1st

I summered at GD&C a couple of years ago. Great mirth was had at the annual summer associate event, when the firm's diversity chair couldn't attend to give a talk about what a wonderfully diverse place GD&C was, and had to send a deputy instead. She interspersed thirty minutes of reading bullet points off of Powerpoint slides (sample: "We regularly schedule lunches with diverse associates") with personal anecdotes (related sample: "I myself had lunch with a diverse associate earlier this week"). Went over especially poorly as it happened the same week as an AmLaw article came out pillorying GD&C's record on the matter.

It was so embarrassing that our SA mentors took us out to lunch individually over the following weeks to apologize and ask what else they could do to improve their diversity record. Of course, between the three whiteys at my table, no great breakthroughs were reached.

Drudgereport.com has more style than that crappy website.

WSJ beat you again!

Keeping with this week's theme, there are nine former L2L's at GD&C.

I worked for Jeff Webb when I summered at Gibson. Nice guy.

The attorney bio pics look like DMV pics.

That Gibson website looks assy and boring.

Puke.

Looks like they ripped off Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern ( http://mcsweeneys.net/ )

re: my 4:59 post - as WSJ noted.

who cares about firm websites? the only ppl that check them are gunner law students researching for their interviews.

dont taze me bro.

I feel like "David Lat" should be some kind of anagram of codename for "Peter Lattman" since they might as well be the same person and because of the commonality of the letters "lat." Who's with me on this? Conspiracy?

I feel like "David Lat" should be some kind of anagram or codename for "Peter Lattman" since they might as well be the same person and because of the commonality of the letters "lat." Who's with me on this? Conspiracy?

I wonder how much they spent on all those professional photos of the lawyers--not just the ones accompanying the attorney profiles, but the ones that cycle through on the main directory page. Someone clearly spent time on those. Doesn't that sort of thing eat into per-partner profits???

Hopefully one day people will realize that we're all just folks and law firms won't have to crow about their commitment to diversity (aka institutionalized discrimination).

Gibson Dunn - we don't have "zero" gay lawyers.

Law firm websites are getting rediculous.

However, the Choate videos are much worse

The pictures on GDC main directory page are so stupid. Do you really want to hire the lawyer to represent you in high-stakes litigation who has a goofy picture of him putting on his tie on the website? Not that I am saying I wouldn't, but I don't see how it could really help their image. For god sakes people, we are lawyers, people want us to act like lawyers.

At least one pic on the website is interesting - the one of the girl on the "Hiring"/"Law School Hiring" page of the "Career" section. Wow. Is she a real GDC attorney?

I like the pictures on the main directory. Those are the best part. Except that they don't have too many women, and one of the women is in a very high school girl peek-a-boo around the brick wall pose. They'd never put up a picture of a man doing that.

The videos are composed well, but WAY too darn long. They're banking on a YouTube generation, forgetting about that generation's attention spans.

I like the site overall, though. At least it's different, if not a complete rip-off layout-wise from McSweeneys.

I meant "even if it's a complete rip-off..."

Must go home.

LOL at 4:34's anecdote.

I agrree/ w/ 5:54. Shame on you, peek-a-boo posing Asian woman!

WTF is a "diverse" associate? Is that the new code for any associate who is not white? White guys are white, and pretty lame. Everyone else is diverse, which in modern parlance, is the new synonym for "incredibly fantastic."

Hey, GDC takes all the "diverse" associates out to lunch -- hooray! No white guys allowed! They'd ruin all the diversity, of course. Unless, of course, they're gay. Having sex with other guys can make you diverse, even if you are white.

Uh, that "peek-a-boo posing Asian woman" is Debra Yang, the former U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California whom GDC allegedly paid a $1 mil signing bonus. She can peek-a-boo around whatever the hell she wants to peek-a-boo around.

Screw the new website -- raise clerkship bonuses!

Well said, 6:42. I'm gay but don't like the D word either.

Debra Yang's picture's been taken down.

lol

from "out"

"what we're looking for when we hire is people who want to do what we do, and want to do it with us"

whoa the double entendres

GDC hires people from Pepperdine and Southwestern.

Well, GDC's taken a decent first step by realizing that we gays are out there, and we want our questions and concerns to be addressed during the recruiting process. Bravo! But, a nitpick:

It is unbearably frustrating to watch a video presumably intended to address those gay questions and concerns, and see only two gay white male partners (particularly those who were not out until some undefined point in their career - senior associate? Partner? We aren't told) featured. Guess what? A closeted GWM partner looks, talks, quacks like a white male. And we all know how disadvantaged those folks are during their careers. As an Asian-American lesbian, I'd like to see these types of informational videos reflecting the diversity of the gay community, to the extent the firm can accommodate that. (And, if they cannot accommodate that, then they should be soul-searching as to why not.) I turned down firms that bragged about how gay friendly they were, and then turned out to have all gay men with not more than a single token lesbian (if that.) I belong to three "minority" categories - gender, race, and sexual orientation. I'm concerned about how firms deal with "multiple minorities," not only how they handle white gay men who look and can act "traditionally male" enough to get by at work.

