Clifford Chance or Latham? Forum

[Anonymous User]

For a friend. He/She is more interested in corporate than litigation, but open-minded.
Both NY.
Go.

[edcrane]

Fried frank.

[Anonymous User]

No-brainer: Latham.

I have not worked for clifford chance, but it has every indication of being a horrible place to work. I've talked to people who worked there, who uniformly bashed the place. The person I interviewed with (last year) said it "didn't have a culture". A friend of mine who interviewed there was told by an associate "If you have any other offer: don't come here." Another friend interviewed there and said it was the creepiest place he had ever seen. They have fired people, they have mistreated people (google "clifford chance memo" for some news from a few years ago), and they are doing badly in this economy.

Latham definitely had some problems, and as we all know they laid off quite a lot of people. But at least the people who still work there don't seem to hate it.

[Anonymous User]

and they are doing badly in this economy.

to be fair, AmLaw's Global 100 for 2009 came out today, and clifford chance is 3rd in the world in terms of total revenue. They were 1st worldwide in 2008:

http://www.law.com/jsp/tal/PubArticleTA ... hbxlogin=1

To note, Latham is ranked 7th worldwide and held that spot in 2008 as well.

We can argue about the value of "total revenue" is as a metric, but it's tough to say that 3rd in the world is "doing badly" (relative to whom?) in this economy is questionable at least.

[bwv812]

.

[NewHere]

I honestly don't see how total revenue should be an indicator. Size is not necessarily a measure of success. As bwv points out, GM has a lot of revenue too. A ten-employee company with $10M in revenues is arguably more successful than a hundred-employee company whose revenue is $50M.