Last month, Kevin Heinz and Jill Peterson got married in Minnesota. They posted their wedding march video to YouTube earlier this month and it’s gone viral. We’ve been looking for an excuse to post the hip hop wedding sensation, and a kind tipster furnished us with the excuse, telling us the somersaulting groom is heading to law school next month.
The couple swapped “Canon in D major” for Chris Brown’s “Forever:”
Their only misstep: Choosing a song by someone convicted of domestic abuse. Find out to which law school Heinz is heading this fall, after the jump.
Yesterday we heard from legal ethics experts about whether Elizabeth Wurtzel’s referring to herself as a “lawyer,” despite not having passed the bar yet, could get her in trouble. The two we consulted, Professors Steven Lubet and Stephen Gillers, did not see it as a big deal.
There’s an interesting follow-up over at Gawker, which obtained the following comment from La Wurtzel herself:
This is my understanding: if you graduate from law school/receive a JD, you are a lawyer; if you are licensed, you are an attorney. That’s what I’ve always been told.
Not too many nice things to say about the Bar Exam. Every year, some very gifted people fail it (Hillary Clinton, Kathleen Sullivan of Stanford Law School)–and every year, a lot of real idiots pass it. Hard to know what to make of that ;-)
Regarding Wurtzel’s understanding of the difference between the terms “lawyer” and “attorney,” other folks have been told that too. See the comments to this post from last year on the subject.
But there is disagreement. Read more, and take a READER POLL, after the jump.
The current online front page of the NYT weddings section is worth a click. The head blurb leads with “Despite their differences in age . . . ” underneath a picture of a 20-something bride embracing a “groom” who appears to be about nine years old. “Differences in age,” indeed. Somebody alert Morality in Media! (Of course, when you click on the link, you learn that the real groom is 40-something. Still yucky, but not illegal.)
Our spotlighted weddings this week feature couples who are well-matched not only in age, but in accomplishments. Here they are:
It is not unusual for some top firms to decline to interview at Yale Law School. The school is so small, and quite frankly some firms know that they are not going to attract Yale talent.
That said, in this market some firms are unsure about what to do with fall recruiting. Is pulling out of Yale this year an indication of a firm’s larger decision to scale back its 2010 summer program? A tipster has done some legwork for Above the Law readers:
Yalies got a fall interview program pep-talk/preparation video yesterday. According to the CDO, the firms participating plan to have “robust summer programs” but “smaller” than in the past. Nothing too surprising….
Interesting to you guys will be the top firms who are NOT participating in the fall interview program at Yale. I went through Vault up to 50. If firms with New York offices won’t send people on an hour-and-a-half train ride to New Haven, even just for show, they must really be hurting.
Check after the jump for the list of Vault 50 law firms that won’t be doing OCI at Yale.
All the attention recently showered upon Harvard celebrity professor Henry Louis Gates since his arrest earlier this month has resulted in the discovery of tax problems at a foundation he created and oversees.
Read more and comment over at Going Concern. Henry Louis Gates Can’t Catch a Break [Going Concern]
It seems like the summer associates just arrived, yet many are already packing up their Biglaw bags to head back to school. This may be due in part to shorter summer associate programs this year, but that’s besides the point.
Summer associates departing the offices of Ropes & Gray have big smiles plastered on their faces. The firm has delivered good news, say tipsters:
During the week or two leading up to the end of the summer program, the Partner in charge of the summers met with all the SAs for reviews. In these reviews, ALL SAs got offers. There is not even a buzz about anyone getting no-offered or cold offered!
We checked in with the firm. A spokesperson put a very slight damper on the excitement, but also delivered some good deferral stipend news for 2010 law grads, after the jump.
I hope you all enjoyed your bar exam day one morning session. For your lunch break, I have a real-life legal question I just picked up off of the street, standing in front of the Breaking Media offices in Nolita:
You are standing outside your office on a crowded street. Construction workers, residents, and even some clergymen regularly pass by. While smoking a cigarette and minding your own business, a local walks by and asks you for a light. You are about to comply with the request, but the object the local presses to his lips does not appear to be a store-bought cigarette; rather, it appears to be a joint.
You sheepishly ask, “Is that a hand-rolled cigarette?” The local replies “Naw man, it’s the good s***. You wanna hit?”
You shake your head “no,” then scan the street for police officers, but all you see are six-foot blonds entering the casting agency next to your building. Eventually, the local asks again for your lighter.
Should you give it to him? Why or why not? Could you be subject to criminal liability for doing so?
I’m interested to hear what you think. Check back here later — this post will be updated — for my solution. UPDATE on my solution, after the jump.
Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the Second Circuit won approval from the Senate Judiciary Committee just now.
The vote was 13 – 6. All 12 Democrats, plus Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, voted for her.
