DING! F--.

XOXOHTH

In light of how obsessed AutoAdmit is with prestige, I'm surprised Ciolli didn't have an offer from a more prestigious law firm.

the votes in this post is a stark contrast to the Imus poll --- though both situations are similar (in fact, the Imus situation is actually worse, and thus more justified).

Surprised? GTO is just another example of why Penn is a festering TTT in decline.

DINGNOOFFERPWNED!

That firm is SO mediocre though. Seriously, It's like an insurance defense and coverage fiirm. They did him a favor.

On the Imus comparison: Don Imus's JOB was to offend.

Here, it is understandable that a law firm, with (controversy-shy) clients, would not want to be associated with a website like Autoadmit.

There's a world of difference between being a "shock jock" and a Biglaw associate.

AutoAdmit to GTO: "with friends like us, you won't need enemies."

sad

Ciolli offered to defer his starting date by a year. He must have savings or some other way to support himself in the meantime.

It really is a kind of drekky firm.

The kid is not bad-looking:

http://upenn.facebook.com/profile.php?id=612095&hiq=anthony%2Cciolli

He doesn't want to work there anyway, trust me.

According to that Facebook profile, he is a Havard Grad Student '08. Does he already have something lined up?

Charles DeWitt looks like Karl Rove.

1:56 - you have got to be kidding, he looks like my geeky 15 year old brother

this is fantastic news

this is fantastic news

1:51, we'd expect nothing less than mocking and derision from our peers at AutoAdmit if it were us who'd just gotten dinged. No quarter given, none expected.

What do I think?

WGWAG MOTHERFUCKER!!

Interesting to see what this does to the perception of EA, re: Vault peer rating, on-campus interviewing, etc. I wouldn't work for them, knowing that they'll throw a 3L under the bus this late for something like this.

It's great how Edwards Angell has a guy working for them who took sleeping pills, crashed his car and killed a person. Apparently running a message board is worse.

The only thing that could make this more totally awesome is if he sues the firm and they hire Zach Fasman for the litigation.

Are you kidding, Risk Averse? Anyone with the most minimal shred of sense and understanding of the legal market knew that Ciolli was seriously risking his career. I'm surprised he made it this long without getting his offer rescinded.

1:47: You're essentially saying that Imus was fired for doing his job --- and doing it well??? That simply doesn't make sense.

In any case, there's a clear difference between being "offense" and being a "bigot." Neither were his "job."

It's great how Edwards Angell has a guy working for them who took sleeping pills, crashed his car and killed a person. Apparently running a message board is worse.

Is that Facebook photo from prom or something? It looks like Ciolli is opening a limo door.

2:15: that EA waited this long to bring this up makes me think that Ciolli was surprised, too.

More importantly, most law students looking for jobs don't have "the most minimal shred of sense and understanding of the legal market." They just know that they don't want to work with a firm that could do something similar to them that late in the game.

Why do you think law firms started giving 'cold offers' to dinged summers? Hint: it wasn't to help the poor summers in their 3L job search. HTFH

wow, the sleeping pills story is crazy. this draws even more attention to it.

Dude had it coming. He decided to get involved with a free speech experiment in which he helped run an unmoderated message board. People posted insidious lies in the forum he hosted, and those lies have caused harm to the career prospects of innocent people. Now his career has been affected, too, because of what he allowed to happen to the careers of others. In what world is this not justice?

Can someone post a link to the xoxo thread that was the subject of the WaPo article? I want to see what was so bad

wgwag

Dude had it coming. He decided to get involved with a free speech experiment in which he helped run an unmoderated message board. People posted insidious lies in the forum he hosted, and those lies have caused harm to the career prospects of innocent people. Now his career has been affected, too, because of what he allowed to happen to the careers of others. In what world is this not justice?

i agree with 215
the firm should have rescinded the offer long long ago.

better late than never!

"wow, the sleeping pills story is crazy. this draws even more attention to it."

Sounds like a prime candidate for Google-bombing EA...

i agree with 215
the firm should have rescinded the offer long long ago.

better late than never!

This guy had plenty of notice that affiliation with this site was putting him in dangerous territory. He read the offensive posts, he got emails from the affected students - complaining about how they felt threatened and humiliated, and according to WSJ article, he was repeatedly warned by Penn officials that the site was harmful ("The Dean said he has had several conversations with Ciolli and has "pointed out time and again how hurtful these ad hominem attacks can be to individuals, and have asked him to delete threads." The effort, he noted, "has been largely unsuccessful."). I just don't see how this kid can argue that he was ambushed by the offer being rescinded. He knew that the posts might cause problems, but he chose to take that chance. He has to live with the consequences.

Do lawyers get fired for doing undesirably (yet perfectly legal) things all the time? Is this common in the law firm world?

