Who the f*** wears a shirt like this to court, we asked via Twitter on Friday. The resounding response: someone who wants to get out of jury duty.
An alternate juror, Nneka Eneorj, 19, who appears not to be familiar with Kanye West, found an easy way to get herself kicked off a police brutality trial in New York. From the New York Post:
“WHO THE F— IS KANYE WEST?” the shirt read, the offending obscenity resting just above the wood veneer rail of the jury box. Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Farber ordered the other jurors out of the courtroom — directing Eneorj to stand before his bench.
“Do you think it’s appropriate to wear a shirt that says ‘f—’ on it in my courtroom?” the judge asked, anger in his voice.
When Eneorj started to protest about having a sweater on — not that it covered the front of the shirt — the judge cut her off, demanding, “You’re excused.”
We have not yet had the pleasure to serve on a jury. While we would relish the front row seating for a trial, we understand that others are not as eager to sit in judgment of their fellow citizens.
* Sen. Robert Byrd passes away at the age of 92. [Washington Post]
* Wasn’t Guantanamo Bay supposed to be closed by now? I could have sworn the guy who said he would close it won the presidential election. [New York Times]
* How many Republicans do you think will end up voting for Kagan’s confirmation? Let’s set the over/under at seven — since that’s how many Republicans supported her for Solicitor General. [National Law Journal]
* Unlike Republicans, one expects civil rights leaders will eventually get in line. [The Volokh Conspiracy]
* When cyber-bullying occurs outside of school, who should be responsible for disciplining the offenders? The parents? Come on, that would be way too easy. [New York Times]
* Can you get overtime if you have to CHECK YOU EMAIL on the weekends? [New York Post]
Ed. note: Law Shucks focuses on life in, and after, BigLaw, including by tracking layoffs, bonuses, and laterals. Above the Law is pleased to bring you this weekly column, which analyzes news at the world’s top law firms.
One of the many interesting features of BigLaw is the comings and goings of its denizens. Whether it’s looking for the bigger, better deal, jumping off a sinking ship, or departing for the greener pastures of inhouse or government life, every move has a story.
There has been plenty of speculation recently about which firm is wrapped up in an Inspector General investigation of the firm’s practice of hiring former SEC lawyers, who then turn around and advocate for clients at the agency they just left. The Senate Finance Committee is none too happy about the "revolving door," claiming that in at least one instance, the SEC was unduly lenient because of the firm’s close ties with the commission. Usually lateral hires aren’t contentious (examples like Jeremy Pitcock notwithstanding), so this could put a damper on hiring some of the most-coveted free agents.
So which law firm or lawyer(s) might be facing Senate scrutiny?
Martin Ginsburg — a leading tax lawyer and law professor, and the husband of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — passed away earlier today. He was 78. According to a statement released by the Court, he passed away at home, from complications of metastatic cancer.
Marty Ginsburg was known in Supreme Court circles as Justice Ginsburg’s secret weapon. Justice Ginsburg herself can sometimes be shy, awkward, and introverted, but her husband was gregarious, charming, and a great entertainer. He was a talented chef and would perform the culinary honors at dinners for Supreme Court justices and their spouses. He would also cook for RBG’s clerks each Term.
He was widely noted for his great sense of humor….
Congratulations to Sutherland. The firm’s band, “Sutherland Comfort,” won the 2010 Battle of the Law Firm Bands in D.C. on Thursday night. Sutherland Comfort defeated a host of worthy challengers — including “Dangerous Communication Device,” the Williams & Connolly band that won the contest in the past two years.
A tale of three nominees (left to right): John Roberts, Harriet Miers and Samuel Alito.
Last night I headed across town to NYU Law School for a screening of Advise & Dissent, a new documentary about the Supreme Court confirmation process. Here’s a brief description of the film:
ADVISE & DISSENT is the first documentary to go behind the lines and into the trenches of the judicial confirmation wars. SCOTUSblog has called it “a fascinating, balanced insider look,” and Politico named it “a must see.” Timely and timeless, the film illuminates the collision of politics and justice.