She’ll now move on to the Senate floor for a vote of the full chamber.
Congratulations, Judge Sotomayor. Senate Judiciary Committee votes to confirm Sotomayor [CNN] Earlier: Prior coverage of Sonia Sotomayor
We’ve covered the legislative twists and turns of same-sex marriage fairly closely here at ATL. But there was one notable court case we missed back in March.
We thought Dr. Li-Ann Thio’s description of anal sex as “shoving a straw up your nose to drink” was graphic, but this article by the Register on attempted same-sex female marital rape is even more explicit:
A Massachusetts woman has appeared in court on a domestic assault and battery rap after allegedly attempting to impregnate her wife with a plastic syringe containing her brother’s sperm.
Stephanie K Lighten, 26, of Pittsfield, was reportedly “all liquored up” when she made unwelcome advances towards her other half, 33-year-old Jennifer Lighten. Jennifer explained to officers that Stephanie “had been talking about trying to impregnate her for some time”, and that she’d accordingly armed herself with a “turkey baster and her brother’s semen in a sealed container”.
According to Lez Get Real, there were no rape charges per Jennifer’s request, just a domestic assault and battery charge.
Apparently these lovebirds were able to put the turkey baster incident behind them. We checked in with the Central Berkshire District Court and found out the case was dismissed in April. US woman attacks missus with sperm-filled syringe
We all know gunners who spit hot fire at professors. But we rarely see gunners who spit at the police. According to the Charlottesville police, one UVA law student can roll both ways.
From Newsplex:
A Charlottesville woman is facing felony assault charges after an altercation with a police officer on Thursday.
Elisabeth Epps, 29, is accused of spitting on a police officer early Thursday morning in the Market Street parking garage.
It appears that initially she was trying to keep her saliva safe within the confines of her car, but the police were having none of it:
Charlottesville Police say friends of Epps were trying to get her out of a locked, parked car after a night of drinking. When Epps would not respond to continued police instructions, officers broke the back window to get her.
After police removed Epps from the car, she continued kicking and screaming and then spit in an officer’s face.
Epps is actually a little bit famous in UVA circles. More details after the jump.
* Thanks to the Governator’s intervention, the California Supreme Court decided yesterday that paralyzed UC Davis Law grad, Sara Granda, will be able to take the bar exam today. We hope she studied. [Sacramento Bee]
* Sotomayor vote today at 10 a.m. [Washington Post]
* Massachusetts college students being tried for illegal music downloading got bad news about “fair use” yesterday. [National Law Journal]
* Guys in my high school used to bribe, intimidate and silence witnesses in order to defend their drug kingpin clients all the time. It was kind of a big deal. [New York Daily News]
* The Michael Jackson death investigation is shaping up into a murder case, and his doctor is at its center. [Wall Street Journal]
* Sarah Palin hates yellow journalists. [CNN]
Here are some last-minute tips for those of you taking the bar exam this week:
1. Get a good night’s sleep.
2. Set out your clothes for tomorrow, and everything else you’ll need for the exam, before you go to bed.
3. Relax; don’t dwell on the bar exam horror stories. They’ll just freak you out. So many things lie beyond your control — e.g., earthquakes — so there’s no sense in worrying about them.
* Just for Captain Canuck, we acknowledge that the differences between Canadian law and American law are about more than what you can legally do with a moose. [Legal Lad]
* The movement to ban anonymous commenters failed to gain another follower, but anonymous insults are still pretty wussy. [Simple Justice]
* The fair use doctrine is dissected in this podcast. [Intellectual Property Colloquium]
* Some dude hung out a shingle — on Craigslist — and now he’s making all the unemployed attorneys who are sitting around drinking until the economy turns around look bad. In middle school, this kid would have a hard time finding someone to sit with at lunchtime. [ABA Journal]
* Harry Markopolos — the Madoff Ponzi scheme investigator — fulfilled a mother’s worst nightmare about clean underwear. [Going Concern]
* A Blawg Review from a land down-under. You better run, you better take cover.
[Duncan Bucknell Company via Blawg Review]
DLA Piper, one of the biggest law firms in the country (and the world), has added its voice to the changing nature of Biglaw summer programs.
In a letter sent to law school deans and career service officers (and obtained by Above the Law), DLA Piper announced it was deferring its current summers and delaying recruiting for new summers.
