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How can you tell which practice areas are busy? Is the M&A slowdown widely known? How about bankruptcy?

I'm not sure how you could tell from the outside of a firm, aside from news stories and general economic trends. For examples of the former, I think Kirkland is handling a lot of BP oil spill litigation, so they're probably busy there; or MoFo and Quinn in the smartphone cases. For the latter, IP is generally busy right now in CA; not sure what's going on in NYC.

Anonymous User wrote:How can you tell which practice areas are busy? Is the M&A slowdown widely known? How about bankruptcy?

Call a headhunter in your area and pick his/her brain.

If you want to go hardcore, gin up a dummy resume as a mid-level associate and ask the headhunter for help in placing you in different areas.

johndhi wrote:I'm not sure how you could tell from the outside of a firm, aside from news stories and general economic trends. For examples of the former, I think Kirkland is handling a lot of BP oil spill litigation,

And Facebook IPO litigation
And apple IP litigation

And so on and so on.

Find a firm that's hiring people based on the practice group. If a group needs people so bad it gets it's own HR posting, it thinks it has enough work to justify hiring them.