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Here is the list of LMA Your Honor first-place winners::

• Practice Development -- Sutherland Asbill & Brennan: Sutherland Business Development curriculum
• Media Relations: Mayer Brown
• Community Relations: Middleton Reutlinger – kindess public service advertising campaign
• Recruiting: Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft: recruiting microsite
• Chapter of the year (of 18 LMA chapters) - LMA Vancouver: “Changing the Rules”
• Marketing on a Shoestring: (maximum expenditure of $500) -- Morrison Foerster: Regulatory Innovation Award
• Best in show: (an entry that stood out from the rest, where a law firm took something and did everything they could possibly do to maximize it) -- Event by Fredrickson Bryon: “Lawyers & the Louvre” Campaign

Awards given on previous days of the convention, which ended today, are:

• Advertising (single ad): Bennet Jones – The Pink Ad
• Advertising campaign: McInnes Cooper – signal flag branding campaign.
• Events: Miller & Chevalier – inauguration invitation and website
• Website: Gesmer Updegrove -- www.gesmer.com
• Niche web site: Bingham McCutchen – Bingham Information Gateway
• Online Interactive Marketing Tools: Morris, Manning & Martin – MMM Social Media
• Electronic Media: Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman for New Faces of Energy: Insights from the Energy Revolution
• Identity: (logo and stationery)  Baker & McKenzie with zünpartners – branding a firm for growth
• Firmwide brochure: Bingham McCutchen – inSecurities practice brochure
• Annual report: Blank Rome “A Year Marked by Change”
• Announcements: Bingham McCutchen – Bingham-McKee Nelson Announcement
• Newsletter or Alert: Stikeman Elliott – Registration reform

 You can find the entire list of first, second and third-place winners by clicking here.

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Howrey is planning to oust up to 10 percent of its partners, a move that follows a year of disappointing revenue numbers.

Howrey is expected to cut between 25 and 30 partners, most of them in the United States, Legal Week reports. The decision to make the cuts was made before Christmas, according to the story. Both equity and nonequity partners will be let go.

Last month the law firm laid off 29 associates and 65 staffers from its 10 U.S. offices.

The move comes after Howrey saw a 35 percent drop last year in profits per equity partner and a 16 percent drop in revenue.Further evidence that the legal profession  is in a recovery economy arrives in a new report that layoffs at law firms are nearing zero.

Meanwhile, Darby & Darby, a 62-lawyer IP firm in New York, announced it would close. The decision follows a series of departures, as partners left to join general practice firms and failed attempts to merge with another law firm.

Legal Job Losses Drop Off Sharply

Howrey and Darby are the outliers in a major trend in the opposite direction.  As the national unemployment rate remained steady in February, the number of legal industry jobs lost dropped to one-tenth of what it had been in January, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly jobs report.

The legal profession shed only 100 jobs in February — substantially fewer than the 1,100 jobs that it lost in January — according to the report, released Friday.

Those numbers represented the second significant monthly decline for the industry. The sector lost 2,100 jobs in December and 2,900 in November — a steep difference compared to the 5,800 lost in October. The industry has shed 37,100 positions over the past year, according to BLS statistics, which tally net job losses.

For further details, see Law360.

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The LMA today inducted 3 people into its Hall of Fame:

1.       Silvia Coulter of Hildebrandt Baker Robbins in Boston – she is a former CMO of three AmLaw 100 law firms, founder of LSSO. She has a book coming out this fall: Client Relationship Management for Associates, published by the ABA.

2.       Jim Durham, Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer of McGuireWoods in Richmond, VA -- he was a former practicing lawyer, worked for Major League Baseball, former marketing director for Mintz Levin and later Ropes & Gray, was a marketing consultant, author of 3 books.

3.       Kevin McMurdo, CMO at Perkins Coie in Seattle – he was the 7^th president of LMA, a non-practicing lawyer and a former marketing consultant.

An LMA committee reviews hall of fame candidates and looks for people who must be a thought leader in advancing the legal profession, must be a mentors and must have served the LMA on the local or national level.

The LMA is continuing to issue Your Honor awards a few at a time. Here's the latest:

First Place Your Honor Winners

• Advertising (single ad): Bennet Jones – The Pink Ad
• Advertising campaign: McInnes Cooper – signal flag branding campaign.
• Events: Miller & Chevalier – inauguration invitation and website
• Website: Gesmer Updegrove -- www.gesmer.com
• Niche web site: Bingham McCutchen – Bingham Information Gateway
• Online Interactive Marketing Tools: Morris, Manning & Martin – MMM Social Media
• Electronic Media: Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman for New Faces of Energy: Insights from the Energy Revolution

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I haven’t been to an LMA meeting in 5 years, and this one in Denver is a very pleasant surprise.  Many longtime and senior members of the marketing profession were there. There is great networking – I barely made it 30 feet into the Hyatt Regency lobby when I immediately ran into people I knew.

There are 800 attendees at the LMA conference, according to conference co-chair Despina Kartson.  This is up from 530 last year. There are 190 CMOs and Marketing Directors here.