Last night’s showing of the movie was followed by a conversation, featuring the following participants:
Howard Fineman, chief political correspondent, Newsweek;
E. Joshua Rosenkranz, partner, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe (which sponsored the screening);
* If Kenny Rogers was a patent lawyer, Kramer would still be the only person who preferred his chicken to the Colonel’s. (Or: some thoughts on Bilski.) [Patently-O]
* To a liberal, “you can’t take it with you” isn’t a clever saying; it’s a fundamental rule that will be enforced by the sword if need be. [Going Concern]
* And now comes the part where BP tries to pass liability off onto its friends. Other corporate offenders are starting to look at BP the way prison inmates look at child molesters. [WSJ Law Blog]
* But let’s keep the BP hate within the laws of physics and chemistry. It cannot rain oil from the sky. [The Rachel Maddow Show]
* The internet “kill switch” is making progress. But now the bill will come with a whole new cybernanny department organized under Homeland Security. [Huffington Post]
* The Blagojevich trial rolls on, embarrassing essentially everybody that has ever spoken with the man. [Althouse]
We’ve gotten used to private firms trying to take advantage of the terrible economy by convincing lawyers to sell their services for $0, but when it comes from a district attorney — a public servant with a law degree — it really stings.
A tipster reports that the DA’s office in Marin County (CA) is looking for new lawyers. The salary? Insulting:
Note: they’re not looking for a coffee-running intern; they want a full-on deputy DA. Yet they’re willing to pay him or her absolutely nothing…
It’s that time of the year again when law school administrators lead law student cattle into the big law meat processing plant: OCI time. I’m a rising 2L at a T-14 law school with decent grades. My question to you is, how am I supposed to know which firms are good and which aren’t? I know about AmLaw and other types of rankings but I feel like that doesn’t encompass everything. I worked at an auditing firm prior to law school that was ranked “one of the best places to work” by some major magazines… and it sucked ass.
Our career services tells us to go to each firm’s website, but that’s the equivalent of judging whether a girl is hot or not by looking at the Facebook pics of her out on the town. It’s the ones of her during finals that really count. I have no particular subject matter interest, but I do want to work in NY or DC.
Interviews or Bust
Dear Interviews or Bust,
You have “decent” grades and zero practical skills. I would mainly just look for firms willing to hire you. But if you’re going be picky about the place that’s going to cut you checks for sending around the dial-in and bringing copies of attachments to meetings, here are some guidelines on what to look for…
Want the thrill of hacking into a White House attorney’s inbox without the risk of getting into serious legal trouble?
The Sunlight Foundation has a nifty tool for you. It’s come up with a creative way to make some of the bajillion Elena Kagan-related documents being released by the Clinton Presidential Library searchable.
It’s taken her emails, from her time as associate WH counsel (1995 – 1996) and as assistant to the president and deputy director for domestic policy (1997 – 1999), and dumped them into an Outlook-style inbox.
We’ll be liveblogging Kagan’s confirmation hearings next week, when we’ll likely hear a lot of evasive answers about her time in the White House. We rummaged through the ekagan@whitehouse.gov inbox hoping for more candid information about her time there. We found some fun emails, and maybe even a little romance…
It’s been a while since our last Courtship Connection report. We still have many, many single types in our database, though. We are thinking about having a singles mixer at a bar in New York in July. Is this a brilliant idea or a terrible idea? Please email Kash with your thoughts on this. The key question: Would you come to see the awkwardness if you have to buy your own drinks?
Back to our more exclusive pairings: We set up one Biglaw couple and one Midlaw-Biggov pair. Though Midlaw and Biggov both like tonic as their mixer, they did not mix well. They met at Ginger Man in midtown Manhattan on a Wednesday night. They both live in New Jersey and I hoped this might make going home together easier. Alas, no. She reported:
As promised, he had a copy of The Economist peeking outside of his messenger bag/briefcase. Although the bar was crowded, we were able to find a table in the back so we could sit down and chat without yelling over the dull roar at the bar. Turns out he went to law school with one of my co-workers and we both live in the same town. It was fun getting to know someone new over a beer and chatting about how our jobs are different (I work for a big firm and he works for the government) and favorite restaurants. There weren’t any awkward breaks in conversation and all in all, a fine blind date. But no real connection to speak of so at the end of the night, we were fine with going our own way.
