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WHAT WE'RE WATCHING

YOUTH MOVEMENT - One firm's cost center is another firm's profit center. Last year, large and midsize law firms continued to employ "drastically different" approaches to staffing, according to a new industry report, "with the largest firms actively cutting back on associate headcount" while midsize law firms continued to grow them "aggressively." Through November, Am Law 100 firms increased their associate ranks by only 1.7%, according to an annual state of the legal market report, published this past week by Thomson Reuters. Midsize firms, on the other hand, grew associate head count 11.8%. And some analysts and legal observers told Law.com's Andrew Maloney they don't expect those trends to change in the short-term either as large law firms wait on transactional work to pick up and smaller firms continue to try to scoop up talent while it's available and try to balance generational ranks that lean toward older partners.

CEREBRAL CYBERCRIMES - Cybercrime just keeps getting creepier. Gone are the days of the easily detectable phishing scheme betrayed by misspellings and poor grammar. Like Skynet's upgrade from the T-800 to the T-1000, today's hackers can more convincingly mimic legitimate colleagues. Consider, for example, the No. 1 cybercrime last year, known colloquially (and charmingly) as "pig butchering," in which a criminal spends weeks getting to know their target. Sometimes they send a request to connect through LinkedIn to an employee of a certain company, earning their trust by asking for mentorship and career advice. Stephen Dougherty, a financial fraud investigator with the the U.S. Secret Service's Global Investigative Operations Center, told Law.com's Maria Dinzeo that criminals are refining their attacks to focus on what he called "the human factor," either by building trust with unsuspecting victims or by tricking unwitting employees by impersonating colleagues and vendors.

ON THE RADAR - Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani partners Brian M. Ledger and Mark B. Tuvim have entered appearances for chocolate manufacturer Theo Chocolate in a pending consumer class action related to the marketing and sale of the company's variety of organic dark chocolate products. The suit, filed Jan. 4 in California Northern District Court by Fitzgerald Joseph LLP and Tousley Brain Stephens, contends that the products are not organic and contain unsafe levels of lead, arsenic and cadmium. The case, assigned to U.S. District Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr., is 4:24-cv-00061, Davis et al v. Theo Chocolate Inc. Stay up on the latest state and federal litigation, as well as the latest corporate deals, with Law.com Radar.  

EDITOR'S PICKS

Paul Weiss Hides Partner Pay Inside 'Black Box,' as Firm Shells Out for Top Laterals By Justin Henry