Who Will Join Milbank’s Summer Bonus Party?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Kathryn Rubino:

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Thinking Like. A Lawyer. My name is Kathryn Rubino. I’m an editor at Above the Law, and I’m joined by my colleague Chris Williams. Hi, Chris.

Chris Williams:

Hello. Hello.

Kathryn Rubino:

How you doing?

Chris Williams:

Pretty good. Pretty good. Where’s Joe?

Kathryn Rubino:

He is at a legal tech conference, probably unsurprising for regular listeners. So he is in, I think, Nashville at the moment, hobnobbing with all sorts of very fascinating. I’m sure he will tell us legal technologists.

Chris Williams:

It still blows my mind. I think that’s all is an estimate. It’s like using just an average chat. GPT prompt is the same as dumping out a bottle of water. Just the amount of tech issues that, because it’s not my forte, but when I do hear things, I’m like, oh,

Kathryn Rubino:

That’s his thing. Well, I’m sure he’ll come back with all sorts of updates from that. Were all for us. But before we get started, and of course this is your show where we talk about the legal stories from the week that was, but before we dive into all that, let’s start our small talk segment. Joe’s not here, so we’ll fake the sound effects done small talk. Okay. How you doing, Chris?

Chris Williams:

So you ever hear that moment when somebody asks you how you are and have I ever lived a life without having that sort of brain that tabular raa, otherwise pretty good. Oh, I did a thing yesterday. There was this event called Science on Tap, which was in Philly. I went to that and there was a four different speakers, and he talked about things that were related to their interest areas, the research. Did he do, the first speaker talked about this non-existent animal that he ended up calling it a mammoth. It was a big thing. He ended up finding out that it was just actually a brick of bracket of different animal bone parts. But it was cool to see how pseudoscience and science can kind of coincide and overlap. So for example, so this animal did not exist. They just had a bunch of bones, but at the time they were using its non-existence as proof that extinction could be a thing, which is a legitimate scientific concept. I thought it was cool to see how the, just because the thing is fake doesn’t mean doesn’t have effective effects that er out, but yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, I have been in a little bit of a spiral because you ever have, there’s a news story that is really nothing to do with you personally, but it incenses you and inflames your sense of right and wrong injustice to the point where it’s almost all consuming. That’s where I’m at with Jordan Chiles.

Chris Williams:

Got you. Who is this person?

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, Olympic gymnast won the bronze medal in the floor exercise and had it stripped through literally no fault of her own. I heard about that. Things that we absolutely know to be true, the higher value of her floor routine as compared to the Romanian gymnast who launched a complaint about it. That is true. The judges scored, her coaches submitted a challenge to the score within shortly after a minute. It was up there. It was changed. She won the bronze medal. The Romanian gymnast was kicked out of the third medal spot. She was awarded the medal and the Romanians put in a complaint to the international arbitration, some sports arbitration group, and they said that the deadline to submit the appeal by Jordan’s coaches was one minute, and she submitted it in one minute and four seconds. Therefore, they were stripping her of the medal in the IO state Olympic.

The International Olympic Committee signed off with that as well. And it’s just horseshit in every conceivable way. Also because the USA gymnastics was able to uncover evidence, finding that they actually have video timed evidence as a timestamp on it, saying that she actually got it in before the one minute deadline from the time that, and they refuse to evaluate that evidence, which is just so wildly unfair. Jordan had the superior routine that day. She should have received the higher score. The judges messed up. She followed her and her coaches followed the appropriate procedure, and she’s still going to have her Olympic medal shipped from her. And it is utterly unfair. USA gymnastics apparently is to make this legal. Again. It’s not done fighting. I think it looks like they’re going to go to Swedish court or the International Court of Human Rights. I think that’s also a possibility as well.

But it just reeks of utter unfairness. She had the better routine. The judges fucked up. They called the judges on it in time, but now this morning arbitration committee won’t look at it, and it’s just so unfair. And of course the racists have all come out because that was an all black women podium for the floor event, and now that Romania supposed to have that medal, all the races have come out in a terrible way, which just makes me so mad. Twitter. Yeah, well, not just Twitter, but yeah, literally when I see posts on it on TikTok or other social media, I have to immediately scroll past it because I know that if I spend even more than a second thinking about it, it’s going to derail my day.