Didn't the moderator of this message board "lose" his job for exercising his free speech rights?

This is really just stupid. They've penalized him not for his speech but for his ownership in a vehicle for the dissemination of free speech?

Do lawyers get fired for doing undesirable (yet perfectly legal) things all the time? Is this common in the law firm world?

2:37,

He wasn't penalized for owning anything. He was penalized for being associated with or failing to disassociate himself from racist, sexist, ---holes who threatened and defamed others.

Logic is our friend!

white girls with asian guys

So, Ciolli, a 3L, was fired and/or terminated by having his offer recinded by the Boston law firm of Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge LLP? The same Boston law firm of Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge LLP that boasts such accomplishments as work in the insurance and reinsurance fields, as well as being ranked as one of the "Most Active Law Firms" by DowJones Private Equity Analyst's recently released rankings for 2006? That very Edwards Angell Palmer and Dodge who continue to employ the drug taking killer Ki O? Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge, who associate knowingly and deliberately with a lawyer who runs down innocent tire changing men while high on pills and speeding in his Audi? THAT Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge?

This kid's an idiot. Anyone should have known he was going down for being anywhere close to affiliated with this msg board. He wasted his own education by staying with the thing and defending it.

By the logic of many posters here, Google employees should be denied future job opportunities because they help run a site that allows people to access racist and misogynistic content.

Ciolli never endorsed any of those views. As far as I can tell, the only view that he has consistently stood for was that of Mill's "marketplace of ideas."

what a shitty law firm. thats the best offer he could get from penn. He should have spent more time studying and less on idiotic web sites.

In assessing whether the decision to rescind the offer was justified, it is important for readers to know that Mr. Ciolli listed his affiliation with AutoAdmit on his resume. EAP&D hired Mr. Ciolli as a summer associate (and gave him an offer of full time employment) with full knowledge of his role at AutoAdmit.

Google allows people to get offensive information about themselves removed, which Ciolli refused to do: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals

That AutoAdmit was on his resume means nothing, except about Ciolli's audacious cluelessness. The firm probably may not have realized what AutoAdmit was until the Wapo article. Anyway, the law firm had a legitimate reason to be more concerned about its reputation once Ciolli started getting a lot of bad press this spring, regardless of what they knew when they gave him an offer.

I hope this is only the first for the assholes at AutoAdmit.com. They are truly the worst this world has to offer, and I hope all of them are ruined.

Sounds like Ciolli needs to give Reputation Defender a call. Wait, nevermind.

I hope this is only the first for the assholes at AutoAdmit.com. They are truly the worst this world has to offer, and I hope all of them are ruined.

Lat, you should know a thing or two about losing your job because of a website you run... what's your advice for AC?

Lat landed on his feet. He's more well-known and influential now than he was as some random AUSA in New Jersey. Random AUSAs don't get profiled in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Legal Times, etc.

Lat probably makes about as much money too. Government lawyer salaries suck.

As for Ciolli, I'm sure he will find some firm that is willing to hire him. He will do just fine.

Maybe Ciolli can get a job with a very pro-free-speech firm that specializes in First Amendment law. Like the firm of Martin Garbus, representing Don Imus?

4:13--
Keep dreaming. This kid is radioactive. No one wants to get negative coverage of an associate hire.

He's radioactive now.

Will he be in a few weeks?

I'd say he is going to be radioactive for up to several years. And what happens when the Yale kids ship their Anthony Ciolli dossier to every character & fitness committee in the country?

He'll have less trouble passing C&F than Adriana Dominguez.

why the vitriol towards xoxo? i'm a fairly liberal, well-adjusted, gainfully employed associate at a credible firm and i post there regularly. i never post racist or homophobic drivel.

for someone to say i should have my life ruined because i post there reminds me of all the great american witchhunts whether for servants of the devil, communists, or whatever the hated group of the day is. robert penn warren once said the worst thing about america was its idea of an "easy millenialism"--that small ultimately insignificant events would fix everything. the xoxo furor reminds me of the inverse of that proposition.

It is really going to suck for him to be starting out as an insurance salesman in Allentown with $150k in debt for a degree he can't use from the "other" professional school at Penn. His frank comments to the WSJ Blog suggest he is finally waking up to the reality he has destroyed his career.

I'm not sure the C&F dossier could possibly contain anything damning in the eyes of a C&F committee. I don't think the bar will be Ciolli's problem.

Well said Anonymous at 4:36.

The problem is that many people conflate the few offensive posters with the majority of good, helpful posters.

4:36--
First, your comment is likely BS XO trolling. Second, if you post there, it shows a lack of judgment even if you stay away from the racist crap. Third, no one is suggesting a casual non-racist, non-sexist, non-abusive XO poster should suffer career consequences. This kid RAN THE XO SITE. Big difference.

