News Blog

Last week, writing for Anderson Cooper's blog, Carmen Van Kerckhove (Director of New Demographic) made this statement: "A good friend of mine is an associate at a white-shoe law firm that just went through a major round of layoffs. Workplace diversity is very much on her mind now because during the job cuts at her firm, it became glaringly apparent that people of color were massively over-represented in the pink slips department."

If this is true, then it seems as if the economic downturn might have the power to undo the legal profession's already scant diversity progress (let's face it--for many firms, letting just 2 or 3 people of color go could drastically reduce diversity percentages).

But let us not speak too soon. What's happening at your firm? Have you witnessed this same trend? Carmen suspects that "this recession will soon lay bare which companies are truly committed to diversity, and which ones have just been saying what they thought people wanted to hear."

Hmmm. Do you agree?

In the age of social networking almost nothing is secret anymore. This is a fact that's changing the legal landscape in interesting ways. Facebook photos and status updates are being used to prove infidelity or sway custody decisions (interestingly, even text messages are being used as evidence in court nowadays). And in some ways all of this transparency can be good given its potential to move us all closer to the truth within the litigation context.

However, the use of Social Networks for things besides actual networking has potential to affect the legal profession itself by derailing many law student and laterals' job prospects. This is because the fact still remains that, like it or not, the legal profession is one in which people are constantly judged based on their reputations and the quality of the decisions they choose to make. And content posted to social networks is considered fair game when people are making character determinations.

So, this might sound paternalistic, but so be it . . . we hereby respectfully submit that being half-naked in one's Twitter photo is not a professional look (or a good look, for that matter). You never know who's going to see that and develop an opinion of you that might keep you from landing the job you want.

Take for example a conversation that JD Diversity recently had with a recruiter at a top D.C. firm. This recruiter informed us that part of her job was to check the Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter pages of applicants for the firm's Summer Associate program. The recruiter apparently created accounts with these social networks and used them solely for the purpose of discovering potentially untoward information about job applicants. She explained that although you can only see someone's profile on Facebook if you are friends with them, this does not keep you from seeing their photos, which can be damning enough (on Facebook, profile photos come up in searches and are viewable by the public). The applicants who were eliminated based on social network page content were never informed as to why they were denied the job.

This means that while you may be thinking it was your fumbling over an interview question that lost you the position, that half-naked Twitter photo might actually be the culprit.

Bottom line: be cautious of how your social network page might affect your job prospects or your reputation within the legal community overall. In this economy, you can't afford not to be.

Here's law professor and former domestic violence attorney, Brian Gilmore's take on the Rhianna and Chris Brown fiasco (from a legal perspective).

He states at the outset: " ...the fact that it is now rumored that Chris Brown and Rihanna are back together is not strange to me; this is typical. I also resist calling Rihanna an "idiot" as some have done already or calling her "foolish" for her alleged decision to accept Brown back into her life. If Rihanna had walked away forever, or if Brown had issued a public apology announcing he was wrong and that he would not approach her ever again, I would have fainted."

Click here to read the essay. It's incredibly insightful!

Apparently the number of layoffs within the legal profession has gotten so far out of hand that LawShucks was able to create an extensive 'layoff tracker' complete with colorful charts and graphs.

Click here if you're wondering which firms are doing most of the slicing.