Archive for the ‘Life at Law Firms’ Category
Is associate lawyer the unhappiest job?
Looking at my Facebook newsfeed last night I saw that a friend (well, a Facebook friend, you know) had posted a story on how, according to a Forbes’ story, associate attorney is the No. 1 in a list of unhappiest jobs. Legal assistant ranks 7th.
This is quite troublesome, for it means that a great chunk of our readers are unhappy. I could have figured it out; who else would want to read half-serious competition law blogs?? [a suggestion to GoogleAds; it would be smart to place ads for anti-depressant pills on Chillin’Competition]
The list of happiest and unhappiest jobs has been compiled by a jobs website called CareerBliss, which has based it on reviews completed by more than 65,000 employees, accounting for factors such as life-work balance, work environment, compensation, growth opportunities, company culture and control over daily work. According to this site, a great deal of associates’s unhappiness is due to billable hour pressure, as well as to prevalent up or out policies.
Those who attribute this reported unhappiness to billable-hour pressure may find their ideas vindicated in a most interesting and provocative New York Times’ op-ed on The Tyranny of the Billable Hour published last week. At one point it refers to lawyers who ended up in jail for billing fictictous hours, which reminded me of a joke you might’ve heard:
– A prominent lawyer suddenly dies and arrives at the Gates of Heaven. When St. Peter greets him the lawyer protests that his untimely death had to be some sort of mistake: “I’m much too young to die! I’m only 35!”. St. Peter agrees that 35 seems to be a bit young to be entering the pearly gates, and agrees to check on his case. When St. Peter returned, he tells the attorney, “I’m afraid that the mistake must be yours, my son. We verified your age on the basis of the number of hours you’ve billed to your clients, and you’re at least 108.! “. 🙂
I believe I might have gone a bit off topic… Coming back to the issue of unhappiness, you may remember that in the past we’ve devoted some attention to this issue. See, e.g. my random thoughts on life at law firms, Nico’s I love my job and my reply in Re: I love my job, or the more recent Where to work in Brussels?
You know my take. We’re privileged. If I compare what we do with what other people outside our circle do, well, we don’t have much reason to complain. One of my best friends in the competition law world used to work, among many others, at suspect identification parades in England (Mark, you don’t mind me writing this, right?) and I bet that he likes it better now (do you?) 😉
But the fact remains that there’s a problem, that many associates are unhappy doing what is and should be a most interesting job, and that many things could be done better, so we’d like to pose you a question: what do you think is the problem, and how do you think it could be fixed?
7th Junior Competition Conference – Call for speakers
In our last post we stated that one of our goals for the future is to contribute to increasing the visibility of young lawyers. Here’s a way to start:
We would like to draw your attention to the Seventh Junior Competition Conference. The editors of the Competition Law Journal have informed us that the Conference will take place on Friday 25 January 2013 and will be dedicated to reform of the system of private enforcement in the UK; for further details please click here.
If you would like to speak at the conference, please contact Vian Quitaz – vjquitaz@hotmail.com – with an expression of interest and a short outline of your proposed topic.
A separate announcement will be made in due course for those interested in attending the Conference.
The editors of the Journal look forward to hearing from you!
And speaking of younger generations, we recommend you take a look at this: Tournament of Jokes: Generational Tension in Large Law Firms
Where to work in Brussels?
Freshly graduated students often come with queries about life in law firms.
Many questions are related to wages and working hours.
But the key question is always about how cool (or stressful) it is to work for this or that law firm.
Here are a few cardinal principles to keep in mind:
- Wanna keep a social life? => Avoid merger factories;
- Life at European law firms is not necessarily better than in anglo-saxon law firms. This is because there is often a stronger pyramidal hierarchy in traditional (especially south european) law firms. In turn, junior associates are typically less involved in high level issues (meetings with clients, etc.) and must show a lot of deference to senior colleagues. In US law firms, partners – but this is again a generality – would tend to be more approachable;
- US firms pay better than UK firms, which pay better than continental firms. The same equation however applies to billable hours;
- What law firms seek to purchase with a strong paycheck is full availability, including at very short notice. Upon client/partner call, young associates must be ready to sacrifice family, holiday, wedding plans…;
- Minimum entry wage for a 1y associate in a Brussels competition pratice : 50K€/year;
- Like team work? Go for big law. Hate ghost writing? Go for academia;
- The above is of course contingent on the people. Several well-known merger factories are really cool places to work for, simply because the partners there are great professionals and very pleasant persons;
The bottom-line? The talk of the town is that there’s two places where it’s really good to work as a junior associate in Brussels, Sidley Austin and Hogan Lovells (and Garrigues, of course).
Competition Plagiarism?
