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A third year Skadden associate sent out a firm-wide - including overseas offices in Europe and Asia - email with her "conditional" resignation, where she laid out her terms not to quit. The terms were basically to fight Trump better. She also posted the email on her LinkedIn.
A few hours later, she could no longer access her firm email - it appears Skadden accepted her resignation. She is now making news appearances talking about #resisting in the face of authoritarianism. It's unclear how many firms want a corporate associate that desires to "fight" so badly - in the few firms interested in disrupting client work for challenging the administration, social justice is reserved for the litigators.
Ultimately, all BigLaw is soulless, putting profits over justice. It's about dealwork and defense, not upholding the law itself - that's more plaintiff-side work that very few BigLaw firms can swing litigating. Not many clients wants to hire a law firm that paints a target on their back, not when NGOs and civil rights firms exist - there are more appropriate "mechanisms" in the legal world to fight these fights, and those mechanisms are in play. It is not the duty, nor the skill set, of BigLaw.
I admire her confidence that the world-wide firm would care about a junior leveraged finance associate's opinion regarding the rule of law in the United States. Posting an internal email on her LinkedIn also feels concerning from a disclosure perspective - associates have been fired for filming tiktoks in their offices before because of the risk of showing client materials.
She has previously circulated an anonymous statement "signed" by BigLaw associates listing their firm name and class year, because she believed it would pressure BigLaw firms into Doing Something.
It seems that statement culture is no longer a tool of the culture war - firms don't really seem to care. Being willing to resign is a step in the right direction, I think, although I wonder if she really thought she would be considered so valuable to the firm that they would meet her conditions. She seems to truly believe that she Accomplished Something, and I wonder if that's a residual impact of the COVID corporate social justice era, in which empowering employees to Defend The Current Thing took off.
I'm waiting to see if she's going to try to file a workplace retaliation claim or anything crazy for Skadden accepting her resignation, because that kind of feels like the vibe of things. Realistically, I know that this is going to be like when random tech workers quit over how their employers "handled" Palestine - it will be swept under the rug and forgotten about.
I really would have to know more about her to figure out what her motivations are. One possible motivation that no-one else seems to have mentioned is that she simply just actually believes that we are headed for a fascist dictatorship that will take away women's rights and so on.
In the course of the last few years I have seen several very smart friends of mine become rabid Trump-haters who genuinely, not in a virtue signalling way, but genuinely are worried that Trump is taking the country towards dictatorship and that there are plausible mechanisms by which Trump could create such a dictatorship. These are well-read, sharp people who do not normally display any sort of cognitive derangement or hysteria.
I myself have some worries about Trump and dictatorship and so on, which I have expressed here before, but not to the level of these friends of mine. I think that Trump would absolutely love to be a dictator, I just see no plausible path by which he or any other politician could accomplish this. Any major steps that Trump took towards dictatorship would literally cause a civil war. For example, California wouldn't sit around letting it happen, it would secede from the Union. I don't know, maybe I am overestimating the left's willingness to resist, but in any case I just can't imagine any plausible path to dictatorship as long as the politically non-apathetic Americans are split about evenly 50-50 between the left and the right. This isn't like Russia, where basically 80% of people supported Putin in the early 2000s, which gave him an opportunity to consolidate a dictatorship while backed by a huge fraction of the population.
Some of my smart friends, however, very much disagree with this.
Anyway, my point is that it's perfectly possible that this woman just genuinely feels like she has to do something, anything. Do I think that's the most likely explanation? No, but it's a possible one.
A sufficiently well-practiced performance will be indistinguishable from genuine belief. TDS, from what I observe in Germany, is entirely performative if only because Germans have very little to fear from Trump yet still ape the same kind of condemnatory panic that leftist Americans adopt. Overstating the danger is a form of virtue signalling analogous to claiming that video games cause satanism, or similarly absurd claims. It's considered good form among humans to exaggerate the danger posed by one's enemies in order to rally around a common friend/enemy distinction.
