Dahlia Lithwick has a post on Slate about the signing bonuses for Supreme Court Clerks. Lithwick argues that the bonuses are “incomprehensible” and economically irrational, and she worries about the ethical implications. But these are conflicting points, it seems to me; you cannot have (1) The bonuses are irrational; the new clerks aren’t worth it; and also have (2) the new clerks are improperly trading on their access and knoweldge about the Court and the justices. If you have (2), then the bonuses are rational, no?
Lithwick does have some great quotes, which may have made the article disjointed as she tried to include them all.
“I’m sort of glad we didn’t have that kind of bonus in my day,” says Tim Wu, who clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer in 1999 and teaches at Columbia Law School. “Money like that leaves you no option. In my case, it would have ruined my career.”
I also enjoyed this quote from David Lat about the newly-hired clerks:
“They’re billing 1,800 hours, not 2,500, and a lot of them are probably already working on their job talks,” he says, referring to their sales pitches for the academic market.
Here’s Lat again, talking about hiring non-Court clerks:
“[The firms] get all the benefits of a knock-off Prada purse: [the non-clerks] perform the same function, they look great, and you know they’ll do a great job.”
One final note. I think Lithwick is wrong about this claim:
Billable hours are the six-minute increments by which lawyers account for their time. If the studies are right, and you must spend three hours at work for every two hours you can bill, working 10-hour days you’d bill between 1,500 and 1,600 hours a year. Way low. Hence the weekends and takeout and no-life to get you up to 2,200.
This ratio is off; it changes as you get more and more hours. It probably takes four or five hours to bill one hour when work is slow, but the ratio gets closer (and reaches) 1:1 when you’re swamped. To take an extreme example, a friend once billed over 400 hours in one month (honestly) as he worked on an arbitration. It did not take him over 600 hours to bill those 400+ hours; 100+ a week was enough. So I don’t think the difference is 3:2 as you move from 1500 hours to 2200 hours.
Posted by Matt Bodie on March 12, 2007 at 01:55 PM
» Round-Up from SCOTUSblog At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick has this commentary on Supreme Court clerks’ $200,000 signing bonuses. Matt Bodie has these comments on Lithwick’s piece at PrawfsBlawg; Peter Lattman has this post at the WSJ.com Law Blog. In today’s issue of the Legal… [Read More]
Tracked on Mar 12, 2007 4:11:49 PM
Comments
Lat is proposing a rationale by which MORE lawyers get the respect and compensation currently afforded to only 36 people. I can think of only 36 people who should have any objection to that. Your commitment to the meritocracy is showing.
Posted by: Corey | Mar 13, 2007 11:40:57 AM
Lat’s “knock-off Prada purse” analogy is also inapposite by his own terms. He asserts (in the article, not in the post here) that firms use SCOTUS clerks as a marketing tool for clients; i.e., “look how many SCOTUS clerks we have.” If this is true — and it almost certainly is — then “knock-offs” contribute zero value along this very significant dimension.
By the way, the above commenter’s description of David Lat as a “knock-off Prada purse” himself is the most spot-on I have ever read. I concur wholeheartedly, and I think I’m going to refer to him by that appellation from now on.
Posted by: Another former ATL reader | Mar 12, 2007 5:17:59 PM
Lat says: “For every one of the 36 smartest law kids,” he says, “there is another equally smart law kid who just had a bad interview [for a Court clerkship].” And if law firms make the economic decision to give bonuses to them, “they get all the benefits of a knock-off Prada purse: They perform the same function, they look great, and you know they’ll do a great job.”
This is Lat’s invention, as far as I can tell. Lat is a knock-off Prada purse. He clerked for Judge O’Scannlain and got an interview or 2 but didn’t get to the Supreme Court. He’s built his own identity and a fictitious identity (“Article III Groupie”) on the resulting bitterness.
Posted by: former ATL reader | Mar 12, 2007 4:36:24 PM
I haven’t seen the studies, but it also matters what you are working on. It’s not just being swamped; it’s being swamped by one matter (or just a couple matters) that is generally the life of a new associate.
Are the 3:2 studies of all lawyers, or lawyers at a particular stage of one’s career? Most professors do not get to the stage of a career in which the lawyer is jumping from matter to matter – driven by the phone or the emails or whatever, and not by control of one’s own schedule – and there is a certain amount of downtime, or retooling time between each matter. There is just a lot of time lost in the friction of two or more tasks for different clients butting up against each other, and even more if you get many in the course of a day. I wouldn’t be surprised by a 3:2 ratio, or even higher.
When you are doing due diligence, or discovery, or writing briefs, the time comes out in big blocks. (I should also note having been in every place in the food chain on this – it is NOT unethical, in my view, to keep the clock running as you hop down to the bathroom or walk out to the coffee pot. It would be unethical to keep it running as you took an hour to go to lunch or run to the bank or whatever.) So the ratio is much closer to 1:1.
The disconnect, of course, is that, as a buyer, I didn’t care. I had a pretty good feel for what it was going to cost me, and generally thought the practice of flyspecking or auditing legal bills was counterproductive. If I suspected bill padding, it was easier and cheaper to fire the firm.
Posted by: Jeff Lipshaw | Mar 12, 2007 2:19:35 PM