A few weeks ago we posted a story about the “competition pills” that the Spanish Competition Authority (CNC) is distributing (see here). We remarked the “originality” of this promotional campaign. Yesterday, one of our readers (thanks, Luca!) posted a comment in which he questions such originality; the comment reads as follows:
“This is scandalous!! Plagiarism!!
They’ve copied the idea, the packaging, the leaflet, the design – literally, everything except the color, red instead of deep blue – from a record by Spiritualized of 1997 – “Ladies and Gentlemen, we’re floating in space”.
Am I the only one old enough to remember this masterpiece?
Still I’d be curious to know who’s the psychedelic case handler at the CNC who came up with the idea”.
Since our readers’ wishes are our commands, we are launching a quest to find the musically literate CNC official/s who came up with this idea, and we want to interview her/him/them here (about music, copyright and the promotion of competition).
The customary beer tasting reward applies to whoever gives us any information that may help us in our quest.
Enforcement menu: shrimps
Last Friday the European Commission confirmed that it has addressed a Statement of Objections to four traders of North Sea Shrimp over a suspected cartel. We learnt the news through one of the sites that we check several times a day: www.seafoodsource.com; see here).
Some of you have conveyed to us the suspicion that, in reality, DG Comp has sent this SOs in an attempt to force us to write about it. According to this theory, the guys at Bubba Comp, DG Gump. DG Comp were worried about our silent week and decided to resort to the big guns: a food case. Judging by precedents (notably our well known endive saga), they knew that we wouldn’t let it pass by without a comment.
As credible as this theory may sound…. the sending of these SOs at this time of the year is in reality a classic piece of July desk clearing on the part of the Commission. Getting one of these right before the holidays is one of the occupational hazards of being a competition lawyer in private practice in Brussels (the other one coming the run up Christmas).
In any event, we should not be making jokes about this. It is a serious matter. Nicolas – a renowned shrimp consumer may moreover be a victim of this alleged shrimp conspiracy- One nonetheless wonders: have they caught the big fish? It certainly isn’t small fry!
PS. A Chillin’Leak: We have been told by very reliable sources that the Commission found the evidence for this case during a “fishing expedition”.
Random thoughts on life at law firms
Our most recent posts speak for themselves: both Nico and myself are currently quite absorbed by work and have struggled to find the time to write some sensible and substantive stuff here (we’ll be back to substance next week) nor to attend the various social competition law events taking place these days. [Query: if everyone is partying or writing blogs, who works here??!] . However, the “hecticness” of these past few days has spurred some random thoughts with regard to life at law firms (the fact that for the first time ever I have to alter my summer holiday plans because of work has also contributed to some intense reflection). Here they are, in the hope that they give rise to some debate: Read the rest of this entry »
Some very personal views on the College of Europe
Every time we meet for the first time a reader of this blog, we get the question of how Nicolas and I met. Most people guess we studied together at the College of Europe, but that’s not the case. In fact, next weekend Nicolas will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of his promotion, whereas last weekend I celebrated the 5th anniversary of mine (I´m not used to telling the truth here; people often assume that I was there much longer ago –which doesn’t say much about my juvenile looks..- and I always fail to tell them wrong).
With all these current commemorations it seems like an appropriate moment to share some of our views on the College, an institution which elicits all kinds of reactions from different people [an illustration of those reactions: a recent book titled “Intimate Brussels” characterizes alumni of the College of Europe as the evil characters in Brussels and profiles them/us as a much hated secret society (!)]
This post is not entirely competition law-related and we don´t want to bore you, so click here if you’re interested on this long story:
The Fastest Antitrust Expert Award
[If you’re reading this, it means that the above pic of Robocop Nicolas hasn’t scared you off, in which case you’ve earned my respect]
A few posts ago we referred to the proliferation of awards in the competition law world and we created what we referred to as the “first objective legal competition”: the Fastest Antitrust Expert Award. The idea was to give the award to the competition law expert who could run the Brussels 20k faster. We said that we would both participate. Nicolas did and I didn’t (a few days before I was told not to because I seem to have a herniated disc, a.k.a. a very convenient excuse, so I followed the maxim “when in doubt, chicken out“).
A bunch of you ran too. Some of you (mainly our friends who wanted to show off) have been kind enough to send their times. The contest is still open: you have until Friday to submit your results. The provisional semi-finalist readers/runners are the following:
1) Mark English (Shearman & Sterling): 1h 39′ 21” (it was about time that Mark earned a reputation for something other than endive bashing).
2) Nicolas Petit (Chillin’ Competition): 1h 42′ 02” (actually, there’s another (?) Nicolas Petit who apparently did not finish the race -see here ChronoRace20k-; who’s who?).