Chris Williams:

Well, my day derailing thing I think is a little more positive. So I saw the Deadpool and Wolverine movie.

Kathryn Rubino:

Oh yeah, I did too. That was a good movie.

Chris Williams:

I think it was last week, and I don’t want to be that asshole that spoils one of the character debuts there. It’s not new to the franchise, but his performance is really good. He really makes a name for himself. And I saw people’s reactions to the character who plays the character, and they’re like, this is bad. I’m like, no, this is good. This is legitimately good acting. He researched the character. He did a good job. So my hope is that over time, whoever plays whatever character I’m talking about, people have a better reception. But yeah,

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, with that very cryptic explanation, if

Chris Williams:

You’ve seen it, who I’m talking about,

Kathryn Rubino:

I have seen it and I have a guess, but my thought is that the character that you’re talking about is actually their premier of that person playing that character because they tried to get the movie made for a number of years, but were unable to do so. And it’s kind of a nod to those kind of internet fan forums where people were talking about it for years about like, oh, if this character does it, blah, blah, blah. Am I right about that?

Chris Williams:

I put it this way, Wolverine should have asked before you drank his whiskey.

Kathryn Rubino:

Oh,

Chris Williams:

The character made a name for himself.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Fair enough. So with that, we will end our small talk segment. So our first story of the week, our biggest, and I think if you’re an associate in big law, you’re hoping that it’ll become an even bigger story in the weeks to come. But Millbank has issued special summer bonuses ranging between six and $25,000 depending on your seniority at the firm. They issue those globally, so not just limited to one office, which is pretty big news. Obviously. We talked in an earlier episode of the show that some of the smaller firms, some boutiques, some specialized firms had put out summer bonuses early in the year. And we certainly had a lot of a TL tips’ that were very excited about that possibility and really wanted it to happen. But I’d

Chris Williams:

Be excited about an unexpected 20 5K too.

Kathryn Rubino:

Sure. Listen, it’s all good news, but the majority of those earlier bonuses were tied to ours. Listen, which is always still great to be recognized, but it’s rewards a specific number of hours, and the Millbank bonuses are merely tied to just being in good standing in your class year, which is a little bit of a difference. The likelihood, of course, is that Millbank is having a very busy, very productive year, hence their ability to give out these generous surprise bonuses. But I think that when Millbank does it, it really changes the analysis for the rest of big law, whether or not they’re going to be able to step up and meet this new Millbank scale. Millbank has in recent years taken up the mantle of first mover. I think sometimes, listen, big law leaders tend to be little C conservative. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.

Let’s just keep on doing things the way we’re doing them. But Millbank is taking a little bit of a different tact. They don’t mind being the first mover, and if somebody comes over the top later, whether it be Davis Polk or Cravath or whomever, they’ll just match it. But they have taken the lead in getting extra money to associates, whether it be in the form of these kinds of special bonuses or compensation overall. So now the ball is really in the rest of big law’s court, and specifically I think in those two firms that I’ve already mentioned, which is Davis, Polk and Cravath, because they tend to also be in that initial wave of movers in big law. And what we saw in a couple of the last few rounds of raises is that the rest of big law kind of plays almost like a wait and see game until they figure out what Cravath is doing.

So Cravath partners I imagine are discussing this issue right now, and I think we’ll see, I, there’s a lot, there’s certainly a lot of associates out there that are very hopeful that this becomes a thing for the summer. Definitely. Obviously, I don’t think that the productivity numbers are necessarily where they were kind of in the 2021 immediately post Covid kind of a year. But this certainly is good news. We’ve been writing about the uptick in corporate and m and a hours, which in 2023 saw a dip. And this is again, just across the board, not limited by hours. So if your group is having a slow time, you’re still getting this money. So it seems like a really good indication that across the board hours are where the firm wants them to be. So I think that that’s a real turn for the corporate slowdown that we saw last year.

