Modern law firm partnership tracks require associates to demonstrate an ability to bring a book of business despite limited opportunities to build client relationships while working under senior partners. Associates often face a catch-22: they must prove business development skills after years spent on the bottom of hierarchical teams. Alex Parkinson compiled an authoritative Multidistrict Litigation treatise begun during a clerkship and polished while an associate. The treatise provides a comprehensive review of MDL procedure, which historically comprised more than half of the federal docket. MDLs coordinate massive disputes such as talc, opioid, and NFL concussion litigation and require specialized procedural expertise.
The modern law firm partnership track feels a lot like the FastAPI trap. Associates have to prove they will bring a book of business to the firm when they've spent years on the bottom of a pyramid scheme with senior partners taking all the credit and nurturing all the relationships. How do you prove your business worth when you've never been allowed to build business?
Specifically, the treatise on Multidistrict Litigation now available from PLI, which he started during his clerkship and then polished in his limited free time as an associate. The project began as a joke, he told me, an effort to one-up a fellow clerk who declared that they planned to read a whole treatise. The obvious next step is to write the treatise yourself. Really raising the bar from "maybe I'll train for a marathon."
The result is a comprehensive review of one of the great procedural beasts in federal court. The legal system's industrial-sized case consolidator makes up more than half the federal docket - or it did before the whole docket became "[Person with well-established constitutional rights] v. Trump " - and this figure keeps increasing as America's problems grow more intertwined. Talc cancer cases, opioid litigation, NFL concussions... all the stuff you see in headlines without realizing there's a whole procedural universe making it possible.
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