Biglaw Office Policies: You Catch More Associates With Honey Than Vinegar

Hello. Hello. You really thought you were going to get me that time. I appreciate that you're still in the game. You know. Losing, but in it. That's fair. I'm Joe Patrice. This is thinking like a lawyer. Catherine Rubino is also here. So from thinking like a lawyer and you know, above the law. Yeah. This is our weekly roundup of some of the big stories of the week that was here at above the law. And then, yeah. That is what we do. But before we do that, we like to, you know, catch up with one another, see how the week's gone and a little segment we call. What do we call it? Small talk. Small talk. Okay. I'm not familiar. I think you are. Oh, there it is. There's the small talk fanfare. You really enjoy that, don't you? I do. You know, we all have to steal whatever joy we can from this life that just tries to grind us down. If you stopped interrupting me at the beginning of the show, maybe. Is that like a deal you want to work out? Yeah. See, but I'd have to, I'd have to act first. And I'm not sure I trust you not to renege a deal. Whoa. Whoa. Am I wrong? Dear listeners, do you think I'm wrong? I don't think you do. I will delete the trumpet fanfare. I could get, I'm just saying. I don't know. You can test it out next time. A lot of trust, a lot of trust. I didn't know if I've built up that much trust in you. Wow. So how was your weekend, Joe? Weekend I don't really know about. Last week I was at Legal Week as the ALM's annual, what used to be called Legal Tech New York and is now called Legal Week despite the fact that it's still just Legal Tech New York, but branding is fun. And it's the annual Get Together in New York to talk about all manner of legal technology stuff. So what's kind of the flavor of Legal Week you've kind of talked in the past, the different tech conferences, of which I now know entirely too much, have slightly different focuses. So what's kind of the Legal Week's variety? I mean, it used to be de-ricifully called e-discovery week. It still largely is, though there are some different... Why de-ricifully, it seems as someone who did e-discovery work that it is a tremendously large portion of legal tech. Yeah, de-ricifully for the same reasons that... When is that supposed to mean? Oh, I know. It's a portion of the job, but it is also... It is just a portion. It is not something that really should sustain an entire conference theoretically. It is a critical part of the legal workflow, but not all of it. It's certainly not a part of the workflow outside of litigation. And so, yeah, it got kind of a knock because it was the same thing over and over. It also has, let's be honest, become a mature part of the legal tech landscape, at which point does it really need a show anymore? I don't know. That said, that's not really a fair knock on it to the extent that e-discovery has one person put it, the guts of e-discovery can still be used for other things. You can take the way in which it operates and with some work apply that to other use cases. And so, it's still valuable. That said, its focus is largely what big New York firms want, largely litigation based. The keynote was LeVar Burton this year. You're fun. It was fun. Shorty. Very captivating. As he explained, storytelling generally was the theme of what he talked about. But what was kind of captivating is how, even though this is somebody who's not in the legal tech space, he managed to kind of bring it back around, talking about how it is about telling a story. That is what they tell the speakers to. Yeah. Well, that's a thing. Sometimes when you bring in somebody to speak from outside of the field, they talk about their thing and leave it up to you to figure out how it connects. But he had a plan for how it's connected. So that was very interesting. What else? Yeah, no, saw lots of products, mostly e-discovery probably, but some contract analytic stuff, some very exciting stuff out of Lexus, saw some cool things about, I saw a really cool tool called Liquid Text. It was a good show. Well, that's good. But before we end this segment, I do have a very important question for you, Joe. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Ready? Yeah. How's your bracket doing? Oh, yeah, terribly. Yeah, I did not have any of the Final Four, as you might imagine. I would be shocked if anyone had this Final Four. Yeah. So that said, in the bracket competition amongst my friends, there is someone who had Miami winning, so they have at least one. They're living the dream. They have at least one still in. Yeah, I mean, I imagine Miami Natives and or alum are doing okay. Same with Yukon, San Diego, or FAU folks, but outside of people who have personal connections to those schools, it's not looking great. They use the one I whiffed on the most, I feel, because I just... Well, they are a nine seed. They are. That's not surprising. Well, and that's the problem. I didn't probe much about that team other than seeing them as a nine. Had I done so and learned that they'd only lost