LMA is issuing the Your Honor Awards in batches.  Here’s the first batch of first place winners (like the early awards given out in the Oscars):

• Identity: (logo and stationery)  Baker & McKenzie with zünpartners – branding a firm for growth
• Firmwide brochure: Bingham McCutchen – inSecurities practice brochure
• Annual report: Blank Rome “A Year Marked by Change”
• Announcements: Bingham McCutchen – Bingham-McKee Nelson Announcement
• Newsletter or Alert: Stikeman Elliott – Registration reform

The new conference company is a great improvement.  Before the conference I got an email with a bar code in it.  I printed it out and scanned it upon registering at the hotel.  Instantly my information was prepared for me at a counter 10 feet away. The whole thing took 60 seconds.  Very innovative.

I think that a higher-level crowd is at this conference – I see more CMOs and Marketing Directors than in past conferences. One factor is that the full member registration fee is $1195, and it’s $1645 for non-member – so attending the conference has reached an expense level where attendance is not given out as a perk to marketing assistants, for example. With law firm cuts in budgets, it’s become a destination that only the CMO can justify.

Yesterday was the first ever pre-conference session for lawyers.  About 25 people attended, with the crowd growing to 40 by lunchtime.  The best received speakers were Alvidas Jasin (soon to leave Thompson Hine for a job at BTI Consulting), Jim Durham, CMO of McGuireWoods, and Rick Klau of Google.

Attendees were grumbling that there is no Wi-Fi at the conference, but I anticipated this and brought my plug in "skycard" that gets me online using a cell-phone connection.

The programs have better speakers this year too—more CMOs and marketing directors and fewer consultants at the podium.  I want to hear from the in-house marketers, because they’re the ones on the firing line.  Tomorrow is broken into 4 tracks: business of law, client service, business development, and public relations. 

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I can tell the economy for the legal industry is getting better when research shows that law firms are merging with each other without any slowdown.  Hildebrandt Baker Robbins reports that there were 57 completed law firm mergers in 2009.

The newest one is the merger of Benesch Friedlander Coplan & Aronoff LLP, with headquarters in Cleveland (plus offices in Columbus, Philadelphia, White Plains, Wilmington and Shanghai) with Dann Pecar Newman & Kleiman of Indianapolis, IN, effective March 1, 2010.  Because Benesch has 145 lawyers and Dann Pecar has 26, it's really an acquisition.

In an announcement, the firms say the merger would strengthen several of Benesch's core practice areas, particularly real estate, commercial litigation, bankruptcy, and their transportation/logistics and construction industry groups. Dann Pecar has promoted itself as a local leader in real estate, litigation, employment law, business and bankruptcy law.

The firm will do business as Benesch/Dann Pecar in the Indianapolis market as part of a national expansion plan by Benesch.

Interestingly, the consultant at Altman Weil who worked on the merger quoted statistics from AW's year-end MergerLine report, that the number of law firm mergers dropped by a significant 24 percent in 2009.  This is the opposite of what their arch-competitor Hildebrandt is saying in it's latest client advisory (see below):

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Six law firms are on Fortune magazine’s list of the best 100 companies to work for in 2010, up from five last year.

New on this year’s list is Baker Donelson, with 560 attorneys in 16 offices. To pick the best companies, Fortune surveys a random sample of company employees to learn their attitudes about management's credibility, job satisfaction and camaraderie. It also factors in pay, benefits, diversity and communication.

Here are the law firms’ rankings and Fortune's summaries of why they made the list:

• Alston & Bird. “The law firm invites all employees—everyone from receptionists to shipping clerks to legal secretaries—to attend monthly firm meetings marked by the review of a project and kudos to all who contributed.”
• Arnold & Porter. “Employees who make successful referrals at this prestigious law firm are rewarded with bonuses ranging from $450 to $15,000.”
• Baker Donelson. “A strong commitment to diversity at this law firm founded in 1888 has lifted number of minority lawyers from 12 to 40; of 540 lawyers, 180 are women.” It is one of 17 of the top 100 companies reporting no layoffs.
• Bingham McCutchen. “Diversity has a high priority at this corporate law firm. Retreats bring together lawyers of color and openly gay and lesbian lawyers. In response to employee feedback, health insurance was amended in 2009 to cover additional benefits for transgender employees.”
• Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. “Recession prompted law firm to ask incoming associates to defer their entry until the fall of 2010 and offered to place them in legal jobs at nonprofits and government agencies, paying them an honorarium of $60,000 and a $15,000 bar stipend. Forty-three incoming lawyers (56 percent of the class) agreed to the deferment.”
• Perkins Coie. “Firm was proud to represent Obama for America, with 59 lawyers working on the campaign. Another 48 attorneys worked on the Al Franken campaign.” It is one of 14 companies on the Fortune list that pay 100 percent of their employees' health care premiums.

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The Connecticut Statewide Grievance Committee has dismissed complaints against five Connecticut attorneys accused of violating the state’s Rules of Professional Conduct by subscribing to Total Attorneys’ group lawyer Internet-based advertising program. 

