Legal News

Associates Gone Wild, Part II: Cadwalader Lawyers Speak

By Ashby Jones

We blogged yesterday on what we’ve cautiously decided to call a trend: law firms showcasing for recruiting purposes their associates in an up-close-and-personal way. Along those same lines, we were surprised to find that Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, the firm which has laid off some 131 lawyers this year, had freed up a handful of associates for a roundtable discussion with Nate Raymond of the American Lawyer, who has a very nice piece on the firm in this month’s issue (the lead anecdote alone, involving Dennis Block and Jimmy Cayne, is worth the price of admission).

The roundtable discussion is an interesting read for a handful of reasons. As a threshold issue, it strikes us as just, well, novel, to read the words of real associates in the press, sorta like how we, as baseball fans, feel when we read Curtis Granderson’s dispatches on ESPN or Doug Glanville’s articles in the NYT. (Equating law-firm associates with major league baseball players? We know, we know, just work with us.)

Secondly, while the answers given by the CWT associates are mostly extremely positive takes on Cadwalader and their experiences there, e.g. — “I’ve had absolutely amazing experiences here compared to my friends who I went to law school with. I definitely lucked out.” — some candor does creep through, like an admission that “all-nighters” do happen.

Consider the following exchange:

How do you deal with the hectic hours? Every law firm has them, but I’ve heard stories about Cadwalader’s.

[Jodi] Abramowitz: “We just take breaks, coffee breaks. Our clients are really big institutions that pay us a lot of money to get very highly complicated work done, so because we’re doing that, it’s actually sort of fun in a sick way. Everybody is a team player and takes one for the team if not two and does their part.”

[Scott] Griffin: “I’ve pulled several all-nighters, but at my prior firm, I did the same thing. It’s the nature of the types of clients that large firms have, the demands, and sometimes especially in financial restructuring, the fire needs to be put out immediately, so you’ve got to do what’s needed to get it done.”

Not the most critical comments, perhaps, but elucidating nonetheless. LB Readers, any thoughts?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 05, 2008 (boomark / email).