three games all year, I might have said, huh, this looks like a five or six seed that has been woefully missceded. I mean, even if they should have perhaps your right been a five or six seed that was missceded, you still don't necessarily expect them in the final four. No, but I would have believed in them getting a lot further and had them in a place where they could be. I just was like, I don't know anything about it. It looks like a nine. Don't. Yeah. Yeah, that was my mistake. It's weird. Like this is, I think, the year that I have watched the least amount of college basketball in, I don't know, a solid decade, two decades, something like that. And it's wild because it is obviously the most exciting year. But, you know, what's kind of fun about March Madness is that you can pick it up at the tournament level and still get a great deal of enjoyment from the whole thing. Sure. And this one, the men's tournament has been chaos. The women's tournament is just sitting around waiting for South Carolina to win, but the men's tournament has been there. The men's tournament has been utterly wild. And I mean, in other years when you've had like a Cinderella, a five seed, make it to the final four, it's a big deal. And you know, it is like the George Mason year or whatever. But this having four fairly low, I mean, four is the highest seed out of any of them, I believe, is just high. Highest or lowest? How do you do that? That's the highest. Well, because that, well, but it's the lowest number. Like, I don't know what. But it's still high. Like you don't, you don't call the one seed the low seed. Yeah, I guess that's right. I can, I can give you a definitive ruling on this. Are you ready? Okay. Do you watch on Food Network? Oh, okay. Tournament of Champions. No, but there's, it's a Guy Fieri show. There's a wild card element to it though, where sometimes the, you know, he spins a wheel and either the higher seat or the lower seed gets to do a thing. Oh. And the higher seed is the one seed. The lower seed is the eight in those instances. Yeah. I'm just saying, according to Guy Fieri, it's pretty clear. I think, I mean, that's, that's how I would think of it. But then when, when you start saying the numbers and then I go, well, wait, now I guess one is a lower number. Like, should I be calling that technically the lower? But no, I think, no, it's definitely the highest. Colloquy is correct. Yeah. I mean, listen, the point of language is communication. Right, that's fair. People cease to understand you by calling the one seed the low seed. You have missed the boat. Yeah. But I mean, hey, this could be part of one of those like attorneys general situations where everybody says it differently. Okay, but attorneys general sounds so cool though. I love every time I have to write the attorneys general said blah, blah, blah, makes me in my heart happy. Yeah. Fair enough. Or order to Whopper's Jr. I don't know. The Whopper's Jr. Yeah. Okay. I think we're done. I think we're done here. Fair. But oddly, not done talking about seeding. Oh, interesting. So we're going to talk about brackets still now that we're done with this. Yes. With that said, we have an annual bracket competition here at Above the Law where we choose. Cohesides with March Madness. We are getting on the bandwagon like every other website out there. Newsjacking. Yeah. Yeah. So we come up with some ridiculous question every year and ask people to vote on it. Before this year, I'll tell you my favorite was the best true crime documentary. Oh, that's okay. That one was a lot of fun to put together. And as a result, I'm on a lot of distribution lists for true crime. I've asked all sorts of random stuff that still kind of makes me chuckle. Yeah. This started years and years ago actually, I believe with Ellie's competition to become the editor here with one about best fictional lawyer. And we've continued this trend. And this year we decided to make a statement about the way in which the US news is being dropped by a lot of the elite schools. They're saying that they're no longer going to give US news their data. Yeah, I think it's like over 40 law schools. At this point. Yeah. But it started with Yale saying they didn't like US news as methodology. So therefore they won't give it any data. Take their ball to home. So they didn't want a data driven. Even if you disagreed with the methodology, I feel like transparency is good. I really am very cynical about this move. I think that all they're trying to do is be more opaque because they know they're going to win the peer review portion, which is all that's really left other than US news estimating. And they feel that they can just kind of screw over the transparency that we've all asked for. Because if you don't like how the methodology works, you can reverse engineer anyway, whatever. Well, yes, I think that there's plenty to be said about the methodology and the problems. And also still say that there are good things about transparency. But I think at this point, and maybe it was different when US news was the only