Yet another Shepard Fairey parody
26 October 2011 at 20:48
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Archive for the ‘Law’ Category
Cash-register management
7 September 2011 at 21:48
Recommended reading – Steven Harper’s article in this month’s American Lawyer about the results of the midlevel associates survey. Money quote:
The prevailing business model has distorted some concepts of value and jettisoned others. At most big firms, productivity equals billed time, without regard to the efficiency of the worker or quality of the end product. Meanwhile, anything that can’t be measured—mentoring, creating a sense of community, delegating important client relationships to young attorneys, and encouraging balanced lives that make better lawyers—gets discounted or lost altogether.
That’s the real theme permeating midlevel associate dissatisfaction. Running big firms according to metrics aimed at increasing short-term profits is deceptively objective and relatively simple. But it risks ignoring important things that can’t be quantified. […]
As a result, behavior that would enhance institutional stability and intergenerational transition yields to the self-interested development of portable books of business. Add enough laterals, and any partnership can quickly lose itself. Client-filled partner silos don’t promote the shared identity that provides a sense of community. Relying on current profits to be the glue that holds everything together can quickly make a strong firm fragile. Just ask lawyers who once worked at Heller Ehrman, Howrey, or, for history buffs, Finley Kumble.
Among large-firm equity partners, a revolution of rising expectations has continued for two decades. Recessions come and go, but somehow average equity partner earnings have trended skyward as associate satisfaction has tanked. With new attorneys flooding the market, where’s the incentive for those who reap staggering rewards to reconsider the human impact of their business models, especially on the youngest and most vulnerable?
[…] The question for large firms is whether they can continue to attract the best and the brightest even when top recruits truly understand the work they’ll do, the culture of short-term thinking they’ll endure, and the failure most will encounter in their bids for equity partnership.
The tragedy, as I see it, is that the people most responsible for creating the winner-take-all law firm culture, and most capable of correcting it, will read this and either (i) not care (“I’ve got mine, Jack”), because worrying about the institutional legacy is for chumps, or (ii) not recognize themselves, because they believe their own recruiting hype and would vehemently deny pursuing short-term profits über alles or asset-stripping the firm before they retire.
EXEMPTION
10 January 2011 at 12:08
On November 19, 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued proposed rules relating to provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act that expand the SEC’s regulatory authority over investment advisers to include many more investment advisers to private equity and hedge funds, subject to certain exemptions.
Later, a non-U.S. investment adviser went to the SEC’s Division of Investment Management to get a Foreign Private Adviser Exemption, as described in the Dodd-Frank Act.
This is the story of that investment adviser.
Volcker Rule implementation timeline
5 July 2010 at 17:48
Pitching the counterinsurgency
26 April 2010 at 12:11
From today’s paper, the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan reduced to meaningless chartjunk:
As if Edward Tufte’s diagnosis of the state of our verbal and statistical reasoning in the era of PowerPoint — “Power corrupts; PowerPoint corrupts absolutely” — needed any confirmation.
Make sentences, not bullet points.
Into the dustbin of history
22 April 2009 at 10:53
Jim Manzi steps off The Corner and says something truly original about the “effectiveness” debate, an evolutionary argument way smarter than the kind of evidence-free, Saddam-has-WMDs ranting one usually hears in that blighted neighborhood:
Let’s assume arguendo that torture works in the tactical sense that I believe has been used so far in this debate; that is, that one can gain useful information reliably in at least some subset of situations through torture that could not otherwise be obtained. Further, assume that we don’t care about morality per se, only winning: defeating our enemies militarily, and achieving a materially advantaged life for the citizens of the United States. It seems to me that the real question is whether torture works strategically; that is, is the U.S. better able to achieve these objectives by conducting systematic torture as a matter of policy, or by refusing to do this? Given that human society is complex, it’s not clear that tactical efficacy implies strategic efficacy.
When you ask the question this way, one obvious point stands out: we keep beating the torturing nations. The regimes in the modern world that have used systematic torture and directly threatened the survival of the United States — Nazi Germany, WWII-era Japan, and the Soviet Union — have been annihilated, while we are the world’s leading nation. The list of other torturing nations governed by regimes that would like to do us serious harm, but lack the capacity for this kind of challenge because they are economically underdeveloped (an interesting observation in itself), are not places that most people reading this blog would ever want to live as a typical resident. They have won no competition worth winning. The classically liberal nations of Western Europe, North America, and the Pacific that led the move away from systematic government-sponsored torture are the world’s winners.
Now, correlation is not causality. Said differently, we might have done even better in WWII and the Cold War had we also engaged in systematic torture as a matter of policy. Further, one could argue that the world is different now: that because of the nature of our enemies, or because of technological developments or whatever, that torture is now strategically advantageous. But I think the burden of proof is on those who would make these arguments, given that they call for overturning what has been an important element of American identity for so many years and through so many conflicts.
Could it be that when Darwinian competition occurs at the level of national systems, “survival of the fittest” means “survival of the most civilized”?
Dismantling the torture state
23 January 2009 at 0:18
From yesterday’s executive order on interrogations:
From this day forward, unless the Attorney General with appropriate consultation provides further guidance, officers, employees, and other agents of the United States Government may, in conducting interrogations, act in reliance upon Army Field Manual 2-22.3, but may not, in conducting interrogations, rely upon any interpretation of the law governing interrogation — including interpretations of Federal criminal laws, the Convention Against Torture, Common Article 3, Army Field Manual 2-22.3, and its predecessor document, Army Field Manual 34-52 — issued by the Department of Justice between September 11, 2001, and January 20, 2009.
With a stroke of the pen (and a whole lotta commas), Obama knocks down the Federalist Society’s entire pseudo-scholarly edifice, and fixes the beginning and end of the 2,688-day Lawless Interregnum.
