Here are some of the latest offerings from The Careerist, the lawjobs.com blog featuring Vivia Chen as chief blogger. Click on the links below and visit the blog!

Moms Who Won't Quit
Recent studies show how former high-powered professionals turned full-time moms have made parenthood exhausting. Maybe it's those impossible standards of parenting that make some lawyer-moms glad they can hide out in the office.

News You Don't Want to Hear
I don't want to go there, but as your faithful career sherpa, I have no choice but to give you the unvarnished truth about the state of the legal marketplace. You probably know bits and pieces of the news already, but I'll lay out the whole mess on one table.

We're not sure how big of a deal this is yet, but it's worth reporting on quickly: Jones Day and Northwestern University's School of Law have agreed to push back the law firm's on-campus interviewing date from mid-August to mid-September in what both sides are billing as a move toward a more reasonable interview schedule.

Northwestern will keep its general on-campus interviewing date on Aug. 11, right around the time when the bulk of the nation's top law schools invite prospective employers to campus to meet with rising 2Ls. Jones Day will make its own visit on Sept. 13, the firm announced Monday.

The former Levinson Axelrod associate who launched a website mocking the firm -- and got sued for it -- has quietly settled the litigation and shut down the page.

Though a nondisclosure agreement covers the settlement terms, the site, levinsonaxelrodreallysucks.com, is no more.

Edward Heyburn, who spent six years at the Edison, N.J.-based personal injury firm and is now a Robbinsville, N.J., solo, will say only that "the parties have resolved their differences and all pending actions have been dismissed."

Several Levinson Axelrod partners who were targets of Heyburn's online barbs -- Richard Levinson, Ronald Grayzel and David Wheaton -- did not return calls requesting comment about the end of the litigation.

Commemorating the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird," Peggy Noonan, writing recently in The Wall Street Journal, hit on an important truth that law firm leaders should heed. In lamenting what she called the national need for "adult supervision," Noonan wrote, "there's kind of an emerging mentoring gap going on in America right now ... a generalized absence of the wise old politician/lawyer/leader/editor who helps the young along, who teaches them the ropes and ways and traditions of a craft."

The obnoxious lawyer: Sure, it sounds redundant to the public at large, but if a lawyer uses the phrase to describe one of his own species, it takes on special meaning. Sooner or later, every lawyer is going to run into one of these. In Miami, it's generally sooner.

The obnoxious lawyer is a particularly noisome creature. You can tell she's lying because her lips are moving. He never gets lost because he can follow his slime trail home. Be sure to count your rings and check for your watch after you shake his hand. All the clichés apply.

Here are some of the latest offerings from The Careerist, the lawjobs.com blog featuring Vivia Chen as chief blogger. Click on the links below and visit the blog!

Tell Her She Looks Ridiculous
It's hot out there, and women lawyers are getting steamed up about summer clothes in the workplace. Mainly, senior women are complaining about the casual and tawdry styles of the younger women in the office -- but they aren't saying anything to the offenders. Why is it so hard to tell someone she looks bad?

With revenues down and collection times up, the number of law firms that are starting to consider the benefits of a two-tiered approach to associate attorneys is growing rapidly. Firms are finding that a two-tiered associate structure can be an efficient profit model in that the second tier of "nonpartnership track associates" are paid sometimes as much as 50 percent less than the first tier of "traditional associates," but may be billed to clients with rates that are only 25 to 30 percent less than those of the traditional associates. In other words, if a nonpartnership track associate bills 1,800 hours, the firm makes a larger profit and the clients pay less money than if a traditional associate were to bill the same number of hours.

When Sybaritic Inc., general counsel Brian Kidwell alerted senior management to suspected illegal activity at his company, he knew the news could come back to hurt him. Before making the report, he even researched the law on whistleblowers to see what protections he might have if the company retaliated, according to his testimony later at trial.

Yet on June 24, after a four-year legal saga, the Minnesota Supreme Court denied Kidwell whistleblower protection in his wrongful discharge suit against the company. He was simply fulfilling the duties of his job as in-house counsel, the court found.

Gone are the days of law firms assigning armies of associates to work on large litigation matters, but that doesn't mean there isn't a need for that army -- its members are just billed out at a lower rate and sit in makeshift offices away from the law firm and the client.

"Never before have corporations cared about their bottom line. Everything was always outsourced," Penny Burke, director of business development for Hudson Legal's Pittsburgh office, said of times before the recession.

But things have changed and clients are scrutinizing every cost -- including contract attorneys.

In an era when cost predictability reigns supreme, corporate law departments are increasingly using project- or contract-based attorneys to help handle an increased workload on a shrunken budget.

And their business-minded approach has law firms thinking about doing the same thing.

James LaRosa, an owner of staffing firm JuriStaff in Philadelphia, said the use of skilled attorneys on a project basis is nothing new to law departments, but the number of departments looking at this option and the amount of projects available has definitely increased in the last year.