Legal Eagle Wedding Watch: Couple of the Year! (Plus New January Couples)


LEWW congratulates Caroline Nyenke and LaRue Robinson, who narrowly edged out Tracy Zuckerman and Ryan Van Grack in Couple of the Year voting to take the 2009 crown. Unfortunately, we have no trophy to award them, but maybe someone will be moved by this honor to buy Caroline and LaRue that cutlery set they still need.
On to our remaining January couples:

1. Chingwin Pei and Adam Pyonin
2. Emily Scharfman and David Menchel
3. Michelle Ko and Tony Wong

Read all about these lawyer newlyweds, after the jump.



1. Chingwin Pei and Adam Pyonin
(Buy them a cutlery set.)
The Case:
– Both halves of this couple work at San Francisco law firms. Chingwin is an associate at Smithline Jha, a small technology transaction firm that touts its novel subscription fee model. Adam is an associate at Townsend and Townsend and Crew.
The Case Against:
– There’s a significant prestige disparity in their educational backgrounds; the bride’s Stanford / Harvard, and the groom is Wash U / Duke. We have nothing against the marriage, of course — but it’ll be hard on their kids, not being fully accepted by either community.

2. Emily Scharfman and David Menchel
(Buy them a dinner plate.)
The Case:
– This bride and groom met at Latham & Watkins’s New York office, where the bride is an associate in the insolvency division. The groom was an associate in Latham’s M&A unit until last March. The NYT doesn’t comment, of course, on the circumstances on his departure — or how he’s spending his time now.
– They both have law degrees from NYU. She graduated cum laude from Yale; he was magna at Penn.
The Case Against:
– The bride’s mother is a vice president at Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. Pfizer develops and manufactures life-saving medicines, and therefore it is evil and must be stopped. Or something like that.

3. Michelle Ko and Tony Wong
(Buy them a salad spinner.)
The Case:
– This bride and groom both have law degrees from Columbia, and the groom also earned a MBA there. She was magna at Brown; he went to college in Australia.
– She’s the associate general counsel for an equipment finance company, while he’s an associate director at UBS.
The Case Against:
– Michelle and Tony’s website has all the details about their elaborate tea ceremony and nine-course banquet, but the NYT write-up omits all that, mentioning only that they were married at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau and that a clerk officiated.
The Verdict:
– None of these couples really jumps out at us as having particularly impressive or interesting jobs, or having remarkable looks (bad or good). Therefore, as with so much in the legal industry, this contest comes down to a mathematical question of educational prestige. Based on the latest scientifically infallible US News scores, Columbia + Columbia has a score of 176 and therefore wins by the narrowest of margins over Harvard + Duke (175) and NYU + NYU (174). Congratulations, Team Ko-Wong1

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