World At Your Fingertips

Hot or Not: Law Firm Edition

Skadden Insider, an unofficial blog written by two anonymous employees of the big law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, had managed to exist for quite a while without drawing much attention in or out of the firm.

Then it launched a "Hottest Female Associate" contest, and things, well, started heating up.

The contest, a weeklong poll run, featured pictures of the eight contestants which accompanied the nominations, presumably by other employees of the firm.

In several instances, the photos were headshots taken from their Skadden employee I.D. cards, but they also came from Facebook and MySpace.com entries.

The top vote-getter, announced Monday, was Mattie J. Johnstone, a 2005 graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and litigation associate in New York. She drew 400 of the 1,381 votes cast. A blond, she is pictured in what appears to be a maroon plaid bustier.

"Should we send her a fancy certificate?" the bloggers mused of their inaugural Hottest winner.

Then they added, ominously: "Now onto the men."

After choosing a Hottest Male Associate, the Skadden Insider had plans to move on to Hottest Female and Male Partner.

"We should be done with those just in time for the hottest summer associate poll in May," the bloggers purred in a Jan. 7 post announcing the "Not Just Hot. Skadden Hot" contest.

And they were considering adding a Hottest Female and Male Legal assistant to the series, based on comments to the blog.

Well, guess again.

On Feb. 7, Henry "Hank" Baer, who used to head Skadden's labor and employment practice and is now of counsel at the firm, sent an email to all U.S. lawyers, in which he noted that blogs "are to be expected" in today's culture.

"Nevertheless," he added, "we believe that '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 to consider both the privacy and the feelings of the affected attorneys and to discontinue the contests."

In a post called "Not So Hot," the Skadden bloggers complained: "Damn, we feel like we were called into the Vice Principal's office today and had our knuckles wrapped."

The Skadden Insider has suspended nominations for Hottest Male Associate while the blog authors "take our tongue lashing under consideration."

As far as we know, the Skadden Insider is the only legal blog run by employees a law firm it attempts to gossip upon. Just more than a year old, it is a sleepy creature by blogging standard — going weeks without a single post.

Before it launched the Hottest series on Jan. 5, recent items opined on whether Skadden would open an office in San Paulo, Brazil (Jan. 5) and a riff (Nov. 26, 2007) on a Skadden honcho who decried there would be no alcohol served, should Skadden employees decide to watch the New Year's Eve ball descend from the firm's office in Times Square.

Skadden management seems not to have paid attention or cared — at least until now. Baer was not aware of the blog until the contest came to his attention.

His main concern, he says, was protecting the privacy of the women pictured, some of whom had received unsolicited phone calls from strangers, asking if they could meet.

But he admits to other concerns. "We are a professional organization and we'd like to treat each other with respect," Baer says.

And, shall we say, some comments during the polling process were less than professional.

Herewith: "We need full body shots to vote on who's the hottest...enough with these face only pictures."

Or: "How about 2 pictures per candidate?"

Or this: "Would've also liked to see the sexy french girl who does M&A in NY (forgot her name.)"

Nice!

Baer, for his part, isn't gunning for the Skadden Insider. The firm has no plans to try to shut the site down.

"I have no reason to believe that they did this for anything other than fun," Baer says. Then again... Anytime you take a professional woman and try to judge her by her attractiveness, it reeks of sexism."

Apparently, some readers are relieved that the contest has been suspended.

"I was disappointed last year to see how rarely anything was posted to this blog," one commenter wrote. "Now I am disappointed to see where the blog has gone, as I think the "Skadden hottest' contests are a bit absurd.... Is there so little going on at Skadden that you can come up with nothing but the hottest contests?"

The contretemps over the erstwhile Skadden hotties pales when compared to other flare-ups by law firms that consider themselves burned by the blogosphere.

The most ridiculous, perhaps, is the fight waged by Nixon Peabody, which commissioned a song — that's right, a song — when it was selected by Fortune magazine as one of the 100 best companies to work for.

"Everyone's a winner at Nixon Peabody!" is the song's refrain, duly noted by David Lat, author of the AboveTheLaw blog — a must read for any associate wanting to take tabs on the bonuses being awarded by the big law firms.

When Lat posted a YouTube clip of the song on his blog, the firm went ballistic, asserting a copyright privilege and ordering him to take it down. The move landed the firm with egg on its face when the New York Times wrote about it.

(Later, this commentary on the whole affair turned up on YouTube:)

Lat, by the way, is conducting a poll among his readers, who are otherwise craven about bonuses, asking whether they approve of the "Hottest" contest conducted by Skadden Insider.

Lat, by far, is the bête noir of most firms, because he urges young associates at firms to send him juicy tidbits, mostly about salaries and bonuses. He offers advice on how to do so without catching the eye of a firm's email police.

The notion of Skadden Hotties is, well, a bit quaint to say the least. It reminds us of a former editor, himself a lawyer, who, when hearing of a magazine cover featuring "Women of the S.E.C." truly believed it referred to the women who worked at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Now there's an idea!

Source : Karen Donovan, www.portfolio.com