The other couple had a more interesting start to their blind date relationship. I had to cancel their first date at the last minute when our Biglaw woman came down with a serious fever that sent her to the hospital. Did things heat up when the two did manage to meet up?
Three years into his own scheme of dipping into clients’ funds, Maryland malpractice lawyer Bradley Schwartz received an e-mail from a man claiming to represent a manufacturing company in Singapore, offering him legal work…
What happened next, according to Montgomery County prosecutors, is that the scammer got scammed.
Schwartz pleaded guilty and now awaits sentencing. Oh, it is sweet when a thief gets his just reward…
The latest Job of the Week is a shout-out to all of you Consumer Finance Litigation folks. We are looking for you. The mortgage meltdown is creating quite a lot of work for litigators with consumer finance experience. We are seeing a number of opportunities nationally both at firms and companies.
Position: Consumer Finance Litigation Associate
Location: Dallas, TX
Description: Dallas office of an AmLaw 100 firm seeks a litigator with 5 -8 years of consumer finance experience, including experience with the Truth in Lending Act, RESPA, wrongful foreclosures, and mortgage servicing. For more details, please see position #6497 on the Lateral Link website, or contact Gary Cohen, gcohen@laterallink.com. If you are not currently a Lateral Link member, you can sign up for free at www.laterallink.com.
In April and May of this year, the Altman Weil consulting firm surveyed the leaders of 787 law firms with 50 or more lawyers about the state of the legal industry. After receiving responses from 218 of them (a 28% response rate), Altman Weil crunched the data and compiled it in a big law firm survey, which it published earlier this week.
The survey came out a few days ago and has been covered extensively in variouslegalnewsoutlets. But we weren’t in any great rush to write about it, since it doesn’t contain much to get excited about: many of the findings are (1) gloomy and (2) unsurprising.
To turn the Nixon Peabodytheme song on its head, these days it seems that “everyone’s a loser” in the world of Biglaw….
You know the drill when it comes to nonprofit fundraisers: hour-long open bar, followed by an excruciatingly long sit-down dinner. Like hamsters, you are rewarded for sitting through each speech with another course served. Once you’ve finished dessert, you hope for a video or slideshow, so the lights are dimmed and you can slip out unobserved.
Some fundraisers are more fun than others, of course — especially if there’s a photo booth with viking hats, or dueling lawyer rock bands (as there will be at the Black Cat in D.C. tonight). But generally these events are rather staid affairs.
LA-based legal services organization Bet Tzedek wanted to shake that formula up. Thirteen years ago, it launched The Justice Ball. Its founders were “sick of black tie and rubber chicken,” says the organization’s president/CEO Mitchell Kamin, and hoped to attract the young professional set instead of just geriatric philanthropists.
Over 2,500 people are expected to attend this year’s ball on Saturday night, featuring music by Dave Navarro and DJ Skribble, a Guitar Hero battle, legal tattoos, and a J-Date sponsored speed dating session. Since I’m in L.A. after attending Loyola’s Journalist Law School (and a historic taping of Jimmy Kimmel Live), I’ll be in attendance Saturday night too, thanks to comp tickets from Bet Tzedek. I look forward to spotting many summer associates there. Sidley, Skadden, Latham & Watkins, and O’Melveny & Myers are among the many firms that put the Justice Ball on their summer associate events calendars.
I interviewed Kamin about what to expect Saturday, whether tickets are still available (they are), and how he has transformed the LA County legal services firm into an award-winning national network.
* If you’re looking for something fun to do in D.C. tonight, go to the Black Cat for Banding Together 2010: Battle of the Law Firm Bands. It’s a fun evening — and it’s for a good cause. [Gifts for the Homeless]
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.
Who the f*** wears a shirt like this to court, we asked via Twitter on Friday. The resounding response: someone who wants to get out of jury duty.
Continue reading “Ways To Get Out of Serving Jury Duty”
Tomorrow — 
It’s been a while since our last Courtship Connection report. We still have many, many single types in our database, though. We are thinking about having a singles mixer at a bar in New York in July. Is this a brilliant idea or a terrible idea? Please 
