In response to our request for help with Legal Eagle Wedding Watch, we received many excellent applications. After much deliberation — picking among so many qualified applicants was tough — we finally selected a new LEWW writer.

Please welcome Laurie Lin to the pages of ATL! Here’s a little bit about her:

Laurie is a YLS graduate and sometime D.C. tax attorney currently living in the deep South. She had her own lawyer-lawyer wedding last summer and is accepting bids on the three-foot stack of Martha Stewart Weddings in her closet. She also blogs at The Kitchen Cabinet.

Laurie proposed a revamp of Legal Eagle Wedding Watch, which she demonstrated in her audition piece. We liked her fresh take on the column.

Please check out her inaugural LEWW post, after the jump.

LEGAL EAGLE WEDDING WATCH

April 1, 2007

“Prisoner of Love”

Before we examine this week’s contestants, LEWW simply must direct your attention to the couple in this week’s Vows column. They aren’t lawyers, but their story does have a compelling legal angle. They met, you see, in a federal courthouse. Where the groom was on trial. For theft. Classy!

Without further ado, we turn now to our finalists for Couple of the Week:

1. Jessica Liberman and Keith Wilcox

The Case:
- We’ll haul out the big gun first: Jessica and Keith met in prekindergarten. The other contestants may just want to bow out gracefully right now, because not only is this detail super-cute, but it puts Jessica and Keith in the company of a famous pair of judicial lovebirds who met in kindergarten.

- Jessica’s undergrad and J.D. degrees from Penn allow this couple to check off the Ivy League box. Keith’s M.B.A. from the University of California adds some West Coast sparkle.

The Case Against:
- After mentioning that Jessica and Keith met in prekindergarten, the Times is distressingly silent on the further details of their possible 31-year mating dance. There is no recounting of the awkward adolescent hand-holding, the college breakup, the spark reignited at a boozy 30th-birthday bash. After leading us on, the Times should at least have given Jessica and Keith’s courtship the slightly extended treatment that a few of the profiles get each week. (To save space, they could have trimmed the one below, which is a tedious yawnfest featuring tidbits like “My parents always thought that Andrew was a very appropriate person.”)

The silence makes us suspicious that this couple’s story isn’t all that interesting. Perhaps Jessica and Keith toddled out of the sandbox, went their separate ways, and didn’t meet again until her niece’s bat-mitzvah. See? Not that exciting.

- The prekindergarten in question is Hunter College Elementary School, which touts itself on its website as one of “the preeminent schools for gifted education of pre-collegiate students in the nation.” Let’s face it, gifted kids are annoying, and gifted prekindergarteners are hive-inducing. Young Jessica and Keith probably deserved each other.

2. Kathleen Walsh and John von Rosenberg

The Case:
- Kathleen, 37, and John, 39, are both marrying somewhat late in life, which offers hope for those unattached 30-something ATL readers who yearn to see their names in this space one day. And it’s the first marriage for both, unlike the couple below them, where “[T]he bridegroom’s three previous marriages ended in divorce.” Good luck with that, girlfriend. (It’s totally okay for me to say that! As the Times helpfully informed us four pages earlier, if you’ve had more than one failed marriage, “[s]omething must be wrong with you.”)

- Kathleen brings serious Ivy League cred to this union with her undergrad degree from Brown and J.D. from Harvard.

- John’s occupation is a bracing gust of salty air amid the fetid stench of lawyer-banker-analyst-manager-publisher-Cravath-Goldman-gunk that washes up on these pages every week. John is a bathymetrist. We had no idea what that was either, but Wikipedia informs us that bathymetry is “the study of underwater depth.” (The word is derived from the Greek βαθυς, “deep,” and μετρον, “measure.”)

Speaking of underwater stuff, LEWW was nerdily reading The Hunt for Red October the other night when we were assaulted by this bluebooking disaster in a memo to the fictional President from the fictional Attorney General:

There is a good deal of case law on this subject. One single example is Dalmas v. Stathos (84FSuff. 828, 1949 A.M.C. 770 [S.D.N.Y 1949])

FSuff.? That mangled cite could get even AlGo fired!

The Case Against:
- Kathleen was until last month a lawyer for the disabled at the Equal Rights Center, but the Times is silent on how she’s occupying her time now. Do good bathymetrists’ wives quit their jobs to concentrate on throwing lavish bathymetry soirees? Is she at home warming John’s flippers?

- Kathleen will continue to use her name professionally, forgoing the opportunity to be known as “[The Countess] Kathleen von Rosenberg.” This hints at a lack of vanity unseemly in a lawyer.

- John went to LSU. LSU may be tops in bathymetry, but its women’s basketball coach (1) recently resigned amid allegations of coach-on-player hanky-panky and (2) is named “Pokey.” There are sex scandals that reflect well on institutions, but this isn’t one of them.

3. Anne Healy and Robert Pollak

The Case:
- This couple’s resumes begin modestly, with his-‘n’-hers degrees from Hamilton College. But recently Anne and Robert have kicked it into high gear: She’s pursuing her M.B.A. at NYU, and he’s about to earn his J.D. from Fordham. And there’s a cherry on top: In October, Robert will join BigLaw behemoth Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. Skadden currently has only 16 associates with law degrees from Fordham (compare that with 82 from Harvard), so Robert must be a real star!

- These lovebirds had the good taste to submit a nice professional portrait, not one of those just-stumbled-home-from-Ozzfest mugshots so many couples settle for. Robert is giving the camera what we believe is commonly known as a “shit-eating grin.” It’s probably because he’s marrying such a fox!

The Case Against:
- We hope the newlyweds enjoy their honeymoon, because soon Robert will be lured from his bride’s loving embrace by that most cruel and cunning of mistresses, “the New York law firm.” We all know how this movie ends: with Charlize Theron in a mental asylum and Al Pacino singeing the wallpaper.

- Robert’s mom is an artist, business owner, and author of Soul Proprietor: 100 Lessons From a Lifestyle Entrepreneur. She was once “invited to the White House to decorate an egg.” With all this creative DNA, her son is trudging off to hamster-on-wheeldom at Skadden? Weak, Robby.

The Verdict:
Kathleen’s Harvard JD and John’s intriguing bathymetry gig nudge Team Walsh von Rosenberg into first place. Congratulations!