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To state that they are willingly indoctrinated is probably more accurate. Also, the likely reason you never see them acting deranged in real life is that they never reveal that side of themselves to you.
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People want that. They want their life to have some deeper meaning. Spending your life making line go up, not that satisfying. There's the infamous Orwell quote about nazism:
Accepting the psyops that we are headed for a titanic struggle for freedom is perhaps an attempt to find meaning in a world that increasingly doesn't need people.
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But this woman is surely bright enough to realize that this stunt won't actually do anything? Ca cest coullion.
You're way overestimating liberal capacity to resist-in-practice. California in particular(and the west coast more broadly) relies on being part of the broader US in order to avoid local state failure. Now that doesn't mean blue states need reds more than vice versa. But it means blue states(or at least, the kind that could spearhead resistance) are more dependent on the rest of the union than red ones.
Why is everyone so confident in Skadden's HR? When I was graduating some really talented people did make it into the top biglaw firms, but so did quite a few mediocrities. 2nd/3rd year is right around washout time for those people to go to firm #2 at a bump down where again they washout before taking a federal job where they do nothing for GS-14 salary till the end of time.
Young people in genera suck right now in the legal field. I am in an adjacent field and feel it. Friends in biglaw complain about it all the time.
Standards were already out of fashion at law schools, and went off a cliff with covid. There is no appetite at the schools to bring them back
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The backstory here is that Skadden/Weiss and others already their competitor biglaw firms whispering to their clients (and trying to recruit their partners) on the grounds that no one wants a law firm in the White House's crosshairs.
They had no choice but to folds, because the rest of biglaw not only wouldn't back them in a fight against the admin, but would actively use it to carve up their business. No honor among thieves etc....
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My suspicion when I first saw this story was that she was likely going to quit anyway (as reality set in over the years that big law was less about girlbossing around in a cUtE business outfit being a feminist champion and white savior, and more about grinding hundreds of hours a month reviewing documents and addressing Word comments), so she figured she'd go out in a blaze of glory to satiate her TDS, earn good-girl points, and get glazed for being Stunning and Brave by male simps, fellow white female progressives, and the Persons of Color she so pedestalizes.
Comments from a Reddit account that's supposedly hers have done little to dissuade me from that initial suspicion. For example:
Bolding mine. its_all_so_tiresome.jpg
And no kids, you don't say.
While checking her privilege, she for some reason neglected to mention that as a non-ugly young woman, she has the privilege of capriciously quitting her job and burning bridges because she can always Meet Someone to subsidize her lifestyle, if she doesn't have such a someone on tap or on deck already. Daniel Tosh: "Being an ugly woman is likely being a man; you're going to have to work." Additionally, as a jobless daughter, she'd get more parental support than she would if she were a jobless son.
Not that burning big law bridges is all that fatal for progressive lawyers, because there's always a universe of non-profits, NGO, and government positions she can monkey-branch to after she's Had Her Fun doing press tours, writing op-eds, snagging a book deal. Plus, there could always be a big law firm or two out there looking to #Resist and take a stand against Orange Man (like the big law version of McKinsey doubling down on DEI), unlike those evil and cowardly pale stale males at Skadden and Paul Weiss who bent the knee. Even if not, she'll have tons of Allies within big law firms who'll push to hire her if she so chooses to run it back at big law. Progressive women have plot armor.
This was obvious as soon as the story broke. Only an idiot would think her job at Skadden Arps could survive this, and Skadden Arps don’t hire idiots. My guesses as to motive were:
Stay soulsold? What's that?
I think they mean "Her fiancé gets a license to keep selling his soul to big corporations for money while they retain their virtue in their social circles." But personally I doubt this. Most top lawyers run in elite blue-tribe social circles where "selling one's soul" to corporations is not really frowned upon to begin with.