For current summers, the program is similar to the one Weil Gotshal announced earlier this month. The earliest 2009 summer associates will be able to start is January 2011, and they will be encouraged to take a deferral and not start until January 2012. Here’s how the DLA memo puts it:
One result of these deferrals is that our current summer associates would start at the firm at approximately the same time as the Fellowship participants from our class of 2009, creating another potential class that may exceed demand. While we proactively reduced the size of our summer class for 2009 to half the size of the Summer 2008 class, the start date changes require that we adjust the start dates for this class as well. We have therefore made the decision to make offers to this Summer’s class in generally the same manner as the last class. We will make offers to our summer associates of 2009 soon after the program ends, and the offers will be for a January 2011 start date. We expect that some portion of the class will be encouraged to participate in a Fellowship program during 2011, further deferring the expected start date to January 2012 for some. We plan to keep these offers open until the NALP deadline of November 15.
That is bad news for summers that are currently at DLA, but it also means that summers who want to go to DLA will have to wait their turn.
More details after the jump.
Here’s a story that might interest the “legalize cannabis” crowd. From our friends at Fashionista:
This is turning into the summer of the fashion crowd running into trouble with the law.
Last week, a major drug bust went down in Ralph Lauren’s tony New Canaan, CT store. The stock manager, 34-year-old Ricky Sullins, was arrested for accepting a FedEx package loaded with 14 pounds of marijuana. FedEx contacted the police before delivering the package since they could smell the drugs through the box and an undercover cop posed as the delivery man.
Fourteen pounds is enough to get an entire polo team high — including the horses. Since it involved a large quantity of pot moving through the state of Connecticut, we wonder if U. Conn. law student John Belanger was involved.
If Sullins is looking for representation, might we suggest Allison Margolin, aka L.A.’s Dopest Attorney? She’s a California attorney, but perhaps she can get admitted pro hac.
To read more and comment, click on the link below. Pot and Polos [Fashionista]
To those of you getting ready to take the bar exam this week, here’s some reassurance for you: even if you fail, life goes on. Consider this list of famous failures, people who didn’t pass the bar exam but went on to tremendous success anyway.
And here’s another boldface name who failed the bar: Elizabeth Wurtzel, the bestselling and critically acclaimed author, who graduated from Yale Law School last year and sat for the New York bar in July 2008 (and maybe in February 2009 too). In an interview with the New York Observer, Wurtzel shrugged off her bar failure.
In a more recent interview with Bitter Lawyer, Wurtzel once again breezed past that fact. From Gawker:
Wurtzel granted an interview recently to Bitter Lawyer, talking about how much she loves the law and how awesome it is being a lawyer and working at David Boies’s law firm. Except she’s not a lawyer! At least not in New York, where it seems to be unlawful to claim to be a lawyer if you haven’t passed the bar exam. Which she hasn’t.
In the Gawker post, John Cook parses Wurtzel’s Bitter Lawyer interview against the backdrop of New York rules and statutes regulating the legal profession. Cook suggests that Wurtzel describing herself as a lawyer violates New York Judiciary Law § 478, “Practicing or appearing as attorney-at-law without being admitted and registered.”
We forwarded the Gawker link to a pair of legal ethics experts, Professor Steven Lubet of Northwestern and Professor Stephen Gillers of NYU, and asked them to assess the situation.
Read what they had to say, after the jump.
The Cabbed Caller, who reported Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. to the police, now disputes the police report about what she told them in her 9-1-1 call. Instead, the caller — who has now been repeatedly identified as Lucia Whalen — contends that she did not know the race of the two people attempting to enter the house. According to the Boston Globe:
Lucia Whalen, saw the backs of both men and did not know their race when she called 911, said Wendy J. Murphy, a Boston lawyer from New England School of Law. Whalen phoned police, Murphy said, because she was aware of recent break-ins in the area.
Well, I guess I was wrong. On Friday, I questioned whether or not the woman acted appropriately in sicking the Cambridge police on Professor Gates while he was attempting to enter his house. Previously, I questioned whether Gates’s blackness prevented this woman from assessing the situation rationally.
Assuming the woman is telling the truth, then you can’t really fault her. You can fault the Cambridge police, for injecting race into a call where race wasn’t even mentioned.
More from Whalen’s side of the story, plus the 9-1-1 tape, after the jump.
If some law firms are not willing to invite members of the class of 2010 to work for them over the summer, why should banks?
We just received word that Citigroup has decided to cancel its 2010 Summer Program for 2L summer associates. A tipster sent us this email that students at Penn Law School received this morning:
Dear Students,
I regret to inform you that Citigroup is not having a summer class for the Summer of 2010 and has cancelled all of it on campus interviews. Your bid will not be lost as we will consolidate it before we process the interview schedules. I apologize for any inconvenience this cancellation may cause you. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you need further assistance.
All the best,
Did you know that Citigroup got legal talent fresh off of the law school tree? Well, they don’t anymore.
Let’s look at what the program used to be after the jump.
As you may have noticed, we generally moderate comments relating to a certain rather vulgar meme (and sometimes we ban IP addresses too).