4:37: titcr. C&F is not a popularity contest, and what AC did is not within the scope of things C&F considers relevant to whether someone should be admitted. End of story.

Getting hired again, however... that's another story.

Check EAPD's auto industry practice group. Somebody actually wrote this with a straight face.

http://www.eapdlaw.com/services/serviceDetail.aspx?firmService=178

What a ridiculously and thoroughly petty profession, in every way.

If ever I felt regret for not pursuing a legal career, that has dissipated entirely.

This means that Lat & company may be dinged from future employment because of the idiotic comments allowed, even encouraged, on this message board.

BS xoxo trolling? Please. I know who I am. Unless you believe that the owners of public streets should be strung up if they allow KKK members to march on them, you should be jumping to Ciolli's defense.

This says something really sad about the state of free speech in this country.

4:51: hold it right there, buddy. The state (owner of public streets) has to let the KKK march. They're blameless. But the bar at the end of the march? Should they be strung up for letting the KKK have a cold one in their *private* establishment? Yes. And any *private* enterprise, should the owner be able to DING an employee who also happens to be a KKK member? Of course they should.

Free speech is only free from State censure: everything else is private action. And yes, I know that there's things like anti-discrimination law which undercuts that statement; but it still stands as a basic tenet.

4:51,

No, but if someone permits the Klan to continue burning crosses on their property, then I will consider that someone a complete and utter asshole and someone I don't want in my employ.

4:51,

And, since Google indexes, hosts (in the form of their cached pages), and allows people to easily access racist material. I think that all the employees of Google should also be publicly ostracized and humiliated. Any one who helps aids in the free flow of information, especially offensive content (i.e., autoadmit and Google), should be stopped. It does not matter that they do not explicitly support this content.

Don't worry, it's o.k., I'm not the government.

5:12, if you think that line of argument's gonna do anything to help rehabilitate Ciolli's reputation, you've got another think coming.

"This says something really sad about the state of free speech in this country."

What you're forgetting is that, in addition, FREE SPEECH = a firm's decision to rescind an offer of employment to someone who was complicit with the spreading of vile and false information about other members of the legal profession.

Ciolli can run a web site that can say whatever it wants. And a law firm can decide not to associate with him because of it (putting aside prohibited discriminatory hiring practices). End of story.

clearly the firm CAN do what it's doing. that doesn't mean it should. obviously the first amendment doesn't force them to hire ciolli. but i'd also like to think that people care enough about free speech to not hang a guy because a small cadre of trolls on a board he partially runs saying racists, homophobic, and occasionally libelous things.

what's sad is that people don't seem to care about preserving a free market place of ideas. such attitudes are the driving force of the anti-PC backlash bubbling up at places like xoxo and throughout the pop culture.

anyone else notice his facebook profile lists him as a Harvard grad student '08. Think he's doing an LLM? Or any other 1 year degree solely designed to get the Harvard name?

Is it now time to start the deathwatch for the Auto Admit message board?

Nope.

It will go nowhere.

But, it does need to change.

Exactly how, I do not know.

how about hiring a moderator?

5:55 anon, I know he had or was getting a Harvard Extension School degree. He posted about it on autoadmit.

I love how Brian Leiter is staying above the fray and isn't even posting about this development. Totally ignoring someone is the ultimate in condescention.

I would argue that correcting someone's bad spelling is the ultimate in "condescention."

I feel kind of sorry for Ciolli right now, but I'm glad this is happening. He has been a blight on Penn Law. Too bad Ciolli was too stubborn to see that he's been digging his own grave for three years.

5:34, Ciolli took down certain threads when it suited him, especially ones that were unflattering to him. This behavior doesn't really jibe with the "1st Amendment Absolutist Martyr" theory.

@ 5:34

I think the several posts after yours further refute the point you're trying to make. This kid wasn't some kind of 1st Amendment champion; he removed posts he didn't like, but left the misogynistic ones up (and stubbornly refused to take them down when confronted with why they were a problem).

And your argument, if it can be called that, is a tad circular. As you argue, the firm CAN rescind the offer, but that doesn't mean it should. (I disagree with you on that point).

But take it a step further -- free speech and free will means Ciolli CAN support the posting of misogynistic (and false) information about women. But that doesn't mean he should have. But he did. And in our society, rational people tend to want to disassociate themselves with misogynists and liars, especially if there's money at stake.

Make no mistake about it -- the firm has its own interest in mind; it's not necessarily taking a moral stance here. If Ciolli had proven himself a brilliant legal mind and was bringing in tons of cash for the firm, perhaps he still has a job. But as it is, he's just a law school graduate who has displayed poor judgment (at best). From a business standpoint, he's expendable.

