The city’s white-shoe law firms have taken a serious hit in the recent economic downturn, but Summer Associate Season, that debauched perennial perkfest for rising 3Ls at Harvard and Fordham and Yale, is up and running (and only slightly diminished), much to the delight of Asia de Cuba, Sparks, and other corporate-card joints that can ply a half-dozen overworked lawyers and pampered will-be esquires with enough Scotch and sirloin for an easy thousand-dollar tab. A thousand dollars isn’t even half of what each of the “summers,” as they’re known, gets paid every week at the biggest shops. And, to listen to Jonas Blank, a tall, handsome summer resident at Skadden Arps, the biggest of the big, a great deal of effort need not be expended to collect it.

Inadvertently following the New York Law Journals advice for this summer’s associate class (“Stand Out in a Crowd. . . . You still have to distinguish yourself from lots of other very bright people”), Jonas replied to an e-mail from his friend Melissa the other day with a message that was probably news to no one who’s familiar with the drill: “I’m busy doing jack shit. Went to a nice 2hr sushi lunch today at Sushi Zen. Nice place. Spent the rest of the day typing e-mails and bullshitting with people.” Jonas did, unfortunately, have a bit of work to take care of (corporate-finance deal; yawn), so he needed to “peruse these materials and not be a fuckup.” But he couldn’t complain; he was, after all, a summer associate. He signed off, “So yeah, Corporate Love hasn’t worn off yet. . . . But just give me time.”

Try two minutes. That was about how long it took the hiring department at Skadden to page Jonas (Duke undergrad, Harvard Law) and put him to work correcting his mistake. Jonas had sent his life-is-good note not to Melissa but to the firm’s entire underwriting group. His task was to write an apology to the forty or so attorneys who had already opened the e-mail and reached the conclusion that Jackass might be a better name for him.

Jonas wrote to say that he recognized the damage he’d done to his firm-wide reputation and possibly to his future, and that he was appropriately concerned about “the implicit reflection such behavior could have on the Firm.” Recipients of Jonas’s apology were less concerned, however, about the firm’s rep—“I thought they taught the summers how to use e-mail,” one Skaddenite wrote to another—and within minutes the legal grapevine was buzzing. Before long, Jonas, who is from Virginia, was a celebrity in Milwaukee, Austin, and L.A. Across Sixth Avenue from Skadden, Jonas’s Journal became a memo (Subject: FW: FW: FW: RE:—) addressed to the summer associates at Kronish Lieb: “This is a good lesson in what not to do.”

Jonas’s goof is this season’s addition to the ever-growing Corporate Oops genre, and, as such humiliations go, it is relatively tame. Certainly it’s no match for 2001’s most celebrated legal e-mail, a farewell note dispatched by a departing summer associate to his colleagues at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. The author, apparently, was not a fan of summer camp for lawyers (“I did not get shit-faced drunk like the rest of you”), but he had more specific complaints, about the firm’s bigotry (“Because of my Italian-American heritage I was singled out”) and its leisure pursuits (“I will also not speak of the blatant cocaine use in people’s offices”). “I can proudly say that I am now no person’s bitch,” he declared.

That same year, there was also Peter Chung, a twenty-four-year-old Princeton grad who went to work for the Carlyle Group, in Seoul. Peter, who was living the foreign-financier version of the summer-associate life—sprawling pad, lavish feasts, nights on the town in his V.P.’s Porsche—alerted a dozen or so friends to his good fortune. The e-mail announced his plan to be fresh out of condoms (he’d brought forty) before the week (his second in Korea) was up. “chung is king of his domain here in Seoul,” he proclaimed. Chung was, instead, “resigned” from his domain at the Carlyle Group before the week was up, after his enthusiasm quickly spread across several continents, and back across his V.P.’s desk.

Corporate Love wore off pretty quickly for Chung, and it had clearly already run its course for the Cadwalader snitch, but the insider speculation in these parts is that Jonas will not only live to see his Camp Skadden farewell dinner (the summer associate gets to name the place and the principals) but even be offered a chance to come back next summer, as a first-year associate. Then the real punishment begins.