Legal Jobs - Washington, DC

Selig Sacks, China Practice Partner at Foley & Lardner

GLI/Grimes Legal, Inc., a global recruiting network, recently worked with Selig Sacks in his move to Foley & Lardner. Selig was brought in as a co-chair to the U.S./Greater China Corporate Practice. Jay Rothman, Chairman and CEO of Foley said, “He’ll be a tremendous resource to our clients facing new challenges and opportunities in the expanding global economy.”

When asked about Selig’s impact within the firm, Peter Wang, managing partner of Foley’s New York office described Selig as “high-caliber” and said he “…will further strengthen our securities and corporate finance capabilities on the East Coast”.

Since moving to Foley & Lardner earlier this year, Selig has reported he is happy and thriving. Everything he set out to do as a leader at an Am Law firm, he has been able to do, thanks to Foley’s platform, support and cross-marketing opportunities.

Here at GLI, we recruit the highest level of lawyers throughout the hottest locations and practices. We listen to our clients and candidates to discover a true match with continued success over the long term. Many GLI candidates go on to serve in leadership positions within their firms. We are creative… we think differently and focus not on what is, but what could be. At GLI, we chart new paths in recruiting daily.

We are leaders in the recruitment world. GLI continues to expand its international footprint. With the placement of Selig Sacks, we assisted Foley in doing the same.

When you work with GLI, you will be our number one priority. You will see firsthand how GLI becomes intrinsically vested in your success. We will work tirelessly throughout the recruitment process to ensure we locate the ideal situation for you. Our relationship does not end with your placement. That’s the beginning of a career-long relationship. We provide support as it is needed for as long as it’s needed.

Selig Sacks is a perfect example of the GLI process. He is a stellar attorney who is a true leader in his field who makes a significant contribution to his firm and the legal industry as a whole. Please visit our website, www.grimeslegal.com to learn more about our process and how we can assist you.

Article courtesy of  Nancy Grimes - Founder GLI / Grimes Legal, Inc. - Legal Search Firm
    Retained Legal Recruiters © Copyright 2008 Grimes Legal, Inc. | All rights reserved

Nancy Grimes, President and Managing Senior partner of GLI Global Recruiting Network, recently addressed the rise in lateral moves in big legal markets Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and Washington, DC.

“Books of business are definitely in high demand in the current economic climate. However, I’ve noticed many legal firms are finding increasing value in both the experience and contacts in house counsel can bring to their firms. Many times, the in house lawyers’ client list can be as wonderful as an inventory of paying clients. I’ve spoken with many attorneys who’ve recently moved from in-house opportunities to legal firms due to the firm’s increased work load. Expertise is golden. Case in point - the recent Supreme Court decision regarding health care has created an influx of business for many firms. Thus, the work is there - they just need lawyers with the expertise to service it. The need for specialists who can complement existing business groups and fill gaps is a trend that I think will continue grow for some time.”

According to Grimes, the recent demise of powerhouse Dewey & LeBoeuf also contributed to the rise in lateral movement. “Many firms who were able to snag Dewey’s major notch talent had to also acquire junior attorneys to support those partners. Other firms who were not able to capitalize in the acquisition of Dewey lawyers decided to keep looking for other major drawer talent. I think even the smaller law firms will look to increase their lateral recruitment in 2012 in an effort to expand their existing services and add to firm revenue. Firms hope to hire new lawyers who will bring new clients to the firm that fall into sectors the firms are trying to expand.”

It appears litigation career opportunities represent an overwhelmingly large portion of the lateral market surge. Labor and employment, health care and, to the surprise of many, corporate, are also having a solid year as opportunities in those practice areas are seeing a noticeable increase compared to 2011 and 2010.

Nancy Grimes founded Grimes Legal, Inc. (GLI) in 1986 to provide businesses with unique resources for locating, qualifying and recruiting proven performers in diverse areas of specialization. We achieve this by first working to understand the business needs of our clients. This requires thorough research into nuances of the industries in which our clients flourish, learning the philosophies of management which guide our clients’ business and professional strategies and focusing objectively on their individual cultures.

Contact Grimes Legal for career counseling. Not only does Grimes Legal assist attorneys in the search for new employment, we also pride ourselves in assisting lawyers in strategically mapping their careers throughout the various stages of practice; from associate, to partner, to department head, to managing partner. We at Grimes Legal go the extra mile, investing in you and your future, arming you with the ammunition you have to succeed. Our program focuses on intense, personalized career consultation whereby the pace and intensity are individually adjusted according to each client’s needs. Support is provided when it’s needed, as long as it’s needed. Contact Grimes Legal to discuss your career goals and aspirations.