game in town, but the ABA collects a lot of data about bar passage and other kind of key metrics about the quality of a law school. Now provide you with a ton of information. If you know where to look for it about these things as well. And all that is compiled at law school transparency.com, which is a fantastic website for prospective law students that has so much information on it, it's waggled. And so the information is in fact out there whether or not folks participate in US news. Well, but it's going to be harder with that data not being released. I mean, they even law school transparency relies on a lot of that data ending up in US news to take anyway. Point is we've gotten very a field of the bracket situation. So we think it's I think it's largely stupid that this is how the law schools are choosing to act. They don't want a scientific evaluation of who the best law school is. So we're going to give them an unscientific version. So we just seeded the law schools per their ranking in US news last year and asked our readers to just go ahead and vote. Yeah, you have had quite a few choice comments about it. And I would like, listen, I don't always give you credit, but I want to give you 100% of the credit here. You immediately called what was going to happen. The first round upset that, you know, you want to talk about you 1000% called before you hit publish on the post. Yeah, I was pretty sure that our readers, many of you readers are wonderful, very serious folks. We also have a segment of readers who are hopeless trolls. And we love them too. And I knew that those hopeless trolls were going to immediately once I saw that the matchup that Yale at number one had was against number 32, Asla, the Antonin Scalia School of Law out of George Mason. I knew Asla was going to win. And boy, did they? They took that out. Yeah. They are rampantly cheating. Almost a million votes cast in one of the rounds. I love how honest you are about the cheating too. I think there was like one of the headlines. You were like, look at this crazy cheating and wild results follow. There are not a million people who have a real opinion about whether or not Asla deserves to win this competition. Even if every reader cared and all voted, we would, you know, hit that number, but that's not every reader voting. It is certainly not. Especially when you look at the other competitions where you can see that we have people who feel like they shouldn't even be voting in that one, but they're all involved in this Asla one. And I don't care because that's not scientific. And that's what US News wants. They want to turn it over to the crazy people. They can turn it over to the crazy people. Now, at this point, we're at a, as of this recording, we have a final four voting going on. You can still, as when this is released, you can still vote in the final four. What are the matchups? Asla is going to be taking on Northwestern and... Defeating Northwestern is what I'm hearing. That's probably true. And Texas is taking on Penn. Did you think those are the four best law schools in the country? Absolutely not. But that's what happens when you try to have a non-scientific way. Democracy is good times. Yeah. So, well, I mean, I don't want to knock democracy, but I do want to knock... Sure you do. Oh, no, but I do want to knock a lack of a scientific rigor. And that's what we have here. So we had a situation where we turned it over to the opinions and this is what we got. And now, do I think that that's going to be reflected by US News? Not really. I think that when US News asks people, it's... Well, they also make sure it's only one vote per person. So... Well, they do that. There's that. There's certainly that. That would help a great deal. And they also are asking people who are a little more serious and they're going to say the... Sure. The serious side of the ATL readership are the folks that are getting... The inquiry from US News. They're the people I see voting for Yale in matchup. So those people exist and those people will probably dominate the US News ranking vote. And it will still look like whatever. But I mean, the point is still the same. It calcifies public opinion when you do it in a serious way. And it turns it when you do it in a non-serious way, but the problem remains the same. If you are not taking evidence as it exists and evaluating it on its own terms, you're going to get screwy results. And that's what US... Evidence-based analysis is important. Yeah. And that's what US News is asking for. And even if the numbers come out this year and it's the same top 14, it almost always is. That's not an argument for taking away that data had no impact. It did have an impact. It just calcified things. And that's not good for anybody either. We don't want to live in a world where we aren't critically examining the way in which law schools operate and we just shrug our shoulders and do the exact same thing. This has been a fun competition. You should all vote. See if you can make Northwestern beat ASLOG. You won't because I'm sure they