Wake Up Call: Law Firms Race to Advise on NFT Transactions

In today’s column, two more firms joined the trend toward standardizing U.S. associate pay; the push to remote work could affect firms’ hiring and billing rates; a Littler survey finds employers and employees diverging on the “future of work.”

• Leading off, the business for crypto assets known as non-fungible tokens has a lot of legal gray areas, and law firms, including DLA Piper, are racing to advise on them, a report says. (Financial Times)
• Florida-founded Holland & Knight announced that by July 1 associates in all its U.S. offices will be paid on a “lockstep” salary scale running from $190,000 to $340,000 depending on year of seniority. Meanwhile, Womble Bond Dickinson said it’s increasing base pay for its U.S. associates by an average 9%, and more than doubling potential productivity bonuses, although it did not specify amounts. They’re the latest of several firms overhauling their compensation for junior lawyers to make it more uniform across the country, as firms confront a tightening market for talent and growing acceptance of remote work. (American Lawyer)
• A report says the surge of remote working in the legal industry inspired by the pandemic could have big effects on how and where law firms make new hires and on the billing rates they can charge; and challenges stemming from the pandemic spurred in-house legal teams around the world to innovate, another report says; a new survey finds that 92% of law firms around the world say they were “completely or somewhat” prepared to shift to full-scale remote work when the pandemic hit early last year. (Aderant.com)
• Meanwhile, as businesses start emerging from the pandemic, they’re not seeing eye-to-eye with their employees on the future of work, a survey report from management-side worklaw firm Littler finds. Some 71% of employers said they believe most of their employees who can work remotely would prefer a hybrid model, and most employers plan to offer a hybrid mix of onsite and remote work. However, only 7% of employers say they will let employees who are able to work remotely full-time do so, even if they want to. (Littler.com)

Lawyers, Law Firms

• Squire Patton Boggs senior partner Randy Evans, former President Donald Trump’s U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg, will represent Trump and his campaign in a legal fight stemming from Trump’s claims of election fraud in Georgia; Dominion Voting Systems, which is suing former Trump lawyer Sydney Powell for defamation over her election fraud claims, accused her of using her putative social welfare nonprofit Defending the Republic to pay her personal legal expenses. (DetroitNews.com)
• The Atlantic magazine says that, despite all the negative attention Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 Senate confirmation hearings got, the associate justice of the Supreme Court is still more or less a mystery. And it wonders if Kavanaugh is “out for revenge.” (The Atlantic)
• Deal update: Paul, Weiss advised KPS Capital on its sale of TaylorMade Golf Company, Inc., to Seoul, Korea-based Centroid Investment Partners, advised by DLA Piper and a Korean firm; Debevoise & Plimpton and others advised Domtar, a South Carolina-headquartered maker of fiber-based products, in its sale to British Columbia-based rival Paper Excellence in a deal worth about $3 billion. Latham & Watkins and others advised Paper Excellence. (Businesswire)

Laterals, Moves, In-House

• Tarter Krinsky & Drogin expanded its Italy practice, hiring cross-border corporate transaction attorney Marco Giovine as counsel in Los Angeles. He’s a former Milano-based lawyer for DLA Piper; Sheppard, Mullin brought in Winston & Strawn corporate and health-care partner John Glassgow as a partner in Chicago. (SheppardMullin.com)
• King & Spalding business litigation partner and class-action specialist Jon Chally joined Atlanta-based litigation boutique Councill & Gunnemann, which added him as a name partner; Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr got patent litigator Courtland Merrill as a partner in Minneapolis in its intellectual property and IP litigation practices. (Saul.com)
• In Hong Kong, former Skadden, Arps corporate partner Christopher Betts is now general counsel of Singapore-based ride-hailing, food delivery, and financial services company Grab Holdings. Skadden was one of the firms advising Grab on its recently announced $39.6 billion SPAC deal to go public in the U.S.; in New York, First Amendment lawyer Lynn Oberlander, former general counsel at First Look Media, the New Yorker, and Gizmodo Media Group, moved to Ballard Spahr as of counsel in New York. (BallardSpahr.com)