Article courtesy of  Nancy Grimes - Founder GLI / Grimes Legal, Inc. - Legal Search Firm
    Retained Legal Recruiters © Copyright 2008 Grimes Legal, Inc. | All rights reserved

By Andrew Lu on June Twenty one, 2012 5:02 AM

Solo practitioners in Oregon have it worst, while 11-20 person firms in New York had it among the best in terms of getting paid for legal hours worked. This according to a new survey on lawyer billing efficiency.

The survey looked only at diminutive to medium sized firms with less than 50 lawyers. So the major firms with endless resources were not included. Though you can probably bet those firms milk every last penny out of their clients (and their lawyers).

The survey looks at lawyer billing efficiency for firms, reports The Wall Street Journal. Billing efficiency means how much time you’re actually paid relative to the amount you put in. So if you work nine hours, but only get paid for six, your billing efficiency would be 66%.

Not surprisingly, solo practitioners and two-person firms were the lowest on the efficiency scale nationally. What is surprising, is just how inefficient solo and two-person firms are, billing only at a 39% rate. Solos are expected to perform a lot of non-billable work like marketing, rainmaking, and administrative duties, so this may explain the low number. Additionally, solos probably don’t have enough resources to hire secretaries and assistants to perform the unbillable work. But getting paid for only half your time seems ridiculous. Perhaps this should motivate you to hire some help.

Sadly for attorneys in Oregon, all attorneys who responded to the survey only billed at a 40% efficiency rate, reports the Journal. If all lawyers in Oregon are only billing at a 40% rate, one can only imagine what a poor solo in Oregon gets.

On the opposite spectrum, lawyers in Delaware billed at 94% of hours worked. New York, Colorado, Utah, Louisiana, and Mississippi also ranked high on the list, reports the Journal.

Attorney billing efficiency varies wildly from state to state and among different sized firms. The fact that lawyers in Oregon bill less than half what their peers in Delaware do is shocking. If you’re a small firm lawyer, you should consider hiring assistants. This may be a case where spending some money, will help you make a lot more.

Article originally appeared in:

Article courtesy of  Nancy Grimes - Founder GLI / Grimes Legal, Inc. - Legal Search Firm
    Retained Legal Recruiters © Copyright 2008 Grimes Legal, Inc. | All rights reserved

Brian Baxter

The Am Law Every day

06-19-2012

A trio of financial services transactions announced this month have boosted the corporate practices of several big law firms.

New York–based private equity giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts announced Monday its purchase of Prisma Capital Partners, an investment firm focused on hedge funds. Reuters reports that the money management unit of Dutch financial services giant Aegon, which helped set up Prisma in 2004, will sell its minority stake in Prisma but remain a significant investor in Prisma’s funds.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the transaction has yielded roles for two Am Law 100 firms that are no strangers to private equity and hedge fund work.

Schulte Roth & Zabel, a firm known for its top-tier hedge fund and investment management practice, is advising Aegon and Prisma on the deal with a team led by M&A partners Andre Weiss and Christopher Harrison, tax senior partner Philippe Benedict, investment management senior partner Jennifer Dunn, and employee benefits partner Holly Weiss. Anne Wynne has served as general counsel and chief compliance officer for New York–based Prisma since June 2010.

Simpson Thacher & Bartlett is advising longtime client KKR on the acquisition. Corporate partner Gary Horowitz, investment funds partner Jason Herman, tax chair Steven Todrys, tax senior partner Katharine Moir, employee benefits partner Andrea Wahlquist, and corporate counsel Lisa Klar are leading a team from the firm working on the matter.

KKR has long been one of Simpson Thacher’s largest clients. In 2011 alone, the firm advised KKR on its $7.2 billion acquisition of oil and gas company Samson, its $2.38 billion buy of Pfizer’s Capsugel division, its sale of a stake in Web domain name provider Go Daddy Group, and the purchase of stakes in Academy Sports + Outdoors and Vietnam’s Masan Group.

David Sorkin, a former Simpson Thacher senior partner and member of the firm’s executive committee, has served as general counsel of KKR since 2007. Documents disclosed as a result of KKR’s $2 billion initial public offering in 2010 revealed Sorkin’s annual compensation to be nearly $7 million. (Simpson Thacher handled the IPO work for KKR.)

