Law firms that rely heavily on financial-services clients will be hurt the most, said Dan DiPietro, head of client relations for the bank’s Law Firm Group in New York.

More lawyers lost their jobs in the third quarter than in the second, according to DiPietro, who says some law firms are now eliminating jobs at the partner level, including so-called equity partners as well as partners who are not owners.

“Some of the tough-love conversations are happening already, and there’s every reason to believe they will continue,” DiPietro said.

Law firms are struggling to maintain profits as the recession cut demand for legal services. Many of the largest U.S. firms fired junior attorneys and staff this year, while deferring start dates for first-year lawyers. Firms including Nixon Peabody LLP and Baker & McKenzie LLP cut pay.

“It’s not an easy year for lawyers,” Leslie Corwin, a shareholder at Greenberg Traurig LLP who advises professional- services firms, including law firms, said yesterday in a phone interview. “I’ve been doing this for 36 years, and this year’s the toughest ever. We’re in a tsunami economy.”

Corwin advised on the dissolutions of Heller Ehrman LLP, a San Francisco-based law firm that closed in 2008, and WolfBlock LLP, a Philadelphia firm that collapsed this year.

‘Bastions’ Collapse

Both were “bastions” of the legal community that went under as a direct result of the economy, said Corwin, whose Miami-based firm is the 10th highest-grossing in the U.S.

Firms with balanced practices that include litigation, bankruptcy and crisis management will be hurt less than others this year, while less well-balanced firms expect large revenue drops, according to a managing partner at one of the top 10 highest-grossing law firms, who requested anonymity.

The less-balanced firms are eliminating lawyers at the partner level, and it remains to be seen what impact the job cuts — some public and some private — will have on year-end financials, according to the attorney. The likely goal of the cuts is to maintain profit levels for rainmakers, or top- performing partners, the attorney added.

Representatives of the other eight U.S. firms with the largest revenue either declined to comment or didn’t return calls and e-mails seeking comment on the revenue estimates by Citi Private Bank, a Citigroup Inc. unit.

Advice to Law Firms

Citi Private Bank’s Law Firm Group provides banking, credit and investment advisory services to law firms and attorneys.

The bank based its 2009 law firm revenue projections on data it began collecting from 131 U.S. firms in 2001, DiPietro said.

Demand for legal services dropped 7.1 percent during the first two quarters of 2009 compared with last year, according to Citi’s data. Demand increased in the third quarter, with the decline for the first nine months of the year slowing to a rate of 6.8 percent, Citi said.

The number of attorneys working at the 131 law firms, which increased by 0.6 percent in the first half of this year, has fallen by almost 1 percent when the third quarter is included, according to Citi. In 2008, lawyer head count grew 5 percent after rising an average of 4.5 percent a year from 2001 to 2007, based on Citi data.

The average billing rate for U.S. law firms grew by 2.5 percent this year to $372 an hour, the National Law Journal, a legal newspaper, reported Dec. 7. That’s the smallest increase in recent years, the newspaper reported.

Fee Increases Fall

This year, as in-house lawyers for companies pressured outside firms for discounts and alternative fee arrangements, some law firms reduced rate increases compared with previous years.

Fifty-eight percent of corporate counsel think law firms are still too profitable while 77 percent of private lawyers say clients are too focused on cost-reduction, according to a LexisNexis survey.

“There’s a Grand Canyon-sized divide between the opinions of corporate counsel and those of law firm attorneys,” LexisNexis Chief Executive Officer Andy Prozes said Dec. 8 in a statement.

LexisNexis, a legal research provider, is a unit of the London-based publisher Reed Elsevier Plc. The firm surveyed 300 private lawyers, 150 corporate counsel and 100 law students, according to the statement.

Hourly Rates Rise

Law firms are expected to raise their hourly rates by 3 percent to 4 percent in 2010, with the largest asking for the most, said Kent Zimmermann, a strategist with Newport Beach, California-based Zeughauser Group LLC.

Law firms are wise to raise rates for new clients while delaying increases for their best ones, DiPietro said in a Dec. 7 interview.

“If firms forgo a rate increase for a year or two, they never make it up,” DiPietro said.

F1 to 2007, profit per partner grew every year at the 100 highest-grossing U.S. law firms, according to the trade magazine American Lawyer. In 2008, as demand began falling, profit per partner fell by 4.3 percent, the magazine reported.

Law firm leaders, while relieved that the free fall appears to be over, aren’t confident the third-quarter rise in demand for legal services is sustainable, DiPietro said.

“The worst could be over,” he said, “but we’re not expecting anything like the profit margins that law firms experienced from 2000 to 2007.”

Less Work

Law firm revenue will continue to drop next year, as 57 percent of corporate counsel plan to shift more legal work in-house and 55 percent plan to reduce their spending on outside counsel, according to the LexisNexis survey.

Rather than hiring to do more legal work in-house, clients are sending more document-review work to outside vendors, according to the managing partner who requested anonymity.

The legal department at Microsoft Corp. plans to reduce its spending on outside counsel by 14 percent for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2010, Brad Smith, the software maker’s general counsel, previously said in an interview.

Microsoft, the world’s largest software company and owner of the third-ranked Internet search engine, is changing its method for paying outside attorneys, choosing alternatives to the traditional billable hour, Smith said. By the third quarter of 2010, the Redmond, Washington-based company projects, half of its legal budget will be spent using alternative fee arrangements, up from 31 percent in 2007.

Billable-Hour Decline

“The billable-hour model has entered a long-term state of decline,” Smith said. The alternative-fee trend will be “difficult to reverse,” he said.

Popular alternatives include fixed fees and so-called success fees, in which lawyers are paid more or less than an agreed-upon fee, depending on their success and efficiency.

