLP, are abandoning tradition as they cut costs in the deepening recession by imposing merit pay, slashing salaries and generally putting an end to decades of associate entitlement. The firms are responding to the plunge in corporate, real estate and

The Obama administration on Friday said it was abandoning the use in court proceedings of the Bush administration’s term “enemy combatant” as it argues for the continued detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, symbolically separating itself from Bush detention policies. But in a filing in federal court, the Justice Department argued that the president

Just as I was thinking it was about time to publish a column on the topic of “leverage” at law firms (roughly speaking, the associate to partner ratio, although there’s more than one way to calculate something that people will call “leverage”), here comes a slew of pieces on the topic, including: Prof. Larry Ribstein