March 2008

Speaking of Penn Law School… Penn grad Anthony Ciolli, the former AutoAdmit.com executive, has gone from being a defendant to a plaintiff. He’s filed a civil action in Pennsylvania state court against the two Yale Law School “Jane Does” from the AutoAdmit case, their lawyers, and various other parties. We just got our hands on […]

A bit of follow-up on goings-on at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. First, in yesterday’s post, we predicted: “[E]xpect Dean Fitts to send out some vague email offering blanket reassurances, but declining to say more due to federal privacy law. That seems to be par for the course for these incidents.” Our prediction has […]

Some of you may be tired of our little Miami blackout caption contest. But we agree with the commenters who suggested that a contest with 20 entries was unwieldy. We’d like to get it right this time. Here’s what we’ve done. We’ve taken the top five vote getters — there was a clear drop-off after […]

Last year, we asked you whether work was busy at your firms, and found that patent attorneys were particularly busy nationwide, while associates in real estate and structured finance were pretty slow in many markets. In last week’s ATL / Lateral Link survey, we revisited the topic, and asked which practice areas are hottest (or […]

“That’s Wider, W-I-D-E-R. Got it, f**k face? You’re welcome.” We thought that this deposition was one of the more colorful ones out there. But it pales in comparison to the deposition described by Shannon Duffy in today’s Legal Intelligencer: A federal judge has levied sanctions of more than $29,000 on a lawyer and his client […]

* The battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, between two of the world’s most famous lawyers, will go on — perhaps all the way to the convention. [New York Times; Washington Post] * Could a Clinton-Obama ticket avoid the otherwise inevitable train wreck? [Politico] * Meanwhile, John McCain sews it up on the Republican side. […]

We tend to focus more on domestic legal news, but every now and then, we’ll make an exception. From the AFP: A Japanese pin-up model says that her big breasts have not only boosted her career — they also helped her overturn a court verdict. The bikini model, who goes by her professional name Serena […]

* So who’s presiding over the criminal trial of former Obama fundraiser Tony Rezko? None other than judicial hottie Amy St. Eve (N.D. Ill.) — who, coincidentally, pursued the Clintons as one of Ken Starr’s Whitewater prosecutors. [The Sleuth / Washington Post] * If you’re a Scrabulous addict wondering why a legal cloud still hovers […]

We’re a bit surprised that Judge William R. Wilson, Jr. (E.D. Ark.) has never been our Judge of the Day. He’s a pretty colorful character. How many federal judges openly embrace the “L” word (as in “liberal,” not the other L word)? Or raise mules in their spare time? (Judge Alex Kozinski (9th Cir.) raises […]

With apologies for the delay, here’s our promised update on the situation over at Dechert LLP. As we mentioned last Friday, back in this post (and its multiple updates), it looked like Dechert laid off 13 lawyers in its Finance and Real Estate practice (“FRE”). Then firm chairman Barton Winokur sent out this message, late […]

Tired of being motherf**king taped on your motherf**king plane? Then file a lawsuit over it — and win millions of dollars. From the AP: The owner of a air charter service was ordered to pay attorney Mark Geragos and an associate several million dollars for ordering the secret videotaping of Michael Jackson and the lawyers […]

The tipsters at Kirkland & Ellis who have complained about the gay cocktail party and the diversity networking forums would welcome this news, which comes from our home state. Reports Charles Toutant in the New Jersey Law Journal (subscription): Seton Hall University School of Law has suspended its “Partners in Excellence” minority scholarship program while […]

On Friday, February 22, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, L.P. (“MLBAM”) and the Major League Baseball Players Association (“MLBPA”) filed a petition for a writ of certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court (No. 07-1099), seeking to overturn the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling that the first amendment protects free use of baseball players’ names […]

Last year, the WSJ Law Blog posed this question: “Are law students emotional wrecks?” Their post generated hundreds of comments. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some law students have, in modern parlance, “issues.” The stress of law school may have a tendency to trigger meltdowns. See, e.g., here (University of Alabama law student who gave a […]

We received quite a few tips and comments after posting yesterday’s table of clerkship bonuses, so we have updated the table (four times) to reflect new information on Arnold & Porter, Covington & Burling, King & Spalding, Patterson Belknap, Wilson Sonsini, Debevoise, Katten Muchin, and Munger Tolles. We also updated the running table of maternity […]

* Two new SCOTUS rulings: some obscure-sounding tax decision, and a 4-4 ruling in a case against Pfizer, which leaves intact a Second Circuit decision allowing suits over the company’s Rezulin diabetes treatment to go forward. [SCOTUSblog; New York Times] * California Supreme Court to hear case on gay marriage ban. (Judge Janice Rogers Brown, […]

The source who sent this nominee our way wrote: “Combo of sex, jealousy, and hacking. Just another day in the WV bar.” From the Charleston Gazette: A Charleston lawyer could be suspended from the State Bar after admitting that he accessed another law firm’s computer system because he suspected his wife was having an affair. […]

* So what if they’re laying off — or, at the very least, reshuffling — some of their lawyers? At least Dechert is supportive of its bloggers. [Drug and Device Law] * Blog politics makes for strange bedfellows. Have Anthony Ciolli of AutoAdmit and the bloggers of Feministe found common ground? [Legal Satyricon] * This […]

Email screw-ups and law school listserves have provided us with tons of material in the past. Today’s cautionary tale comes to us from NYU Law School: “Reply all” has its pitfalls, but so does the “reply to” address. Yikes! [This student] was replying to an email from the professor sent out after the semester was […]

We have not forgotten last week’s promise of an ATL caption contest. To refresh your recollection, here’s the photo: Here’s the actual caption: Lawyers, from the left, Alan Lash, Justin Fienberg, and Alex Mendez, not lawyer, working on a project at Greenberg Traurig, on 27th floor of 1221 Brickell, went to lunch and found the […]