With demand low, law firms should focus on generating revenue at the expense of other firms, through discounts or by hiring star partners from rivals, DiPietro said.

“It’s going to be a very active lateral market in the next six months, with more lawyers leaving big firms for smaller firms that will allow them to cut their rates,” DiPietro said.

Zimmermann said more firms should develop their own departments to handle document review at low costs, to prevent clients from outsourcing such work to India. Lawyers should also focus on deepening relationships with existing clients, “the lowest-hanging fruit,” he said.

‘Bet the Company’

Top firms can continue raising rates for “bet-the- company” work, Zimmermann said.

“When Pfizer wants to hold on to a patent for a drug that makes them a lot of money, the CEO is never going to ask about the size of the lawyers’ bill,” Zimmermann said. “He’s going to ask if they were successful.”

Greenberg Traurig’s Corwin said the fourth quarter is off to a good start.

“As a profession, we’ve seen a strong October and November,” Corwin said. “All of us hope and pray that it carries over to 2010.”

Justice Steven G. Breyer estimated that there are 150 million workers in the United States and that perhaps 140 million of them could be prosecuted under the government’s interpretation of the law.

Complimenting the boss’s hat “so the boss will leave the room so that the worker can continue to read The Racing Form,” Justice Breyer said, could amount to a federal crime.

Based on the justices’ questions, most legal experts expect the court to rule the “honest services” law unconstitutional.

If your salary is important to supporting your family, paying the mortgage or other recurring bills, or sending your kids to college, then life insurance is important to ensure that these financial obligations are covered in the event of your death.

How Much Life Insurance Do I Need?

It’s difficult to apply a rule-of-thumb because the amount of life insurance you need depends on factors such as your other sources of income, how many dependents you have, your debts, and your lifestyle. The general guideline is between five and ten times your annual salary.

What Type of Policy Should I Buy?

The debate over term versus whole life insurance goes on. Some experts recommend that if you’re under 40 years old and don’t have a family disposition for a life threatening illness, go for term insurance, which offers a death benefit but no cash value.

Whole life offers both a death benefit and cash value, but is much more expensive. Half of all cash value policies are surrendered within the first seven years, making the coverage very expensive because huge commissions (thousands of dollars the first year) and fees limit the cash value in the early years. Since these fees are built into the complex investment formulas, most people don’t realize just how much of their money is going into their insurance agent’s pockets.

Whole Life Insurance

In this more traditional life insurance policy, the premiums stay the same over the life of the policy, which stays in effect until your death, even after you’ve paid all the premiums. A cash reserve is built up, but you have no control over how it’s invested.

Variable Life Insurance

Variable life insurance policy allows the insured person to decide exactly how the insurance payments should be invested. With a variable life insurance policy, it’s possible to tie the performance of the policy with the financial markets.

Universal Life Insurance

You can vary the amount of your premium with Universal life insurance policies by using part of your accumulated earnings to cover part of the premium cost. You can also vary the amount of the death benefit. For this flexibility, you’ll pay higher administrative fees.

How Much Will It Cost?

The least expensive life insurance is likely to be from your employer’s group life insurance plan. These policies are typically term policies, which means you’re covered as long as you work for that employer. Some policies can be converted upon termination.

The cost of other types of life insurance varies greatly, depending on how much you buy, the type of policy you choose, the underwriter’s practices, how much commission the company pays your agent, etc. The underlying costs are based on actuarial tables that project your life expectancy. High risk individuals, such as those who smoke, are overweight, or have a dangerous occupation or hobby (for example, flying), pay more.

There are often hidden costs in life insurance policies, such as fees and large commissions, that you may not find out about until after you purchase the policy. There are so many different kinds of life insurance, and so many companies that offer these policies, that I recommend using a fee-only insurance advisor who, for a fixed fee, will research the various policies available to you and recommend the one that best suits your needs. To ensure objectivity, your advisor should not be affiliated with any particular insurance company and should not receive a commission from any policy.

An healthy 30 year-old man could expect to pay approximately $300 a year for $300,000 of term life insurance. To receive the same amount of coverage under a cash value policy would cost over $3,000. so it is your decision to kerja keras and choose the best life insurance that fit on your personal situation.

Intellectual property in itself refers to the creations of the mind, including such things as: artistic works, literary works, inventions, names, images, symbols, and designs used in commerce. In other words, the intellect that is the possession of an organization or an individual is considered intellectual property.

Intellectual property is divided into two categories, copyrights and industrial property.

Copyrights give the authors of an exclusive work, exclusive rights to that work for a limited amount of time. Copyrights cover such literary and artistic works as novels, poems, plays, films, songs and other musical works, artistic works (drawings, paintings, sculptures and photographs) and architectural designs. Copyrights, which must be renewed periodically, allow the creators of a piece of work, the opportunity to benefit from that piece of work.

Industrial property includes patents, trademarks, industrial designs and geographic indications of source.

Patents give the inventors of a new product, a certain (limited) amount of time in which he/she may prevent others from making, selling or using the invention without authorization.

A trademark is an intellectual property protection which is used to protect the distinctive features that distinguish one product from another. Those features can include such things as: symbols, colors, brands, names, sounds, smells, shapes, and signs.

Fortunately, Intellectual property laws benefit the creator of a property, by rewarding that creator for his/her innovation and creativity. Also, society as a whole benefits from intellectual property laws, by the fact, that these laws encourage creativity, therefore allowing the rest of us to benefit from the wide range of products and services that are produced.

Any violation of a trademark, patent or copyright could constitute the grounds for an intellectual property lawsuit. If you feel that you have been victimized it would be wise to consult a qualified attorney in your area. Find an attorney or law firm, which specializes in intellectual property law. Know your rights and protect them accordingly.