will still win. Because you do know how to create these bots. Yeah. But whatever. Do what you can. Vote early and often in this one. I don't care. It's all proving the point. Anyway, so that's where we are. We will then after this have the championship between whoever and whoever, ASLOG, whoever probably. And then they will have voting over the weekend and announce a winner next week. So there you have it. Stay tuned. Yeah. Join us on the road from Legal Talk Network for special conference coverage at ABA Tech Show 2023. I'm your host Lawrence Colletti of Recording Live from Tech Show's Expo Hall floor. We'll be talking about the future of the legal industry with keynote speakers like Cleo's Jack Newton, Tech innovator Jazz Hampton, Legal Tech disruptor Aaron Levine and of course our good friend Kimberly Bennett. Our pre-show talk with Tech Show's co-chair Gisak Galakis is already live and every day during the conference we'll be releasing new episodes with insider details you'll want to hear more about. So just go to LegalTalkNetwork.com and search Tech Show 2023 to hear all the episodes or listen on the road with your favorite podcasting app. We'll see you out there on the road at ABA Tech Show 2023. A digital edge podcast where the law and technology intersect. I'm Sharon Nelson and together with Jim Callaway, we invite professionals from all fields to discuss the latest trends, tips and tools within the legal industry. Stay up to date on the rapidly changing legal tech landscape with the digital edge on the Legal Talk Network. All right, so another story that happened last week was one of yours. What happened? An attorney, an Illinois attorney, Calvida Frederick, decided to not follow the advice of a federal judge. I think listen, if a federal judge is giving you some advice, you should probably take it, right? Especially if you have a case in front of that particular judge, they're probably giving you the advice for a reason, for a purpose. You should probably take it. Yeah, even if it's bad advice, you should listen to it for at least the limited purpose of appearing before that judge. Right, right. In this particular case, a judge, Steven Seager, had told Frederick to refile their motion and watch out for their tone that was full of potshots and hyperbole. Okay. The judge dismissed the case, said that the wrong party was listed as the defendant. And in appealing, that Calvida Frederick wrote a motion to appeal that or to reconsider that rather, and decided to launch into the judge and the judge's previous decision, saying that the judge failed to do adequate research, that the opinion was full of manifest errors, a fact and law was mistaken and or deliberately chose to disregard the evidence in the record and so on and so forth. In fact, Judge Seager said the court could go on. Council did. After 28 pages, Council finally ran out of gas, which I have to appreciate Judge Seager's both sort of the levity, which he approached this, pointing it out, saying, listen, this is full of potshots and hyperbole, and even saying, like, I'm a federal judge, I had to get confirmed in front of the Senate. I can take this. It's not about my personal feelings, but you're not doing your argument, any benefit at all. We judge, Judge Seager has been great that he is a, he, this isn't you for the first time we've dealt with him on this podcast, but we've written about a man and talked about him a bit over the years. The last time we talked about him on this show was when there was a town that tried to find an elderly couple or just a person. Anyway, find some elderly, no, it was like an 80 year old who the town tried to find $30,000 for a bunch of nonsense and he was, he was none too pleased with the town's attempt to extort money from an 80 year old. He also was not talked about on this show, but of interest early on in COVID, he was noted for some people demanded that they hold a hearing early on in the lockdown on some stupid copyright claim and he wrote something back somewhat tongue-ed cheek and humorously about, you know, you're not the important problem right now. And so he's, he's, he's becoming kind of an above the law all-star. So what's interesting is this particular case is the attorney in question, Kelvita Frederick, is also, we've been written about her before, actually our colleague, Chris, who's not with us this week, but actually wrote about her previously because another judge said of Kelvita Frederick that it was the worst lawyer, poorest performance by an attorney that he's seen in his 12 plus years on the bench. So this was, oh, I didn't even realize this was a meetup of a couple of ATL all-stars. And the point is that also Judge Seeker had given Kelvita Frederick, I think 10 days or however many days to refile the motion, perhaps removing some of the, some of the tone issues, let's say, and she never did, never did refile. Yeah. I don't know how you're gonna change hearts and minds. Man. Do they say the best things in life are free, which either means the legal toolkit podcast is pretty awesome or