Legal News

Skadden Insider: Hot or Not?

By Dan Slater

Back in the Law Blog’s law-firm days, we remember passing time by reading the blogs of fellow associates Melissa Lafsky and Jeremy Blachman. By day Lafsky worked at Littler Mendelson. But at night she would — under the pseudonym Opinionista — pen cutting tales based on what she referred to as the soul-crushing nature of law-firm life. Similarly, but using a different literary device, Blachman — a Harvard Law grad who worked for one summer at a large New York firm — blogged from the perspective of a fictitious Big Law hiring partner called Anonymous Lawyer.

Lafsky and Blachman still post, but now they’ve both moved on from law (Lafsky edits the NYT’s Freakonomics blog; Blachman moved to L.A. to write for TV).

Filling the void are two Skadden associates who write a blog called Skadden Insider, which details the underbelly of life at Skadden. Unlike Lafsky and Blachman, perhaps the pioneers of law-firm blogging, these Skaddenites are reporting “hard” news — from the lowdown on firm parties, to e-mail gaffes to salary discrepancies between staff attorneys and full-time associates.

Though Skadden Insider celebrated its one-year anniversary, the blog recently gained notoriety for running the law firm equivalent of a swimsuit contest — the “Skadden Hot” series — in which they ranked the firm’s hottest female associates. Last Thursday the bloggers finally attracted the ire of the firm’s employment advisor, Hank Baer, who sent a firm-wide e-mail announcing his disapproval of the contest. Click here for an AmLaw article and here for a Gawker piece.

But the Skadden insiders, unruffled by Baer’s public denouncement of their blogging efforts, posted his e-mail on their blog. It reads:

The Firm recognizes that blogs are prevalent in today’s culture and that blogs about Skadden are to be expected. Nonetheless, we believe that the “contests” on one of these blogs is inappropriate and does not reflect our values and standards of behavior. Numerous attorneys at the Firm have expressed their concern and, in some cases, embarrassment at such contests. We urge the authors of the blog to consider both the privacy and feelings of the affected attorneys and to discontinue the contests.

In an e-mail the Law Blog reached out to the Skadden insiders, but has yet to hear back. And we left a message with a Skadden spokeswoman but have yet to hear back.

In the meantime, let’s turn it over to you, loyal LB’ers. Are these law firm blogs good for camraderie, if not associate morale? Or do they merely promote an unseemly image of firm life? Or both?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 12, 2008 (boomark / email).