May 2010

The Constitution does not specify any particular professional or educational requirements for serving as a justice of the high court.

* Working overtime will kill you. [Boston Globe] * No more ethnic studies in Arizona? Cool, I thought European history was boring anyway. [New York Times] * Fewer birther requests in Hawaii? Cool, I thought Freedom of Information requests weren’t at all that important to our democracy anyway. [Washington Post] * The fate of Law […]

Remember Kaavya Viswanathan? She’s the Harvard graduate who, while still in high school, landed a two-book deal worth a reported $500,000. The first book, a young adult / chick-lit novel entitled How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, was published in April 2006, during Viswanathan’s sophomore year at Harvard. And then […]

* Fortune’s epic failure at being thankful for a favor. Or: Fortune’s epic failure at threatening copy”write” infringement. [TechCrunch] * Hey Law Revue types, get paid for your videos (if you win). [ACS Constitutional Video Contest] * Starved of case opinions from Kagan, we’ve devolved into trying to make judgments based on her sarcastic notes […]

How much would you pay to go see graduation at New York Law School? Nothing? Don’t be so sure. What if I asked: how much would you pay to go see a very slow moving trainwreck where you had no moral or ethical duty to save any of the passengers? Ah ha, see, you’d pay […]

Students are expected to become completely familiar with and prepared to discuss in class the blog “Above the Law.” — From the description for “Law Firms and Legal Careers,” a University of Michigan Law course taught by Kirkland & Ellis of counsel Karl Lutz UPDATE / CORRECTION: According to Lutz, the course description on the […]

We’ve written before about how cheerleading for football teams is a possible career for J.D.s, but what about coaching football teams? A Detroit Lions assistant secondary coach, Daron Roberts, has done just that. The Harvard Law graduate and former Biglaw attorney is coaching in the NFL, notwithstanding the fact that he had no prior coaching […]

You’d think those in the law would know by now not to send out embarrassing emails. But a Federalist Society officer at the University of Michigan Law School, whose name we’ve replaced with a pseudonym, seems oblivious. Apparently, Fed Soc served up some E-coli tainted lettuce at a recent lunch: Subject: [lawopen] Fed Soc Lunch/ […]

While there are a few offbeat Biglaw firms out there (think Venable and rooftop bocce ball), the quirkiest firms tend to be the small ones. Childress Duffy Goldblatt is a litigation shop that does insurance recovery work. Its Chicago office just moved to a new location where it’s rolling out new perks. One quirky perk? […]

“We’d all be a lot happier if we had some romancing foreplay pre-trial and left the rough stuff for trial,” said Ariana Tadler, a partner in the New York office Milberg LLP. That quote came from an article published yesterday entitled, Show Us the Love to Avoid Discovery Fights, Attorneys Urge, from Leigh Jones of […]

Are you tired of reading about lawyers and law students struggling under massive educational loans? The debt-saddled law student has become something of a walking cliché — and the stereotype is not universally true. According to the 2009 Law School Survey of Student Engagement (p. 14), between 10 and 15 percent of full-time law students […]

A week and a half ago, we ran a story about a student who was soliciting donations so she could go to UNC Law School without incurring student debt. She dreamed a dream, but the tigers come at night. The would-be law student, Sarah Allen, was ripped apart in the press, and now wants no […]

* New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo is keeping banks’ lawyers busy. [New York Times] * Akin Gump senior counsel and former Clinton adviser Vernon Jordan had a star turn on the Good Wife. [Washington Post] * Defendants in the Robert Wone murder trial prefer not to be judged by a jury of their peers. […]

Are profits per partner the appropriate metric to measure law firm success? It’s been a long time since firms seriously looked at the question. I didn’t know my Skadden from my Sullivan back when American Lawyer founder Steve Brill first started shining a light on the black box of top American law firms back in […]

* Nate Silver, already one of the best writers/thinkers/statisticians alive, has totally outdone himself with this one. He has come up with a new stat: Value Over Replacement Justice. Look on his works, ye Mighty, and despair. [FiveThirtyEight] * Kagan is boring (despite Lat’s attempt to nickname her “Lady Kaga”), so let’s start talking about […]

We’ve previously covered a sticky situation involving an alleged drafting error by real estate lawyers at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan. The dispute pits the buyers of luxury condos at the Rushmore, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, against the development company Extell, Stroock’s client. (Our prior coverage appears here, here, and here.) When we last […]

What do your clients think of your firm? Unfortunately, in-house counsel don’t usually send a review of services along when they’re paying their Biglaw bill. But a number of them do rate firms when asked to by Corporate Board Member magazine. It has released its 10th annual list of top law firms, based on what […]

Our contest to determine Elena Kagan’s celebrity doppelgänger has upset a few of our readers (and maybe one of our colleagues here at Breaking Media). One ATL commenter said: Christ, this is the most insane post, and the fact that a woman posted this is most disturbing. How could you? She’s not sexy Sarah, we […]

Am Law Daily has what can only be termed a frightening headline today: The Am Law 100 2010: Too Big to Fail? Nooooo! Haven’t we learned that “too big to fail” is terrible? It’s bad for our economy when things are too big to fail — too often, too big means too inefficient to change: […]

Harvard and Yale are, by any standard, great educational institutions, but it is not one of their strengths to instill in their students a sense of humility. — Jerome Karabel, a sociology professor and author of The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, commenting on the high number […]