we're totally committed to the wrong business model. You'll just have to tune in to find out what it is. I'm Jared Korea and each episode I run the risk of making a total ass of myself so that you can have a laugh, learn something new, and why not, maybe even improve your law practice. Stop believing podcasts can't be both fun and helpful. Subscribe now to the legal toolkit. Go ahead. I'll wait. Today's legal news is rarely as straightforward as the headlines that accompany them. On lawyer to lawyer, we provide legal perspective. You need to better understand the current events that shape our society. Join me, Craig Williams, and a wide variety of industry experts as we break down the top stories. Follow a lawyer to lawyer on the legal talk network or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. Okay. So we have a couple of stories that are intertwined. I think it's probably the right answer. Which one do we want to start with? We can kind of talk about the topic, which is what are big law firms or mid-sized firms doing when it comes to getting back to the office. We've talked about it a million and five times. We will continue to talk about it more because there's no clear standard. How many days do we measure? How many days you're in the office by the month, by the week, by the quarter? Who knows? And what do you do? How do you build camaraderie? How do you teach up the younger associates to make sure they're at the same level? Who knows them? But it's interesting to see the different approaches firms are taking. I think the more fun version is Seward and Kissle, who announced that for the month of August, they're just closing up shop. They don't get the month off, mind you. Not closing. The office is closing. The office is closing. Yeah. Folks are just told to, they're going to be fully remote the month of August. I mean, that's great. That's great. And of course, you know, there's the normal caveats, right? If you're on a case where it's required, who knows what that exactly would be, but you know, obviously all the normal sort of caveats. But I love that it opens the door for folks to be able to, you know, review documents on a beach somewhere. Yeah, no, definitely. It was Seward and Kissle, I think, is very good about this question, generally speaking. It's not just this. They also are the firm that's doing a lot of fun events to build kind of a culture we've written about. Make people want to go back. We've wrote about how they created a office-wide mini golf tournament, constructing things in there. You know, fun things to keep people feeling like, yeah, I'm in this office, but there's a reason to be here. And it's an approach that begins from the premise that you got to do your work. We all know you can do it remotely. We also would like folks in the office for culture reasons, for training reasons, whatever, rather than punish you if you don't come to the office, let's do something to make you maybe want to be here more. Yeah, and I think that even the, oh, everyone's, you know, low offices close for August also bring a build this sense of camaraderie, right? When you come back after the Labor Day weekend, I'm sure the office is going to be filled with all sorts of good nature chatter. Oh, what did you do? Where did you work from? Oh, that sounds like so much fun. Do you have pictures? I think that this naturally builds that kind of environment that people want to go back to. Absence makes the office grow fonder. Sure. They also announced that the week of Thanksgiving and the week, the last week of December, sort of between Christmas and New Year's, they would also be similarly fully remote, which, you know, that's what people want. They want that flexibility. Oh, it's cheaper to fly out the Saturday before Thanksgiving instead of, you know, 930 PM on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. No shit. People want that flexibility to be able to make those choices for themselves, for their families and still do the work that they signed up to do. Right. And you know, you hit the nail on the head with flexibility. And this is the thing we talked about with regard to a lot of these go back to work policies. It seems like some of these firms are thinking so long as we're giving you three days or four days, whatever it is in the office and we're making better policy. Well, I can't. We just dictate what those days are. And the issue is, at least from my experience, most people aren't upset about the idea of coming into the office. They're upset about the idea that it's being dictated when to come after they just went through a couple of years where they worked fully remote and turned in the biggest profits that the firms have ever seen. If they know they can produce like that, they want to be trusted on the level of, you know what, this Tuesday, I just happened that this was the day I could get this appointment. So I'm not coming in. I'll come in tomorrow. And that's what they care about, not the number of days. Right. And I mean, I think that obviously there's a balancing act and at