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WHAT WE'RE WATCHING

GOING NOWHERE - Time to get to know your colleagues⁠—they may be sticking around. While associate turnover hit near-record highs last year, partner attrition sunk to low levels within law firms, according to new figures that suggest partners may have seen too much client work to focus on a job hunt. And industry observers told Law.com's Andrew Maloney that, this year, both partner and associate retention could hold or even increase as both demand and profits dip and uncertainty reigns in the economy. "I would expect that if the economy continues to cool and demand goes down, those retention numbers might [increase]" even more for partners and especially for associates, said Marci Taylor, a principal at Withum who advises law firms. She said that intense demand last year gave some associates the opportunity to move to larger firms where their salaries increased significantly—even doubled, in some cases. That's not really been the case this year for associates. On the partner front, Rob Delicate and Erica Bernstein, founders of the New York-based legal recruiting firm Erica Robert Associates, said higher partner retention last year could also be a result of more firms figuring out what makes their highly valued practitioners stay. For instance, besides helping partners invest and grow their practices, another variable is taking care of the teams those partners work with, they said. "If they are getting that where they are, they are more likely to stay," Bernstein and Delicate said in a statement.

NO FEEDING - While the road to the bench for many of former President Donald Trump's nominees ran through the chambers of a handful of particular judges and justices, President Joe Biden has relied far less on feeder judges in his nominations, according to a review conducted by the National Law Journal. Court watchers told Law.com's Avalon Zoppo that's because Republican presidents, and especially Trump, have paid closer attention to how ideologically reliable a nominee is likely to be on the bench than Democrats, and clerkships are considered one indicator of that. "There's definitely more of a pattern on the conservative side. Republicans have been much more diligent in ferreting out who they're nominating, and one of the ways to do that is to look at who they clerked for," said George Washington University law professor John P. Collins. "These are very conservative judges and I think it's because [Republicans] want some reassurances that this is somebody who's going to view the law the way we want our judges to view it."

WHO GOT THE WORK?℠ - Hunton Andrews Kurth has stepped in to represent Intelligent Change LLC in a pending trademark lawsuit. The case was filed June 16 in New York Southern District Court by Michael Nesheiwat on behalf of What Do You Meme LLC, which accuses defendant of selling a card game which uses plaintiff's copyrighted work and is sold under a trademark that is confusingly similar to plaintiff's "Let's Get Deep" trademark. The case, assigned to U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff, is 1:22-cv-05065, What Do You Meme LLC v. Intelligent Change LLC. >> Read the filing on Law.com Radar and check out the most recent edition of Law.com's Who Got the Work?℠ column to find out which law firms and lawyers are being brought in to handle key cases and close major deals for their clients.

ON THE RADAR - Howard University was hit with a disability-based discrimination lawsuit Wednesday in District of Columbia District Court. The suit was filed by Lange Kim & Dowell on behalf of student Hesham Magdi Salah El Dean, who alleges that he arrived late to class on the morning of a final exam due to an anxiety attack and was denied a request to complete the exam within the remaining time. Counsel have not yet appeared for the defendant. The case is 1:22-cv-02445, Dean v. Howard University. Stay up on the latest deals and litigation with the new Law.com Radar. 

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