The firm that I ultimately selected had not only a critical mass of gays, women, and minority attorneys, but had a reasonable number of people who spanned multiple categories. When firms can cull together criticial numbers of THOSE people for videos - not pick the one or two people like me that they have in some branch office somewhere - then there will have been progress, not only in the firms, but in society at large.

Ugh. That is one ugly website.

The only reason these firms advertise their diversity is because their clients demand it and to a lesser extent they do not want to lose talented young lawyers.

Thankfully society and firms have evolved to the point where they do not care how diverse you are as long as you produce.

As long as the duck is producing no one gives a quack, and if a chicken, goose, owl? is not producing they are cooked.

11:06,

Given that minorities are, by definition, relatively rare, and that multiple minorities are therefore, again by definition, even more rare, mightn't it be reasonable to recognize that there simply might not be an adequate supply of them in the relevant talent pool for all of the top law firms in the country to put together a "critical mass" of such individuals in all of their offices?

Remember that "whiner" is not a protected class nor a desirable one when it comes to diversity.

I like the website. IT is McSweeney's/New Yorkerish. It's fresh for a law firm. And I appreciate the diversity effort. Gibson only interviewed the top ten percent at my top 30 school, so I still think they're a bunch of d-bags.

Here's their NALP form. Looks like they are a pretty gay firm. http://www.gibsondunn.com/gd_files/swf/files/nalp.pdf

But 700+ and no openly disabled?

6:45: I understand that she's a well-respected lawyer. I'd assume that most GDC partners are, because it's a quality firm. I'm sure she could kick my butt going and coming, and my comment is not to diminish her accomplishments in any way. In fact, they're to make sure she gets the professional treatment she deserves.

A woman CANNOT peek-a-boo around a wall in a professional picture no matter who she is. If you saw a picture of President Bush, Senator Clinton or Margaret Thatcher doing that, you'd say it was stupid and unprofessional.

If the firm would NEVER put up a picture of a male partner doing it, it's probably not a good idea for them to show a picture of a woman doing it. (And don't get all silly and say that they wouldn't show a picture of a man in a skirt and heels - you know what I'm saying.)

If you saw that one of your friend's bridal portraits featured a picture like this, and the woman was above the age of 27, you'd think the picture was immature and affected.

I applaud that GDC put her in an interesting photo; I just wish it didn't have such girlish connotations. I'm glad they took it down.

Of course, I loved the tie picture, so that one should go back up.

Wait, the peek-a-boo is still there. Now spotted in the mix over at "Practices".

Please, GDC, put up a different picture of Ms. Yang.

I once did an interview that must have been exactly what it was like to interview 11:06. Dude asked question after question relating to the fact that he was gay. Can I bring my boyfriend to the holiday party? Sure. Can I talk about my boyfriend in the breakroom? If it makes you happy. Can I march in the gay pride parade? Knock yourself out.

By the way, this is a freaking law firm. Do you have any questions about the practice of law, or is that just something you plan to do when you're not otherwise obsessed with expressing your homosexuality?

11:44 - way to assume bullshit (this is 11:06). I actually assumed that I could bring my girlfriend to the holiday party, talk about her whenever people ordinarily talk about SO, and I already march in the gay pride parade every year and would expect to continue doing so at any firm. I actually didn't bring up the topic of being gay during any of my interviews because it was NOT RELEVANT. Not a single question, because it would have been a complete nonsequitur.

After I received all of my offers, I asked the top three firms I was interested in to put me in touch with an(y) openly gay or lesbian attorneys that might be willing to talk to me. Even there, I didn't have a lot of asinine questions of the sort you described, but simply sought to talk to them about their whole experience at the firm, including any areas in which their SOs or sexuality had been relevant. By the time I accepted with the firm I chose, I had spent about 30 hours post-offers talking with attorneys from different firms; most were straight, only a few were gay, and I'd estimate only about 1-2 hours of that talktime total dealt with sexuality. Zero hours out of the time I spent actually interviewing were related to sexuality. Seriously, way to assume that because we might have some legitimate questions about being openly gay at a law firm, we are "obsessed with expressing [our] homosexuality." And here I thought that was the hetero attorneys who can't stop yapping about their boyfriends, girlfriends, fiance(e)s, ring sizes, honeymoons, lavish wedding ceremonies, in laws, kids kids and more kids, divorces, marital blues, and other aspects of flaunting their heterosexuality. If you want to look at the number of accommodations that heterosexuals request to "express their heterosexuality" that take time away from the practice of law, I think you'll find that we queers aren't so unreasonable.

Silly us to not realize that you are not obsessesed with the topic.

Why can't we all just leave the topic of who (or what) we prefer to fuck at home and do our jobs?

The website looks nice, but the empty slogans really seem out of place from an otherwise classy design. They're a small step up from, "Have you been in a car accident?"

"She's a brick... house!"

The peek-a-boo pic isn't the only one worth noting in that "practices" collage. What about Stewart L. McDowell's? She's in the doorway of a house. A house! as in "a woman's place is in . . ." All of the men's pics are in the office. Only one female pic is in the office (as noted, the other two females are in a house or peeking around a wall). What a poorly grouped collage.

I noticed that one of the two openly gay partners featured in the video, Jeff Webb, bolted for the Boston office of McDermott Will & Emery. I wonder why? Will Gibson leave the video up on the site? Will Gibson ever be able to dig up another openly gay partner??