It's more than that; it's almost a requirement, especially for men who want a family in a HCOL blue city. A male educator dedicating his career to helping marginalized youth, no matter his ideological bona fides and other good qualities, is going to have a much harder time finding a wife than even an entirely apolitical and unexceptional corporate guy.
It's widely understood that corporate jobs are just jobs, and you can't be blamed for getting yours. One of the most rabidly woke people I know on social media is a (Asian, female, bisexual) lawyer whose day job is quite literally union busting.
(I don't care about the actual choice of career, just the hypocrisy.)
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Having sold your soul to BigCorp, I imagine. Though I haven’t heard the term before.
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I was halfway through the comment before I looked up at the username. He strikes again.
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How do you know this?
I took this opportunity to do some media bias comparisons on how this story is being reported. There's a combination of editorializing, credulous repetition of claims without explicitly editorializing, and some neutral reporting (Kudos to Global Legal Post which was the best on this). I found no Right-leaning sources reporting on this story. This is typical of news that has partisan slant: most of the bias shows up in what stories get reported, not how they're reported.
GroundNews summary and news source comparison: Skadden Associate Resigns Over Big Law's Tepid Response to Trump Pressure
Business Insider, considered "leans Left", quotes the associate extensively without skepticism, but doesn't editorialize in the article itself:
Law.com, considered Center, editorializes a bit:
And Above the Law unabashedly editorializes:
Other sources I found through Web search:
Democrat-leaning Paul Weiss)I think that my concern is that the coup that is ongoing will be done.More options
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It's all over the fake news if you google it, though it wouldn't have hurt for OP to throw in some links
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Crazy that a firm with 4000 employees allowed a junior to send out a firm-wide email, everywhere I’ve worked heavily restricts that kind of thing to very senior management and the internal comms team.
I don’t think she really expected to stay, which is why she only did so after she’d already decided she was leaving, and decided to basically quit spectacularly in a way that she hoped would shame her boss into fighting Trump. I’m kinda assuming her end goal is to leverage her “do something” screed into a sinecure at a legal NGO fighting for liberal causes. She was probably job hunting before this in that sector and hoped that the fame she got for resisting would get her noticed.
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Could have been worse. Could have started a "Reply all" chain. It took my company a surprisingly long amount if time to figure out how to stop those.
And it can get worse yet.
Fun blast from the past. Haven't thought about that since I read it at the time. :)
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That is fantastic. My funniest personal experience with a "reply all" cascade was the time it happened at a very buttoned-down corporation and not one but several people employed dank memes in their (futile, counter-productive) "Stop replying all, you fools!" replies to all.
Yeah, I love reply-all storms. I get why email admins hate them, but as I'm not an email admin I get to just enjoy the hilarity of people begging everyone to stop/sending memes.
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I mean, this couillon was a lawyer, I wonder how many of those other 4000 employees are? Maybe the legion of secretaries, paralegals, etc can't send out firm-wide emails unless they're, like head of HR and lawyers have the privilege regardless of how junior.
Regardless, this employee was highly stupid. There's probably about 100 people behind her waiting for her job, and she's probably 1% better than the next one. That's not worth putting up with employees who cause drama, regardless of if you agree with it or not. I wonder if this will further feed legal affirmative action for conservatives.
I think she genuinely believed that a large number of the other young lawyers at the firm felt likewise but were afraid to say anything, that the whole thing was a coordination problem, and that if she got the ball rolling others would follow suit and that while losing one associate is no big deal losing double digit percentages would be. And who knows, 10 years ago when SJWism was riding high maybe the company would have dithered for a few days instead of firing her immediately and during that time others would have been emboldened to join.
I think the lower appetite of others to join is obviously a big deal, but the main issue is the decreased willingness of companies to bend the knee. They fired her quickly giving no time for others to join and no sign of weakness or uncertainty that would encourage them to do so. Mozilla buckled like a belt under employee pressure and that really kicked off the SJW movement of corporate pressure. This is a signal, though a small one, that those days are over. Mozilla booting Eich was a signal to others, they will capitulate to young employees throwing a temper tantrum so go throw one. This will hopefully be taken as the opposite signal, if you throw a tantrum you will get fired and put a big "Don't Hire Me" sign around your neck.