The Connecticut action was part of a campaign by a single Connecticut attorney, who filed complaints last spring against more than 500 lawyers  in 47 states.  The complaints were dismissed after the close of Chief Disciplinary Counsel’s evidence, before the Respondents offered a defense to the charges.

"This is In an unprecedented procedural move," said Total Attorneys General Counsel Pam Gracyalny. "To date, no state has found that the Total Attorneys model violates its Rules of Professional Conduct."

Total Attorneys President Kevin Chern, against whom the complainant originally requested criminal charges be filed, voiced appreciation for the consideration the Committee gave the issue.  “We are celebrating the Committee’s decision and we are eager to see the text of the full decision,” Chern said.

Total Attorneys is a managed service provider that helps small law firms and solo practitioners improve operations, save money and grow their businesses. Through the company’s Software-as-a-Service platform, it offers legal process outsourcing, search engine marketing, a professional call center, CRM solutions and answering services. Founded in 2002, Total Attorneys has seen revenue grow more than 9,000 percent over the past five reporting years, and the company now has more than 1,100 law firm customers across the United States.

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The Hubbard One Marketing Professional of the Year Award went to Andrea K. Stimmel, Business Development Director of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle in New York.

The firm’s nomination states, “Curtis hired Ms. Stimmel in 2007. In just over two years, she has prompted a sea change in the firm’s attitude towards marketing, increasing visibility for the firm and establishing a far more tactical approach to business development. Among the many new programs implemented by Andrea, none has been more successful than the utilization of web 2.0 platforms to market the firm. ”

Already, the 215-lawyer firm has benefited from this approach. To date, the firm has established more than 400 online contacts including:

• 195 followers on Twitter
• 186 fans on Facebook
• 60 members on LinkedIn
• The Curtis blogs have been visited more than 12,000 times.
• In November 2009 alone, social networking activity was responsible for almost 9% of web traffic on Curtis.com, including more than 450 first-time visits.

Andrea has 23 years of professional marketing experience, and the last seven were in law firm marketing. She is a member of the Metropolitan New York Chapter chapter of LMA.  She established Curtis' social media presence with the launch of its award-winning Facebook recruiting page in 2008. A first among AmLaw 200 firms, the Facebook page helped increase name and brand awareness, primarily among law students, law schools and junior associates.

Andrea guided the firm's expanded use of the platform, including:

LinkedIn – Used to build relationships and generate new business. The firm also supports a firm profile and a group to maintain contact with alumni and other users interested in the firm's activities.

Twitter – Constantly updates our followers about the latest developments at Curtis. From deals and cases to media exposure, Curtis tweets on the latest firm activities.

Blogs – a series of blogs demonstrate thought leadership in several industry (e.g., international funds) and geographic (e.g., Oman) areas.  The blogs help establish Curtis as a thought leader with both current and prospective clients.

Using Yahoo!'s Tubes, the firm created a single RSS feed that could aggregate all of the content published by Curtis. This "master feed" was then routed to each of the firm's social networking applications. Once implemented, this system enabled all content updates to automatically distribute to the Curtis Facebook page, LinkedIn group, Twitter feed, blogs and website.

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Sharon Geraghty and Matthew Cockburn, co-leaders of Torys' M&A Practice predict that 2010 will be a comeback year with significant M&A activity. While 2009 was a slow year in the M&A space, in 2010 the pickup in M&A activity will be considerable.

"We expect activity to include acquisitions in the "green" and media and telecom sectors. Life sciences will continue to be robust though mid-market focused. Well-run Canadian pension funds and banks will also take advantage of their relative strength to make international acquisitions. Large conglomerates, including financial institutions, will carve out their non-core assets. Private equity is also showing signs of renewed interest in acquisitions.

"Although foreign buyers will face some scrutiny from the Canadian government when national security issues are triggered, "national security" will not be viewed as broadly as was once feared. Canadian M&A deals may also face more lengthy and onerous antitrust reviews.

"In 2010, shareholders will continue their unprecedented level of activism, which began in 2009. Canadian directors may experiment by trying to “just say no” to unsolicited offers, while recent developments suggest that U.S. directors may tread more cautiously on this front.

Torys’ M&A lawyers are looking ahead to 2010, and this is what we see.  For the full story please visit http://bit.ly/79h09N 

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According to LawShucks.com, 2009 will go down as the worst year ever for law-firm layoffs. More people were laid off by more firms than had been reported for all previous years combined.  The good news is that the layoffs peaked in March 2009, and were at their lowest point of the year in December 2009 -- auguring for a better 2010.

The site tracked 12,196 people laid off by major firms in 2009, of which 4,633 were lawyers and 7,563 were staff. Make sure to check the tracker for the methodology – and LawShucks is aware that layoffs are severely underreported, a trend that increased as the year went on.

All told, they tracked 218 reports of layoffs at 138 law firms in 2009. Clifford Chance led the way, with an astonishing 10 different events reported. DLA Piper had seven, Baker & McKenzie six, and Cadwalader, Dechert and Faegre & Benson each had four. Twelve other firms had three and 27 had two, leaving 93 firms that had a single round of layoffs reported.

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