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Law firms are being heavily scrutinized for their social responsibility efforts, with attorneys, clients and critics all pushing for accountability. Find out which firms made Law360 Pulse's list of firms that are taking the greatest strides on social responsibility.
DLA Piper has promoted a corporate finance attorney and former managing partner of its Atlanta office as co-U.S. managing partner of the firm.
Attorney discipline, much like the criminal justice system, is rarely a simple math equation where authorities can plug in a type of wrongdoing and an appropriate punishment is spit out.
As he prepares to start his fifth three-year term as CEO of Cozen O’Connor, Michael Heller recently talked to Law360 Pulse about how the firm overcame the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to adapt, and why Philadelphia has become a popular market for larger firms.
After 64 years in business, Boston-based law firm Burns & Levinson LLP is closing its doors this month after a tumultuous year that saw nearly half of its attorneys leave and merger talks fail.
Cravath Swaine & Moore LLP and Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP top this week's edition of Law360 Legal Lions after a California federal judge wrapped up a high-profile antitrust fight filed by Epic Games against Google that began in 2020.
Three outlier megadeals pushed funding for legal technology companies to $1.57 billion in the third quarter of 2024, up from $392.5 million in the same period last year, but the number of mergers and acquisitions fell by about 50%.
This was another action-packed week for the legal industry as BigLaw firms made a slew of hires and a state judge was admonished for lip synching "Jump" by Rihanna in a TikTok. Test your legal news savvy here with Law360 Pulse's weekly quiz.
A $9.5 million deal settled a Delaware Court of Chancery stockholder suit Thursday seeking damages arising from a stock slump following the $883 million blank check company deal that took subprime consumer lender Katapult Holdings Inc. public in June 2021.
Declaring it "a great settlement," a Delaware vice chancellor approved on Thursday a near chart-topping, $125 million deal to end stockholder challenges to Discovery Inc.'s $43 billion merger with AT&T in 2022, an amount eclipsed only by a $148.2 million pretrial deal in a 2016 case.
A slew of lawsuits related to the Gaza war in the Middle East have already yielded mixed outcomes and, in the view of some, contradictory rulings as they've moved through the courts, revealing a tension between free speech and college campus safety while also stoking concerns over the fairness of the judicial system.
Delaware firm Morris Nichols Arsht & Tunnell LLP announced Thursday that it had hired three attorneys who recently completed judicial clerkships.
Amid a number of recent legal challenges, large law firms in the U.S. have amped up many of their environmental, social and governance-related efforts, with particular growth in environmental sustainability action, while areas like diversity, equity and inclusion have been less successful, according to a report out Wednesday that examined firms' public-facing communications.
A Delaware Superior Court judge has tossed a malpractice suit alleging that Frost Brown Todd LLP failed to adequately investigate infringement issues with trademarks a football league sought to use in the relaunch of the United States Football League.
Milbank LLP should be removed as counsel for digital content delivery platform Edgio Inc. in its Chapter 11, the U.S. Trustee's Office told a Delaware federal judge, arguing the firm is conflicted because of its ongoing work representing Edgio directors and officers in various securities suits.
Several law firms this year, including Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP and McDermott Will & Emery LLP, have filled artificial intelligence-focused chief and director roles to keep up with technological advances and client demands, according to legal recruiters.
The full Delaware Supreme Court on Tuesday revived GMG Insurance Agency's malpractice suit claiming Margolis Edelstein's incompetence caused the insurer to have to settle a case for $1.2 million, saying there are still disputed facts about whether the law firm's representation fell below the requisite standards.
Settlements and attorney fee rulings closed the book Tuesday on two GigCapital-related blank check deals that settled before trial in Delaware's Court of Chancery, with a vice chancellor approving combined public stockholder payouts and fee awards of $7.25 million and $2.5 million.
Former employees of the U.S. Marshals Service say that while judicial security has never been more urgent, finding trends is nearly impossible: The way threats against federal judges are tracked has varied so much from year to year, the data is essentially meaningless.
Polsinelli PC announced Monday that it promoted its chief of staff to serve as both its staff lead and as its first chief practice strategy officer, tasking her with managing how its practices work together to benefit clients and promoting innovation through strategies such as the use of artificial intelligence.
Law firm management consultants say they continue to see historic interest among law firms to engage in merger talks, driven further by a spate of big deals announced during the third quarter of the year, but the number of actual combinations inked has remained fairly steady, Law360 Pulse data shows.
