Pulling Back the Curtain for Some Congratulations...

We try very hard around here to maintain some journalistic distance, so as to fool some of you into thinking we're a viable source of news, but January has proven to be a pretty full month, and some personal acknowledgements are in order.

First, I just wanted to thank everyone for your thoughts and very kind words these past couple of weeks as my family got one baby bigger. My wife, Katie, did give birth to a baby boy on January 23. Both Katie and our new son, Leo are doing very well. He was born on his due date, which is a good sign, we thnk. Also, because he came on time, his 37th birthday will be 1/23/45, which is pretty awesome.

Leo partied a little too hard on the way out and is spending some time in the NICU at Northwestern's Prentice Women's Hospital recovering (read: flirting with the nurses). We owe them a lot of thanks, and this is my most public outlet, so I'm using the blog to thank our doctor and everyone at NW for all their hardwork and patience with us as new parents.

Also, the CE staff has become significantly more credentialled, as all 3 of our current, active contributors graduated from John Marshall on 1/27. Aaron Janik, Chad DeGroot and I all received JDs and Chad was crazy enough to get his LL.M in Employee Benefits at the same frigging time. Congratulations to everyone - just one test and we can start living the dream...

Once again, thanks for letting me toot my horn. Regular CE operations (which, let's be honest, is almost an oxymoron) will resume soon (like tomorrow) with some even bigger changes coming down the pike, so keep a lookout. In the meantime, feel free to add your own congratulations to Chad or Aaron or myself (or Barack Obama or anyone, really) in the comments if you want to.

More After the Jump...

Fullbright Report: Employment Law GCs' Greatest Concern

And all the associates deleted their vacations...

Fulbright & Jaworski’s influential Litigation Trends Survey just came out this week, and it has pretty interesting results that shrinking L&E departments should be blowing up poster-sized.

The “we’re-too-big-to-all-be-lawyering”-sized multinational law firm funds an annual survey of in-house counsel in the U.S. and U.K., asking them about their satisfaction with outside counsel and their greatest litigation-related interests. Topping the list of GC’s concerns this year?

You people.

Yep, as reported by Jay Shepherd at Gruntled Employees, the Fullbright Report (our term - we think it sounds official that way) cites employment disputes as the #1 concern of in-house attorneys, with 43% of the vote (contracts, regulatory and securities matters filled out the remainder of the top 5).

When asked about actual pending litigation, the results were the same: L&E followed by contracts, and then all the other stuff.

Also interesting: the stakes, and the number of class actions, are apparently rising considerably. Manpower’s Mark Toth:

More than 50% of companies face at least one class action, compared to only 34% in 2006 and 16% in 2005. In addition, more than 40% of companies now spend more than $1 million annually on litigation and virtually all companies reported having at least one $20+ million lawsuit pending.

So, tell your bosses – if they want to appease their clients, they clearly need to hire more labor and employment attorneys.

Conveniently, we know some interested parties about to graduate law school. Any resume requests can be sent to currentemployment@gmail.com.

More After the Jump...