The biggest mystery to me has always been why corpos bent the knee in the first place. An angry twitter mob consisting of people who will A) Forget about the story in a week no matter what you do and B) People who will cite this incident as proof of hate forever regardless of what you do, should not be reasoned with. But so many institutions were convinced that if they gave the sharks a few drops of blood, they'd be sated, and the institution spared. So they resorted to emboldening cancel warriors with insane stuff like a company firing employees of ten years because their kid said the n-word on the internet, or school principals expelling children because a one-sided video with no context made them seem guilty.
Why did it take so long for anyone to just try not listening to them?? The standard response was to only ever give the crazy people exactly what they want and hope it goes away.
The simplest explanation, though not necessarily the correct one, is just that many large corporations have huge numbers of people who genuinely hold progressive political views, including on the higher levels where they can make policy. In other words, it's not that they bent the knee to the crowd, it's that they agreed with the crowd.
Many prominent tech industry people, for example, grew up in progressive households and held/hold a mix of libertarian and progressive views. It's only very recently, once the woke really well and truly overstepped their bounds, that some of them began to change their minds. I think some people might overestimate the degree to which these shifts are just staged for mass consumption. For example, the simplest though not necessarily correct explanation for why Musk went from a somewhat Democrat-leaning moderate to a full-on Trumpist over the course of the last few years is that he genuinely changed his mind.
What makes these explanations not necessarily correct, would you say?
I do agree with this take, though, I think there's examples of legacy-corpo family heirs who are both stupid-rich and very progressive.
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After a decade of Twitter mobs exploding at the main character du jour, we know how it plays out now. But in 2014, thousands of people suddenly coming out of the woodwork demanding that you fire employee X was a relatively new experience, and one they were obviously struggling to grapple with: there was an obvious fear that failing to capitulate could gut their brand reputation and share value. After a decade of these blow-ups, companies have started to cotton on to the fact that these mobs are ultimately impotent. The mobs can kick up a stink on Twitter, they can get journalists who use Twitter to publish sympathetic articles damning the company - but I'm not aware of a single instance of a Twitter mob eventually snowballing into a genuine boycott from consumers at large (except Bud Light, as noted by @FCfromSSC below - and even then, that wasn't a case of "one of this company's employees said something dubiously offensive in their private life, therefore we're boycotting the entire company").
Bud Light.
Mea culpa.
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Here's your boycott.
Can you put this information into some sort of context?
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They thought that the wind was going to be blowing in this direction permanently, and that they had better get on the Revolution’s good side by joining up early. And to be fair, a lot of people on this site also thought that the Revolution had won and this was the new permanent state of affairs.
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Full court press from all sides -- the media, regulatory bodies like the EEoC, their own lawyers (listening to left-wing legal academics) -- plus infiltration into the executive ranks (that is, many of them weren't bending the knee but doing what they wanted to do anyway)
Also the employment market for tech people is probably worse today than at any time since immediately after the financial crisis, so companies have more leeway to take actions employees disapprove of.
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I was thinking that if Trump was really smart, he would have forced them to actually commit to hiring, say, 30% of their junior lawyer intake from a college Federalist Society approved list.
How could Trump do that? I can't think of a stick to use, and the only carrot I can think of is being hired as outside counsel, but any firm worth hiring as outside counsel presumably already has every former appellate clerk they can get.
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He needs to boil the frog more slowly than that - particularly when going after the legal profession.
Once it is obvious that Trump wants to make the legal profession his bitches, the Supreme Court goes from a 6-3 Republican majority to a 7-2 not wanting to be Trump’s bitch majority. (Thomas and Alito dissenting). He either needs to have more hacks on the Court or be in a position to ignore it before this happens.
Trump is not good at appointing hacks. His appointees are Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and ACB.
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