Okay. Our next big, big loss story from last week is about hybrid work. I think that’s kind of been one of the bigger question marks sort of in the last four years, kind of post covid. We all worked from home during Covid, big law made record profits, and a lot of people were like, that means I get to work at home for forever, which is not something that big law as a rule has generally been on board with. And I’m sympathetic to both sides. I think of the story because there’s also been documented comments by managing partners at big law firms saying things that these sort of Zoom associates, people that joined the firm, started their legal career in this post covid kind of era are behind where they would expect them to be. So a second or third year is not necessarily able to do the sort of tasks that pre 2020 big law firms could expect from people with that level of experience and seniority.

So there’s a lot of competing factors going on, and I think there’s a bunch of reasons for it. I think some people are always going to blame, oh, kids today, and I’m not exactly sure that’s where the problem really is. As much as it’s that you learn so much that kind of soft learning that happens day to day listening, oh, my neighbor is on a call and we’re on the same case and they just see you in the hall and they just call you in to, you don’t bill for this, but listen to the calls. You can kind of get a sense of what’s going on in the case, or you see somebody buy a water cooler and you happen to mention something and then they’ve got some great advice. Oh, have you looked here for a sample of a document and that kind kind of stuff. But I think what’s interesting is that different firms have very much taken different perspectives, and one of the largest global law firms, DLA Piper had previously said they were never going to mandate specific days or a certain number of days in the office. So they said that a couple years ago,

Chris Williams:

Never ended up being about four years. Yeah,

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. They’ve changed their policy. They’re now mandating a certain number of days in the office. They want to see sort of more bodies and chairs, I suppose. But it really goes to the point that when you make a policy and you make these sort of, even in formal promises, people rely on them. People bought houses further away or apartments or rented apartments further away from the office than they otherwise would. If you know you’re going to be commuting even three days a week, 150 days a year, that’s different than if you are doing it 50 days a year, even once a week. And so I think that there’s a real sense of betrayal based on the tips we’ve gotten from people inside the firm because of that change in policy.

Chris Williams:

What do we even do in that situation? I feel like never is pretty absolute. And for somebody relied on that and spent hundreds of thousand dollars on a home, they just didn’t factor in commuting. Is there a way that they can challenge this and not worry about

Kathryn Rubino:

The security their job? No, they could leave the firm because I think the firm’s perspective probably is that all of their policies within their handbook or whatever are subject to modification and change, which makes sense because there are definitely times when you want to be changing your policies. So I mean, I think that makes sense, but

Chris Williams:

Do you think there’s any risks? This was just a stealthy layoff thing and they were like, oh, we’re, we’re not going to fire these people, but we’re going to just make it so that they won’t want to work here and we won’t have to face any consequences.

Kathryn Rubino:

I’m not sure it’s quite that Machiavellian

Chris Williams:

A law firm, Machiavellian. No.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. I mean, I think that it’s probably just noticing and really kind of getting to realize that the amount and the quality of the hours that you’re getting from, particularly those that junior tranche of associates is not where you expect it to be. So what can you do in order to get your return on investment? You have put in a lot of money and time into getting the associates you want to be able to bill for their hours, and if they’re not producing in the way that is the product you want. And listen, we have no information about what’s actually going on at DLA, just that they’ve changed their position. There’s some great questions in there about what do you do? And I think what really the lesson I think going forward is that you be upfront with your associates in the sense that we are making the best decision we can right now. This is where we think it is, but this is very much unprecedented. We don’t know what we’re going to think about a largely remote workforce in four years. We will be constantly evaluating and updating our policies accordingly, I think is probably a more fair way to frame it.

Chris Williams:

Is there really no way other than Chance encounters to, because when people talk about DEM merits of working from the office, it usually is a sort of chance encounter justification like, oh, things you overhear at the water cooler, or, Hey, coming here for a second, blah, blah, blah. Is there really no way that they can structure ways of teaching people to pick up little things?