If you don’t know what we’re talking about, then skip this post — and consider yourself lucky. But if you miss being able to invoke the ass lobster meme, then you’re in luck.
We are offering “ass lobster amnesty” in the comments to this post. Get it all out of your system now, since we will continue to zap “ass lobster” comments on other posts.
To inspire you, we took some photos this weekend of associate editor Kashmir Hill, posing with a big-ass lobster (five pounds).
Slideshow after the jump.
Morris Manning has decided to cut salaries. Given the decisions of other prominent firms with large offices in Atlanta, this news alone is not that surprising. Morris Manning had been paying $145,000 in Atlanta.
But the pay cuts at Morris Manning are not based on hours or “performance.” Instead, the firm is cutting salaries based on practice groups. As we understand it, Morris Manning is giving a 15% salary cut to associates in the real estate, commercial lending, and general corporate practice groups. Everybody else will receive a 10% pay cut.
Tipsters report that initially, associates in real estate, lending, and corporate were looking at a 20% pay cut. But it looks like the firm reversed course on Friday after they decided to spread the pain around by taking the 10% bite out of the rest of the associates. Update (6:50): Morris Manning spokespeople got back to us and clarified the situation. Apparently, associates in the the slowest practices already received a 20% pay cut earlier this year. When the firm decided to make a 10% across the board pay up, the firm changed the pay cut on the slow practice groups to 10% (making for the average of 15% percent that many of our sources reported). So now, all the associates in every group are looking at a 10% cut in base pay going forward.
Behind the veil of ignorance, this plan is probably more fair than making a deeper cut in practice groups that have been hardest hit by the recession. But — assuming that the three practice groups taking the larger pay cut are indeed slower than the rest — is it fair for busy associates in other practice areas to shoulder part of the burden?
The firm did not respond to our request for comment. But you can weigh in with your thoughts in our reader poll, after the jump.
In 2009, a small group of Harvard Law School students noticed an absurd monopoly in the bar prep space, held by an unchallenged leader with a non-evolving product. In response, these students teamed up with Harvard Law alumni to launch BarMax on January 14, 2010.
The mission: democratize bar prep by embracing new technologies to provide the very best bar exam review courses at a fraction of the cost normally associated with these courses.
Since then, with the encouragement of thousands of students and an unwavering commitment to their success, BarMax has established itself as a comprehensive alternative to the stagnant, over-priced status quo.
As we continue to expand, we do not want to lose sight of the basic premises that led us to create BarMax in the first place. If you are a law student who believes that there is something fundamentally wrong with being forced to take out yet another loan to pay for a $4,000 bar exam prep course, you are not alone.
Ed. note: This post is authored by Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney of Kinney Recruiting, sponsor of the Asia Chronicles. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates and partners in Asia than any other firm in the past five years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com
Happy Chinese New Year! We were extremely busy the past few months, including most of our US based team working from our Hong Kong offices during November and December.
As a follow up from our recent post, which listed our 62 US associate and counsel placements in Asia last year (vast majority in HK / China), please note that thus far in January ’12, we have already made seven US associate and counsel placements in Asia. This is an especially impressive number, considering the biglaw lateral hiring market in Asia is down right now (see state of the market brief overview below). These new placements are of new hires in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai, who were interviewing with their new firm for a month or more and they are spread out among different practice areas, including project finance, litigation, fund formation, M&A and cap markets. We are close on four additional new associate placements, in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai, that we expect to close soon. We do not discuss partner placements in these articles, but the pace of partner recruitment in Asia (a large part of our business) has continued.
Hedge Fund In-House Openings in Hong Kong
We are seeing a small run of new in-house openings in Hong Kong at hedge funds. We are currently filling three different in-house positions at three different hedge funds in Hong Kong, two of these searches we are handling on an exclusive basis. All three will most likely be filled by a US associate, with about 4 to 6 years of experience. Mandarin not required. Candidates from NYC and London will be considered, but at one of these funds the new hire will likely come from Hong Kong / China or Singapore (with HK being the strong preference).
Please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com if you are interested in these hedge fund openings. As you probably would expect, the competition for these spots will be fierce and the funds will be very selective when choosing which candidates to interview.
Continue reading “(Future) Law Student of the Day: Hip hop groom Kevin Heinz”
All the attention recently showered upon Harvard celebrity professor Henry Louis Gates since his 
I hope you all enjoyed your bar exam day one morning session. For your lunch break, I have a real-life legal question I just picked up off of the street, standing in front of the 
Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the Second Circuit won approval from the Senate Judiciary Committee just now.
Here are some last-minute tips for those of you taking the bar exam this week:
Here’s a story that might interest the “legalize cannabis” crowd. From our friends at 
As you may have noticed, we generally moderate comments relating to a certain 