Also on Monday, billionaire Nelson Peltz disclosed that he had amassed a 5.1 percent stake in investment boutique Lazard through his Trian Fund Management. Peltz, whose hedge fund is now Lazard’s largest outside shareholder, has thrown his support behind a strategic plan outlined earlier this year by Lazard management to increase its business and boost shareholder value.

Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison has traditionally handled transactions for Peltz, such as the activist investor’s $2.3 billion acquisition of Wendy’s International in 2008 and the $130 million sale of its majority stake in the Arby’s restaurant business last year. A Paul Weiss spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on the Lazard matter.

Lazard’s longtime outside legal counsel of choice has been Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Bruce Wasserstein, a former lawyer at the firm who served as chairman and CEO of Lazard, eventually prevailed in a fierce internal battle to take the investment bank public in 2005. (Wasserstein, who died in 2009 at 61, once owned The American Lawyer and parent company ALM before selling both to London-based Incisive Media in 2007 for $630 million.)

Two spokeswomen for Cravath did not respond to requests for comment on whether Lazard turned to the firm for counsel on the stake taken by Peltz, nor did corporate senior partner and longtime Lazard lawyer Erik Tavzel. Scott Hoffman, another former Cravath lawyer who serves as managing director and general counsel of Lazard, did not respond to a request for comment on the bank’s legal advisers for the transaction.

Last week, Lazard elected former Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler partner Richard Parsons, who also served as chairman of Citigroup and CEO of Time Warner, to its board of directors. Other members of Lazard’s board include Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld senior counsel Vernon Jordan Jr. and former U.S. Supreme Court clerk Hal Scott, a Harvard Law School graduate who serves as director of the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, an independent and nonpartisan research organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Several prominent Am Law 100 alums also work at Lazard. Last year the former managing partner of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, Mark Walker, left after 45 years at the firm to join Lazard’s sovereign advisory group, where he has played a prominent role over the past year advising the Greek government. Lazard also employs Timothy Pohl, the former cohead of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom’s corporate restructuring practice, who joined the bank in January 2009.

In another major deal announced earlier this month, London-based Norton Rose, which in recent years has put a premium on explosive international growth, took the lead for Absa Bank, a South African subsidiary of Barclays, on its $1.2 billion purchase of the retail credit card business of African department store chain Edcon.

A team of Norton Rose attorneys in South Africa and Abu Dhabi led by corporate partners Kevin Cron and Alan Bainbridge are advising Johannesburg-based Absa Bank on the deal, the biggest in its history. With roughly 700 branches and nearly 9,300 ATMs throughout South Africa, Absa Bank is one of the largest retail and mortgage lenders in the country

Article courtesy of  Nancy Grimes - Founder GLI / Grimes Legal, Inc. - Legal Search Firm
    Retained Legal Recruiters © Copyright 2008 Grimes Legal, Inc. | All rights reserved

Chris Johnson
The Am Law Every single day
06-11-2012

The globalization of legal business has generally come in waves, moving from one country to the next. In the late 1990s, U.S. and U.K. firms flocked to Germany. Intense law firm activity has also been seen in recent years in Hong Kong, China, Russian Federation, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Most recently, Australia and Canada have dominated the headlines.

The signs are that it may now be Africa’s turn. The eyes of the international legal elite seem to be increasingly fixed on the region, attracted by an economy that’s one of the world’s fastest growing, with gross domestic product still rising at almost 5 percent per year.

Last week, Baker & McKenzie became the latest firm to launch on the continent, establishing an office in South Africa with the hire of a 31-lawyer team from Dewey & LeBoeuf—one of the now-bankrupt firm’s last remaining outposts. Wildu du Plessis, who joined Baker alongside fellow co–managing partner Morne van der Merwe and six other partners, says that the specialist energy, mining, and projects group was approached by several firms, but that Baker’s “unmatched global platform” clinched the deal. Baker, highest-ranked firm by revenue on the The Am Law 100, now has Seventy offices in 43 countries.   Click to read more

Article courtesy of  Nancy Grimes - Founder GLI / Grimes Legal, Inc. - Legal Search Firm
    Retained Legal Recruiters © Copyright 2008 Grimes Legal, Inc. | All rights reserved

William D. Henderson
The Am Law Every day
05-29-2012

Dewey & LeBoeuf, an amalgam of two storied New York City law firms that merged in 2007, has died. Understandably, this has prompted a lot of soul-searching among lawyers. One storyline that will attract many followers is that large law firm attorneys, long viewed as the profession’s elite class, have lost their way, betraying their professional ideals in the pursuit of money and glory. This narrative reinforces that lawyer-joke mentality that attorneys just got to be become better people.