Billing rates for the top 100 law firms in the United States surged by 10% from 2023 to 2024, the largest rate hike in the past three years, according to a new research report on Tuesday.
A majority of legal industry employers say that artificial intelligence is changing the skill sets they look for in hiring, according to a report released Monday by business consulting firm Robert Half, with the report also finding that employers prefer to train existing employees than hire externally.
Nearly 60% of general counsel and chief legal officers expect a reduced reliance on outside legal service providers due to generative artificial intelligence — more than double since a 2023 survey showed 25% of respondents would cut the number of law firms they work with in the next year to slash costs, according to data released Monday.
The rapid growth of nonequity partners at major law firms has expanded career options for attorneys, but it also brings distinct challenges as many lawyers in these roles often face extended paths to equity partnership, unclear succession planning, and limited transparency around compensation.
Mateusz Kulesza at McDonnell Boehnen looks at potential applications of personality testing based on machine learning techniques for law firms, and the implications this shift could have for lawyers, firms and judges, including how it could make the work of judges and other legal decision-makers much more difficult.
The future of lawyering is not about the wholesale replacement of attorneys by artificial intelligence, but as AI handles more of the routine legal work, the role of lawyers will evolve to be more strategic, requiring the development of competencies beyond traditional legal skills, says Colin Levy at Malbek.
Legal writers should strive to craft sentences in the active voice to promote brevity and avoid ambiguities that can spark litigation, but writing in the passive voice is sometimes appropriate — when it's a moral choice and not a grammatical failure, says Diana Simon at the University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law.
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Ask A Mentor: How Can I Help Associates Turn Down Work?Marina Portnova at Lowenstein Sandler discusses what partners can do to aid their associates in setting work-life boundaries, especially around after-hours assignment availability.
Although artificial intelligence-powered legal research is ushering in a new era of legal practice that augments human expertise with data-driven insights, it is not without challenges involving privacy, ethics and more, so legal professionals should take steps to ensure AI becomes a reliable partner rather than a source of disruption, says Marly Broudie at SocialEyes Communications.
With the increased usage of collaboration apps and generative artificial intelligence solutions, it's not only important for e-discovery teams to be able to account for hundreds of existing data types today, but they should also be able to add support for new data types quickly — even on the fly if needed, says Oliver Silva at Casepoint.
With many legal professionals starting to explore practical uses of generative artificial intelligence in areas such as research, discovery and legal document development, the fundamental principle of human oversight cannot be underscored enough for it to be successful, say Ty Dedmon at Bradley Arant and Paige Hunt at Lighthouse.
The legal profession is among the most hesitant to adopt ChatGPT because of its proclivity to provide false information as if it were true, but in a wide variety of situations, lawyers can still be aided by information that is only in the right ballpark, says Robert Plotkin at Blueshift IP.
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Ask A Mentor: How Can I Use Social Media Responsibly?Leah Kelman at Herrick Feinstein discusses the importance of reasoned judgment and thoughtful process when it comes to newly admitted attorneys' social media use.
Attorneys should take a cue from U.S. Supreme Court justices and boil their arguments down to three points in their legal briefs and oral advocacy, as the number three is significant in the way we process information, says Diana Simon at University of Arizona.
In order to achieve a robust client data protection posture, law firms should focus on adopting a risk-based approach to security, which can be done by assessing gaps, using that data to gain leadership buy-in for the needed changes, and adopting a dynamic and layered approach, says John Smith at Conversant Group.
Laranda Walker at Susman Godfrey, who was raising two small children and working her way to partner when she suddenly lost her husband, shares what fighting to keep her career on track taught her about accepting help, balancing work and family, and discovering new reserves of inner strength.
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Ask A Mentor: How Can I Turn Deferral To My Advantage?Diana Leiden at Winston & Strawn discusses how first-year associates whose law firm start dates have been deferred can use the downtime to hone their skills, help their communities, and focus on returning to BigLaw with valuable contacts and out-of-the-box insights.
Female attorneys and others who pause their careers for a few years will find that gaps in work history are increasingly acceptable among legal employers, meaning with some networking, retraining and a few other strategies, lawyers can successfully reenter the workforce, says Jill Backer at Ave Maria School of Law.
ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence tools pose significant risks to the integrity of legal work, but the key for law firms is not to ban these tools, but to implement them responsibly and with appropriate safeguards, say Natalie Pierce and Stephanie Goutos at Gunderson Dettmer.