Linklater's Michael Bassett

Here’s some very belated bonus news from the Big Apple, from AboveTheLaw. Earlier this month, the New York office of Linklaters announced bonuses that matched the Cravath scale.  As usual at Linklaters, there was no hours requirement. The news was communicated via individual memo.

A Cravath match, especially in a bonus season when some firms are paying significantly more, isn’t that exciting. A Cravath bonus won’t get a Linklaters associate a pad as swish as the $2.8 million that of Linklaters partner Michael Bassett and his non-Linklaters partner Darren Henaut.  Heck, $35K — the top of the Cravath scale — probably won’t even cover the cost of Bassett’s wallpaper, ATL say.   

Sir Robert Jones - Justice Wilson Landlord

Briefcase also reports on Justice Wilson’s new digs with Sir Robert Jones and the ex-jurists over at Bankside Chambers.  “I thought (Bankside) was named after the sheer volume of fees that must sluice through its ledger, is evidently named after a short street.  It’s certainly a lot better than  the name of the Wellington chambers first occupied by Kit Toogood, John Billington and Michael Reed QCs, unimaginatively and now even downright dangerously called “Marac Chambers”.  Naming a chambers after a finance company is like naming a doctors surgery after a social disease.  Bankside, however, has a cluster of former High Court and Court of Appeal judges, including Sir Ian Barker QC, Robert Fisher QC, Barry Paterson QC and David Williams QC. David Williams has developed a fabulously lucrative arbitration and mediation practice.  The developing role for retired or resigned senior judges to forge a new and highly lucrative career in arbitration and mediation is something to behold (as reported in last week’s NBR).  Deborah Hart, executive director of the Arbitrators’ and Mediators’ Institute told me there has been exponential growth in their work in recent years with no sign of abatement.  Partly, this has been the use of mediation in domestic and family disputes, including the Family Court’s early intervention programme, which has been used to ease the logjam of cases in the Family Court.  But so too has been the growth in construction disputes and others.

All of which augers well for former Supreme Court Justice Bill Wilson who must be the cookie-cutter model of the successful mediator and arbitrator, forgetting the odd career-wrinkle.  Now ensconced in Sir Robert Jones’ suite of offices in Wellington, highly salubrious surroundings as they are, the former litigator and Judge will be quietly setting about carving a successful niche in the arbitration field, all his worries behind him.

NBR columnist

Bowie goes on:  “What’s interesting about the “Truth” book is its rich legal history as publisher Jimmy Dunn, a lawyer, who was a ferocious libel litigant.  The crusading, piratical “Truth” has now disappeared of course, although something called “Truth Weekender” is still published, having merged the page three girl of yore with girls on pages 3 to 30, in primary colour and usually with cell phone numbers and offers to see them in Fort Street.

Apart from Sandra Moran in Wellington one of Dunn’s protégés was a young Geoffrey Palmer.   Young Geoff wrote a kind of Dorothy Dix column on the law – such as the rights you had on returning a broken wireless to The Lamphouse, or when you could legally start birching your kids.    Sir Geoffrey honed his early legal knowledge under the powerful and crafty Jimmy Dunn before moving to university where his Socratic teaching method developed what might be called the “Palmer Effect” upon students, one of whom told me just this week that a kind of deflection-method was used to avoid answering his lengthy, stentorian-voiced questions filled with facts and legally challenging issues, by asking him to please repeat the question.  This usually resulted in someone more studious in the front row, someone like David Collins, to answer the question for him.

Bill Wilson

‘Briefcase‘ reports on the Justice Wilson resignation, commenting that he was never going to face the music at the Judicial Conduct Panel hearing.  As John Bowie writes:   ” But while the retirement may appear to avoid nasty questions, it also leaves many unanswered.  For instance, what did the Chief Justice know about his relationship with Alan Galbraith?  How effective was Judicial Conduct Commissioner Sir David Gascoigne in making his initial report recommending the panel?  What is the future for the Supreme Court and should we be considering a regional court as many have suggested?  After all, two Australian judges were called upon to help with this mess.  But mostly, what damage has been done to the Court and the Bar as a result of the disclosures, including those from Sir Edmund Thomas, a man who has been sent to Coventry from all accounts.  Bill Wilson may have gone.  The unanswered questions haven’t.”