And that narrative is wrong. Yes, we all need to become better people, but that still won’t begin to cure the larger structural problem affecting large U.S. law firms. At its core, Dewey’s collapse has less to do with individual moral failings than with aging organizational structures that worked remarkably well for over a century, but now, for a variety of reasons, inhibit law firms’ ability to adapt to a changing legal marketplace.

Many law firm leaders recognize this problem, yet they struggle to communicate it convincingly to partners who have become rich under the existing model. The economics are compelling. Between 1978 and 2003, legal services as a percentage of the nation’s GDP increased from 0.4 % to 1.8 percent. In the mid-2000s, average profit per partner shattered the $1 million-per-year barrier and kept climbing. This pattern of getting a bigger slice of a bigger economic pie continued right up until the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the drop of 2008.   Continued…

Article courtesy of  Nancy Grimes - Founder GLI / Grimes Legal, Inc. - Legal Search Firm
    Retained Legal Recruiters © Copyright 2008 Grimes Legal, Inc. | All rights reserved

Associates- The legal market is heating up! Immediate Legal firm Openings

New York - minimum 2 years transportation finance experience.

Apply now!

Article courtesy of  Nancy Grimes - Founder GLI / Grimes Legal, Inc. - Legal Search Firm
    Retained Legal Recruiters © Copyright 2008 Grimes Legal, Inc. | All rights reserved

Leah Eadens, pictured above, has become an invaluable member of the GLI team. Leah joined GLI in December 2011 as a co-op student from Warren East   High School in Bowling Green, KY, where she is a graduating senior. Leah’s interpersonal skills are remarkable. She is great with her team members and her communication and work ethic are always high-level, professional and efficient. Leah’s energy and enthusiasm are a welcome addition to GLI.

GLI established a cooperative education program with local high schools and colleges 5 years ago in an effort to help better prepare students for work in a professional environment by helping ‘em to:
• Build career opportunity qualifications for future employment
• Increase self-confidence
• Reaffirm career choices
• Obtain experience in managing financial responsibility
• Gain professional skills which will translate into any career field

GLI is committed to identifying the social issues that are most relevant to our business and most pressing to our community and to working in partnership with our community to leverage our combined expertise for mutual benefit.

Article courtesy of  Nancy Grimes - Founder GLI / Grimes Legal, Inc. - Legal Search Firm
    Retained Legal Recruiters © Copyright 2008 Grimes Legal, Inc. | All rights reserved

There is no doubt about it. For lawyers, business is a necessary key to success. It means independence, autonomy and, even more importantly, security in these uncertain times. According to the golden rule, the one that has the gold makes the rules. While that credo rings just as true for men and women, female lawyers have traditionally had a tricky time attracting a robust stable of clients. Those days successful, client-laden female lawyers are hardly an endangered species. That said, the legal profession could certainly use some more.

Become An Expert

One proven strategy for success is to develop an expertise. In other words, become the “go-to” in your field. This bit of advice is personified by Katherine Keefe, a major health care attorney who dispenses advice to hospitals and health care providers on a every day basis. For Keefe, the story began in law school, when she took a part-time job in the legal department of a major Philadelphia hospital. She quickly realized that health care was a great fit and one that she has subsequently built her career around. It should come as no surprise then that with the state of health care and health care law in constant flux, Keefe’s skills are in regular demand.

Keefe honed her expertise as an in-house lawyer at big managed care providers and then made the transition to law firm life, taking with her a healthy book of business. “Health care presents constant challenges,” explained Keefe, which means she’s always tracking the latest changes in what is already a highly complex field. When it comes to further enhancing her reputation, Keefe said she hits the speaking circuit and tries to “put herself out there” as a credible source to help potential clients navigate an ever-shifting landscape.    More

Article courtesy of  Nancy Grimes - Founder GLI / Grimes Legal, Inc. - Legal Search Firm
    Retained Legal Recruiters © Copyright 2008 Grimes Legal, Inc. | All rights reserved

 We have dynamic opportunities for lawyers with a minimum of two years experience in M&A or general corporate law.  Opportunities provide training, flexibility and potential advancement.  Submit your resume today to opportunities@grimeslegal.com.  

Article courtesy of  Nancy Grimes - Founder GLI / Grimes Legal, Inc. - Legal Search Firm
    Retained Legal Recruiters © Copyright 2008 Grimes Legal, Inc. | All rights reserved