a certain point, I think firms have to say, we're employing professionals and we have to allow them to use their professional judgment. I think it's okay even to say we prefer if you're here on Tuesdays or whatever. Sure. And it's fine because, listen, if I have a choice between my dentist appointment on Tuesday or Wednesday, okay, fine. I'll choose Wednesday. But if I don't have that choice and it's only Tuesdays or a specialist is only available on Tuesdays, trust me as a professional enough to know that that's true. And I will be there next Tuesday and I will still be there on Wednesday and I will do as much work as I always did. Right. So on that note, Sir Enchisel is approaching this from the perspective of incentivizing people to come to the office. What's the opposite? DPW, Davis Polk has updated their handbook to include the sort of heads up that if you don't comply with their in office mandate, then your bonus might be impacted. So now here's what's interesting about that. To my mind. You know, some law firms have minimum billable requirements and you have to bill a certain amount to get your bonus or else or you bill a certain amount and you get smaller bonus than the full bonus. Yada yada. Davis Polk does not do that. They are a lockstep bonus shop. So if you don't bill as much one year as you do another year, it doesn't matter. You're getting your full bonus either way. So with this statement, what Davis Polk is saying is they don't care if you work as much so long as you're doing it while sitting in the office. Well, nominally, I think that is what they're saying, but they're also not creating sort of a clear bright line. It's more of a heads up that this is what their expectations are and it could impact your bonuses. There's no sort of formula. You miss X amount of days. Y percentage is taken out of your bonus number or something like that. I think that they're going to likely use it judiciously and say, you know, oh, this is someone who we don't think is meeting the standard of the firm and this is one of the ways that that is true. I mean, we don't know yet, but it feels like the sort of thing that they're going to be applying very much on an individualized basis. So we kind of have to wait and see what the stories sounds like after bonuses come out. Yeah. So heads up at the very least that we are very serious about this about our in office policy. It just strikes me if you're trying to use this to weed out people that you don't think are performing, then go ahead and create an hourly minimum like a bunch of other firms did. It's not something I think is a particularly good practice for a law firm to do as far as helping with, you know, we're talking about culture. I think it creates something of a toxic culture to do that, but if that's what you want to do, then go ahead and do that. I don't know. I would rather from a firm culture perspective, I'd rather work somewhere that tells me I have to be in the office three days a week or my bonus will be impacted rather than some firm tell me I have to build 1900 hours or my bonus will be impacted. Well, I sure, but what you're saying and I think is correct is that this isn't going to be applied in any kind of bright line manner. This is going to be used as a proxy for them to ding some other people who they think haven't performed in a week. But there is a pretty clear way to avoid that, right? Be in the office. I think it's three days a week. Yeah. Yeah, I just it's not that much. Sure, sure, sure. It strikes me as weird to be making your bonus discussion be we don't care if you ended up only billing 1500 hours so long as you FaceTime did it sitting in your cubicle. That strikes me as bad. Like if you care about the money, then care about the money. But anyway, that's the back and forth we have. Well, cool. So thanks everybody for listening. You should subscribe to the show if you haven't already. So you get all the new episodes. You should leave it reviews stars right something. It's all very helpful. We could use some more stars because we don't have the best rating simply because of a stretch in between hosts where I was doing a lot of interviews and people said this is getting weirdly salesy, which I agreed with. And so we managed to find a way to get out of that, but it would be nice to have some new ratings to reflect where we are currently. Then you should be following us on social media. I'm at Joseph Patrice. She's at Catherine one, numeral one, you should both on Twitter for now. Who knows? We're going to lose blue check marks soon. So whatever. Also, a T L blog is the account of the website. You should be reading above the law. That way you get all these stories and more as they happen. So you can have your homework done before you show up. You can listen to the Jibo show that Catherine hosts. You can listen to the Legal Tech Week journalists round table, which I'm on. You can check out all the other shows from the Legal Talk Network. And with that, I think we said everything. So talk to everyone later. See you next time. Bye. ♪♪♪♪