3) José Enrique Elías (Chief Economist Team): 1h 44′ 12′. We are told that José Enrique ran fast because he was being chased by some violent ordoliberals who were throwing stones at him.
4) Napoleón Ruiz (Garrigues): 1h 48′ 39”. Napoleón was, in fact, one of the ordoliberals throwing stones at José Enrique.
We are also told that Philip Lowe (former Director General at DG Comp, now Director General for Energy) did 1h 42′ 30” and that G.J. Koopman (Deputy Director General for State Aid) did 1h 49′ 27”. Very impressive.
Congrats to all others who took part in the race, and especially to those who signed up by commenting on the previous post, namely Philip Werner, Sandy Tsakiridi, Montse Adam and M. Fevzi Toksoy.
Once again: this post serves not only as a provisional set of results but also as a final call for any other readers to submit their times. We will publish a definitive list – and announce the winner of the coveted Friday slot and Li-ning shoes – in the coming days. So, who beats Mark English?
Legal films and series
Many of you are aware about our taste for antitrust videos. In previous posts we commented on “The Informant” and on the OFT’s own production, we awarded Chilling Competition’s Antitrust Oscars, and we brought to you the wonderful classic”The Raid“. Many of those posts rank high in our list of most visited posts, so there are reasons to believe that you share our “geek” taste for these movies.
Our “Friday Slot” guests also seem to be fans of legal movies. In the interviews published so far some of them have confessed that legal movies rank among their favorites [e.g. “12 Angry Men” (Eric Gippini Fournier); “12 Angry Men”, “Philadelphia” and “The Verdict” (Johan Ysewyn), or “To Kill a Mockingbird” (Maurits Dolmans)].
The American Bar Association has a list of the 25 Greatest Legal Movies of all times [headed by “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “12 Angry Men”, which reveals that Maurits’, Eric’s and Johan’s taste for movies is not as original as their legal constructions 😉 ] Other websites have posted lists of the top-15 film/TV lawyers in history. The image that oursiders sometimes have from our job is often dictated by these movies and these characters. Whether or not they portray reality is generally a contentious issue. I went to Harvard Law School thinking that it would be like in “Legally Blonde” (I even died my hair and let it grow…here is the evidence), but it actually was closer to the scary “The Paper Chase“. Actually, it didn’t ressemble any of them. But it didn’t ressemble “The Social Network”s constant drunk partying neither..
Nowadays the good stuff has moved from the big screens to the TV. There’s a surprising number of “legal” TV series (see here for a list). Not having ever watched most of them, I have to confess that I’ve a clear favorite: The Good Wife. For the past couple of months watching an episode (sometimes a couple, sometimes even one or two more…) has been a late-night vice routine. I know for a fact that other competiton lawyers are going through the same problem right now with this series. I even know someone in the US who called in sick the day the last season was released in DVD and watched the whole thing in one day. Maybe that was a bit too much, but you really should watch it. I’m now done with all available episosed and opened to suggestions for a new series. Anyone?
The European Commission’s Legal Service
One of the good things about this blog is that it enables us to give credit to the people who, in our view, deserve it.
Today it’s the turn of the European Commission’s Legal Service.
Why them? Because many of the most brilliant jurists and many of the most reasonable and kind people that I have come across in my professional life were/are members of the Commission’s Legal Service. We won’t cite individual names because it would be unfair to those not mentioned, but also because the list would be too long.
These guys know competition and State aid law inside out, but they also know there are other provisions in the EU Treaties; they have the uncomfortable mission of second-guessing the case team’s work and of facing lawyers in Courts; they don’t have the same means and tools that big firms have; they sometimes have to fight armies of lawyers with the help of only one or two colleagues; they have an unbearable workload (Fernando Castillo de la Torre recently told us that he’d had more than 20 oral hearings last June!); and still they win most cases. And when they win there are two options: (a) either other people get the credit; or (b) everyone blames the Court for getting things wrong. That’s not always fair; I have worked with, and most often against, them, and in every single case they did an outstanding job.
Were Court submissions in the EU not confidential (query: should they?), people would realize the importance that the Legal Service has had in shaping up competition law.
All of this sounds like we are buttering them up but, frankly, it´s what we think. We seldom see their work praised in public (praising the ones on the other side of the table is not always common whereas demonizing the Commission is), so we decided to take it upon us to say that the work these guys do is to be acknowledged.
We said above that some of the most brilliant and nicest people in the competition law we’ve met in the competition law world belong to the Legal Service. We are very proud to anticipate that one person who fits perfectly into this description, Eric Gippini-Fournier, will be our next “Friday Slot” interviewee. (P.S. Click here for the interview)
Chillin'Competition 