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, I mean think there is, but I think that people have a different perspective on meetings and that kind of thing when they’re in person versus on Zoom, particularly when you have the option of shutting off your camera just psychologically, I think that that’s probably, we are in fact on Zoom and Chris, in fact, to shut off his camera just now,

Chris Williams:

This isn’t about me. This is about DLA Piper,

Kathryn Rubino:

But at various big law firms that I used to work at, they would have, especially during the summer, there would be once a week where they would order in lunch for everybody and everyone would meet in the conference room, and it wasn’t necessarily billable or anything like that, and it was free lunch, so great. But you talk to people about cases that they were working on. Oh, that’s really interesting. Oh, we could use some extra hours. Why don’t you do blah, blah, blah on it? Or that kind of thing. But it’s still structured in the sense that everybody was there and the firm encouraged it in that particular way. Other firms do CLE classes where you need your CLE hours, particularly if you’re in your first couple of years in New York, and they needed to be in person and it wasn’t required. But even there’s a difference when you’re like, oh yeah, I guess I will go.

I get to sit next to my buddy. They also provide lunch, I’ll get a free meal out of it. That kind of stuff. And there’s kind of those networking opportunities, they’re happy hours on Fridays, that kind of stuff where even if you’re not necessarily getting specific work from somebody or it’s not necessarily work related, you’re still visiting those relationships. There’s a reason why people spend so much money on networking classes and activities and that kind of thing because oh, now I know Penny a lot better and it’s a lot easier for me to ask her for work. I know I like her and I know she kind of likes me. We chatted about F1 racing at theBar on Friday, and I think that I have a cousin who’s about to start his second year of law school and talking just about careers in general. And one of the things that I really struck me when I was chitchatting was how lucky and fortuitous so much of a career can be.

I mean, listen, there’s some people who are very diligent and deliberate and bless their hearts, but I just happened to work on a case for a partner that just happened to get hired and didn’t have any associates working for him yet. He had lateral over and the associates he wanted to bring over from his old firm didn’t take the offer, which, whatever. So I got put on a totally different kind of law. That was my first antitrust case, and it spiraled from there. I didn’t intend, I didn’t know that that was what I was going to do, but it turned out that just because just the timing, when I got hired, when he got hired, that it worked out for me. And so much of it is this kind of luck based twists and turns in your career that doing the things to maximize that is probably for the best. And there’s also some stuff that just doesn’t translate great over Zoom, right? Watching a partner do a markup of a document that you’ve handed to them. I can remember, I think I was the second year associate getting called into a partner’s office. My office was next door to his, and so he called me in because he was going over a memo I had written. He first of all yelled at me because I did not put the staple in the document in the right place.

Chris Williams:

Oh, that you should have known. Always mind your staples. The, I mean,

Kathryn Rubino:

I had made it perpendicular, and he really thought that the appropriate place for a staple was caddy corner on the edge of the paper, which he’s not wrong. It is certainly superior.

He’s not wrong. He’s just an asshole, which is fine. But watching him kind of go over my work and see as he’s going through it, it’s not something that you really, that’s hard to do over Zoom. It doesn’t translate nearly as well, but it was really an incredible learning experience, even if the most stark memory is the correct way to staple a document. Alright, well, good luck to those DLA associates who are now coming into the office. Hopefully you’ll be able to get some joy out of the hours. Maybe listen, take the time to invest in you and a new wardrobe, maybe a new pair of fun shoes in order to make the heartbreak of going back to the office a little bit less. Okay. Chris, what is the light? There’s so much all the time with Elon Musk. That could almost be like a subheading on the Above, the Law page. God, no. So

Chris Williams:

Tell me, no, kill it with fire.

Kathryn Rubino:

Don’t suggest that. Okay. It’s not a suggestion. I’m just saying that the number of stories that many of us write about Elon Musk is not zero.

Chris Williams:

Yeah, yeah. It’s bad. I will say, well, just one, just a side note, nothing to do with any particular story. There was a point in my Elon bashing career where I really enjoyed just calling him a man child. I think that he is, he’s

Kathryn Rubino:

Accurate. So it has the sting of truth.