So, in summary: the firm CAN and SHOULD rescind the offer.

Looks like Leiter has gotten in on the fun after all:
http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2007/05/wall_street_jou.html

And why shouldn't he? He has been an outspoken critic of Auto Admit for two years, which led to Ciolli and Cohen and sliming him here:
http://www.autoadmit.com/leiter.html

I'd say Leiter won this one big time, guys.

Now the self-proclaimed "Most Prestigious Law School Discussion Board in the World" is run by two insurance salesmen. Ouch!

Do you think Ciolli will be condemned to the life of an insurance salesman?

Has anyone considered that at least part of the reason EA revoked AC's offer is what he POSTED using his widely known moniker, not just the fact that he affiliated himself with xo as a "Chief Education Director"? There are many threads, especially since his resignation, in which he says he has no sympathy for the women whose reputations were harmed by xo postings. If I were a managing partner at a firm, I wouldn't want an a**hole like that--who has no sympathy for a colleague who receives abuse unprovoked--working at my firm either.

I commend Edwards Angell.

Ciolli exercised his freedom of speech...

and Edwards & Angell exercised its freedom to evaluate his qualifications accordingly.

AnonAnon 9:50, your point would be well taken if it were true. But EA's decision was based solely on the Washington Post article, which did not quote the guy's posts.

One could say he deserved to be fired but got fired for the wrong reason.

To 2:37pm:

"Didn't the moderator of this message board "lose" his job for exercising his free speech rights?"

Umm, no. He was penalized because the "free speech" turned into sexual threats and vicious attacks on innocent individuals who didn't even know the website existed.

And when those individuals attempted get help from GTO, GTO denied them any help, regardless of how offensive the comments were or how distressed the uninvolved individuals were.

Do you honestly call that "exercising free speech rights"? Give me a break.

It is truly scary to think that a future lawyer like Ciolli couldn't see the risk of associating his full name with an organization that sexually threatens, tarnishes and damages innocent people's reputations.

If he couldn't see that, he's not suited to be a lawyer. And he's obviously not that bright either, if he couldn't figure out how wrong the whole thing was.

Whoever thinks that sexual threats and attacks on innocent people should be defended as "free speech" is an ignorant fool who doesn't belong in the legal field.

PS. By the way, GTO = Anthony Ciolli's screename on autoadmit-- for those who don't frequent autoadmit.

Regarding the link to Ciolli's Facebook page (posted above): are there students at Penn who are really his Facebook friends?!

1:49 AM is Jill Fillipovic. It takes her a page to explain a simple concept, and cannot understand the difference between a speaker and a forum.

To lathropeamt:

First of all, I am not Jill Fillipovic.

Second, I did not explain a simple concept. I made several statements.

And last: I'm not sure what you mean about the difference between a speaker and a forum. But maybe you could explain that yourself in 2 or 3 words, since you seem to criticize anything that doesn't take that short to explain.

Your post was 1 sentence and stated (a) a lie about a poster's identity, and (b) something that made no sense whatsoever. Smart!

03:40 AM is Anthony Ciolli. He always makes reference to "his point" but never gets around to--is too arrogant to--prove it. He also personally attacks people and/or criticizes their grammar when he can't come up with supporting evidence for his points.

4:37, 9:21, 9:24: I thought Ciolli's partner (Cohen) was the insurance salesman. Is Ciolli also a peddler of insurance products?

EAP&D's position is understandable and justified. They don't want to be associated with the site and what goes on there. This is the same reason xoxo has so few advertisers, despite it's heavy traffic. EAP&D might have been willing to turn a blind eye (or more likely, was never aware of the site's content), but once the xoxo made the front page of a national newspaper I think they had to distance themselves.

From the exerpts of the firm's first letter to Ciolli, it sounds like they were really fishing for him to resign. It's too bad that no one called (off the record of course) to make that more clear. Having his offer rescinded will make it very hard for Ciolli to ever find work at a large law firm.

I do feel awful for him , through. I read xoxo when I was applying to law school and again when I was interviewing. Despite all the horrible things that go on on there, it's also one of the best sources of information on law school admissions and big firm interviewing. And a lot of it is information you just can't find anywhere else.

But I think the analogy to google is flawed. No one associates racism, sexism or tubgirl with google. But anyone who spends more than half an hour looking at the site associates these things closely with xoxo.

Given its baggage, I suspect that very few of of the regular posters on xoxo would want to be publically associated with the site. So it shouldn't be a real surprise that a law firm wouldn't want to be associated with it either.

Maybe.....just maybe.....there's now an associate opening for me at EA/Boston!

Ciolli deserves what he got. Why would ANY law firm want a new hire who publically encourages sexual harassment and racism? I hope he never gets a legal job.

Any updates here?