January 2007 News
- What's in a name? 300 bucks and a lot of hassle
- Gay Man From Mexico Wins U.S. Asylum
- Most California Firms Still Not Matching N.Y. Associates' Pay
What's in a name? 300 bucks and a lot of hassle
01/30/07
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Mike Buday isn't married to his last name. In fact, he and his fiancee decided before they wed that he would take hers.
But Buday was stunned to learn that he couldn't simply become Mike Bijon when they married in 2005.
As in most other states, that would require some bureaucratic paperwork well beyond what a woman must go through to change her name when marrying.
Instead of completing the expensive, time-consuming process, Buday and his wife, Diana Bijon, enlisted the American Civil Liberties Union and filed a discrimination lawsuit against the state of California. They claim the difficulty faced by a husband seeking to change his name violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
"Diana and I feel strongly about gender equality for both men and women," Buday said. "I think the most important thing in all of this is to bring it to a new level of awareness."
Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the ACLU in Southern California, said it is the first federal lawsuit of its kind in the country. "It's the perfect marriage application for the 17th century," Rosenbaum said. "It belongs in the same trash can as dowries."
Only six states -- Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Massachusetts, New York and North Dakota -- have statutes establishing equal name-change processes for men and women when they marry. In California and other states, men cannot choose a different last name while filing a marriage license.
In California, a man who wants to take his wife's name must file a petition, pay more than $300, place a public notice for weeks in a local newspaper and then appear before a judge.
Because of Buday's case, a California state lawmaker has introduced a bill to put a space on the marriage license for either spouse to change names.
The Census Bureau does not keep figures on how many U.S. men are taking their brides' names. But clearly it happening more and more. Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, Clerk Mark Ryan estimated that one in every 100 grooms there now takes the name of his wife.
Bijon, 28, approached Buday about the idea when they were dating. She had no brothers but wanted to prolong the family name. Buday, a 29-year-old developer of interactive advertising, was estranged from his own father and was not attached to his own last name.
"I knew immediately it was pretty important to her or else she wouldn't have brought it up," Buday said.
At one point, the couple tried the Department of Motor Vehicles to get a name change. But Buday said he was told by a woman behind the counter: "Men just don't do that type of thing."
Couples who want to hyphenate or combine their names also must endure the lengthy court procedures in California. One of the more notable examples was Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who went to court to fuse his last name, Villar, with his wife's, Raigosa, when they married in 1987.
Laws giving women an easy choice of names were largely a byproduct of the feminist movement. A 2004 Harvard University study found that the number of college-educated women who kept their surnames upon marriage rose from about 3 percent in 1975 to nearly 20 percent in 2001.
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Gay Man From Mexico Wins U.S. Asylum
(AP) - LOS ANGELES-An immigration judge who previously denied a gay man's asylum bid on the grounds that he could conceal his sexual orientation if he returned to his native Mexico reversed the decision Tuesday.
In allowing Jorge Sota Vega to remain in the United States, Judge John D. Taylor said that gays should not be required to dress or act a certain way to avoid persecution and that Vega's lawyers proved he would be at risk if he were deported to Mexico.
Vega's case attracted attention from national gay rights groups when Taylor denied his application and said that Vega could live safely in Mexico because he did not look gay and could hide the fact that he was.
"It seemed to us this is a real double standard," said Jon W. Davidson, legal director of Lambda Legal. "Courts don't deny asylum to someone based on their political beliefs by saying, 'If you just didn't tell other people what you believed, you would be fine.'"
Vega, 38, lived in Tuxpan and Guadalajara before he fled to the United States. He said in his 2004 asylum bid that he was beaten by police and told by authorities in Mexico he would be killed.
Now a New York resident, Vega appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The San Francisco-based court sent the case back to immigration court last year.
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Most California Firms Still Not Matching N.Y. Associates' Pay
January 31, 2007
More California-based firms are opting for a segmented associate salary scale, hiking pay to a $160,000 base in their New York offices but implementing a $145,000 scale in California.
The salary fragmentation between New York and California began last week with O'Melveny & Myers and Morrison & Foerster and continued Monday with Los Angeles-based Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton. Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker also went to the higher scale in New York on Monday, but has made no announcement about California.
"It's too early to tell, but my guess is that the differences will remain because New York is the most robust, vibrant and competitive legal market in the world," said Gregory Nitzkowski, managing partner for Paul Hastings.
In setting its California scale, Nitzkowski said, the firm will evaluate its competitors.
Nitzkowski noted that firms such as Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, which have high concentrations of lawyers in New York, face "a much different calculation" for associate pay than firms with most of their associates in, say, California.
"You just don't have the same rates on the West Coast as New York," he added.
Sheppard Mullin administrative partner Robert Beall agreed: "They're just two different markets -- that's how we perceive it. I think all of us have to look at this in terms of what's best for clients and the markets."
Beall said the firm would not raise billing rates because of the salary matches: "It's just a cost we have to absorb."
New York-based Stroock & Stroock & Lavan carved out a distinctive path on Monday. It will pay New York associates on the $160,000 scale, but starting salaries in Los Angeles will be $150,000, according to partner Michael Perlis.
But Boston-based Fish & Richardson raised associate pay in all of its offices -- including Silicon Valley and San Diego -- to the $160,000 scale on Monday. The 420-lawyer intellectual property firm had "a responsibility to offer the most competitive salaries in the industry," according to Peter Devlin, the firm's president.
That's similar to the approach California's Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges adopted last week when it went to the New York scale in all of its offices, including Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Leading California firms such as Latham & Watkins and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher were quiet Monday -- though speculation and commentary on Latham's possible moves cluttered associate messageboards and blogs.
A move from one of those firms could be enough to force firms that have raised to less than $160,000 to go the rest of the way, said Avis Caravello, a San Francisco-based recruiter.
"Let's say Latham goes to 160 -- there's no way O'Melveny or Gibson will stand by and let it happen," she said. "All you need is for one big California firm to do it."
If the market continues to be segmented, it could have long-term implications, she said: "If you lose one or two stellar candidates because you're lower, that reverberates through the firm. It really makes an impact in areas like corporate, where there's competition for associates with New York firms."
Firms with profits per partner above $1 million will find it easier to absorb the financial impact of the raises. But meeting the higher scale "could really squeeze midmarket firms," Caravello said.
Franklin Gowdy, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius' San Francisco managing partner, said rapidly rising associate salaries could drive some firms to try to get around the pay structure.
Firms may try to contain costs by hiring contract associates that they won't have to pay so highly, Gowdy said. Morgan Lewis has not made any salary moves yet, he said.
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