Chris Williams:

Yes, he’s a grownup boy with billions, but when it came out in a court case that he had a burner Twitter account where he actually roleplayed as a child, calling him a man child now just feels like I’m validating him and the bastard stole my joy. So now I have to think of other ways to insult him besides calling him a billionaire, which I think should be a slur, but well fair.

Kathryn Rubino:

But I feel very confident that you were up to the task of finding new ways to insult Elon Musk.

Chris Williams:

Why thank you. If I’m not a will Smith, I’m a wordsmith. So this is D decided to, which I guess is actually legally speaking, a bold endeavor. He decided to rework

Kathryn Rubino:

Does not necessarily mean smarter or good folks. No,

Chris Williams:

No. Like I said, I was selective. He decided to reinvent antitrust and be like, what if actually it was supposed to protect the robber barons? So he got mad at advertisers for not using his platform and said that them not giving him money was the antitrust violation.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. It literally inverts the whole concept of free speech. We live a post citizens United World, which means that corporations have speech rights.

Chris Williams:

Yeah. Not just speech rights. Was it true? But also it just fucks with the notion of market share. It’s like you need to be giving me more control of the market or else.

Kathryn Rubino:

There’s certainly that, but also free market means I can take my business elsewhere if I don’t like you. Right. It means nothing. If Karen’s can’t go and demand of a manager, I will take my business elsewhere. If you don’t do what I would like you to do,

Chris Williams:

Well shout out to the through creative, but yes, yes. All the people who have sense of the common variety think that this is dumb and stupid, but that is never stopped Elon Musk and likely won’t in the future. Turns out that he used this goofy legal theory, ended up having a business, had ended up not being able to sustain itself and went out of business. I think they couldn’t afford the

Kathryn Rubino:

Lawsuit. Yeah. I think it was a trade group that was working and analyzing whether or not, and it was because a bunch of advertisers took their business away from Twitter now X, because there’s a lot more racism on Twitter X, and you may not want your advertisement for Coke next to Stormfront or some other terrible content. And that is definitely, you are right as an advertiser.

Chris Williams:

I mean, there’s a lot, even the people that are like, I can excuse racism, but I can’t excuse election misinformation because that’s also there. Or I feel like if you wanted to find one of the leading minds on ology, it’s on Twitter. Got to, I feel like there was a point where a Stormfront, which used to be the biggest white supremacist forum, they ended up taking it down. They got broke. It was like a $2,000, my annual cost keeping. They’re like, we can’t do this. People were fine. They just moved their white supremacy to Twitter. And as you mentioned when with the Olympic Bs on TikTok, which isn’t even homegrown, but people still find ways to infiltrate and make David Duke happy. His spirit at least. Just remember, free speech means doing what billionaires want or else you lose your

Kathryn Rubino:

Company specific billionaires. Right? Specific ones. Specific ones. It has to be what Elon wants, not what multinational corporations want

Chris Williams:

Different people, the multinational

Kathryn Rubino:

Corporations.

Chris Williams:

But yeah, it is one of those things where one, it is legal newsworthy, but it’s also Elon Musk, Musk King. Nobody read this and was surprised that this happened. At least you shouldn’t have been. I like granite, but you shouldn’t live under a rock. It’s a thing. But yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

Fair enough. Well, I’m sure we will talk about Elon Musk, if not this specific case in the relatively near future. Oh,

Chris Williams:

No,

Kathryn Rubino:

It seems likely. Well, I think that pretty much wraps it up for us today. Thanks Chris for chitchatting, and thanks everyone for listening. You should be reading Above the Law. You can check us out on the social medias. Chris is at Writes for Rent. I’m on at Kathryn one. That’s the numeral one. You should be listening to other offerings from the Legal Talk Network. I’m also the host of the Jabot podcast. Oh, Joe also does the legal tech writers roundtables on Friday, and he’s at Joseph Patrice on X and Joe Patrice because he was able to get the more truncated moniker on the newer social media. Other than that, I think it have a great week y’all.

Chris Williams:

Peace.