This award-winning monthly magazine counts among its readers the nation's most powerful attorneys: managing partners and partners at the largest law firms in the United States, as well as General Counsel at the Fortune 500.

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The American Lawyer is the nation's leading monthly magazine for lawyers. Our mission is to cover the business-- profits, losses, mergers, strategies, and spectacular failures--of the most successful law firms in the nation as well as their practices--the biggest deals and cases, the inside story of who won, who lost and why.

The American Lawyer covers the most significant legal business stories and the most important legal news stories. Often the two overlap. Corporate governance, bankruptcy, and the Supreme Court, are all topics that we address through our special perspective.

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DECEMBER 2008
15 Bar Talk
Bearing the burden of huge white-collar fees; luc Despins's unusual move; the states of the legal economy; IP lawyers on the auction block; Fannie mae's former general counsel has doubts; firms rescind offers to law students; idle hands do an angel's handiwork; veterans of '91 talk to today's unemployed; bad times for hedge funds means bad times for the cayman islands; a life sentence for securities fraud?

IN-HOUSE At The American Lawyer
We spend many pages this month discussing the prospects for significant change in the world of large law firms. The impetus for this comes from listening to many conference sessions over the past year during which speakers passionately pointed to the prospect of new money, talent, technology, and/or a new breed of client becoming the lever (or levers) that moves the status quo. We're agnostic about which, if any, of these factors stands a realistic chance; we're pretty confident, though, that it will take a while before we will see transformational change we can all believe in.

One area that may be an exception is the advent of fixed- or alternative-fee arrangements. Even as I type those words, I can't help but chuckle. "stop writing that story, " one managing partner insists elsewhere in this issue. "It's not going to happen!" If it doesn't, there are really only two interested parties to blame, the law firms and the clients.

The zeitgeist certainly seems to have changed. In our annual survey of the heads of the am Law 200, we asked whether over the next ten years they thought that "many if not most" big firms will have to change their billing practices. about three-quarters said yes. and two-thirds of them volunteered that fixed-fee deals were in the offing ...

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