After CNN editor Octavia Nasr got the boot for an indiscreet tweet, Fast Company was inspired to do a series of stories on companies’ social media policies: “guidelines about how its employees (and freelancers and interns) should represent themselves on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media destinations.”
In the most recent piece in the series, Fast Company looked at Harvard Law’s guidelines for its bloggers. It approved of Harvard’s straightforward approach:
Think this one is going to be dense and chock-full of legalese? Though it’s not exactly written in plain English, the one page document titled “Terms of Use” is a straightforward take on how to blog under Harvard’s domain. Not surprisingly, the first point deals with copyrights, but goes on to include:
“As a general matter, you may post content freely to your blog and to those of others, so long as the content is not illegal, obscene, defamatory, threatening, infringing of intellectual property rights, invasive of privacy or otherwise injurious or objectionable.
Well, that takes all the fun out of it, doesn’t it?
You may not use the Harvard name to endorse or promote any product, opinion, cause or political candidate. Representation of your personal opinions as institutionally endorsed by Harvard University or any of its Schools or organizations is strictly prohibited.”
So no endorsement of Elena Kagan allowed over there?
There’s a burgeoning awareness of social media in the law firm world. When we were in Chicago for an in-house counsel conference, we met a lawyer who had chucked the practice of law to advise law firms on how to use social media. We asked him about guidelines for law firms and lawyers when it comes to Facebooking, blogging, and celebrity endorsements via Twitter…
If you are superstitious, then the house shown at right (click to enlarge) — 1509 Swann Street NW, Washington, DC — is not the house for you. It is the house in which promising young lawyer Robert Wone — a former associate at Covington & Burling, and general counsel for Radio Free Asia at the time of his death — was murdered.
The murder took place almost four years ago, on August 2, 2006. Three former residents of 1509 Swann — former Arent Fox partner Joseph Price, his domestic partner Victor Zaborsky, and their lover, Dylan Ward — were recently found not guilty, after a bench on trial on obstruction of justice and conspiracy charges (but not murder).
Their former house is currently on the market. Says our source:
Get a peek inside the house. For $1.6 million, I would expect my home to not have been the scene of a murder — but then again, nothing surprises me in DC real estate.
The house’s history may be troubled, but there’s a lot to like about it….
I’m surprised this doesn’t happen more often. A student is demanding that his law school admit to scamming him out of money in open court.
And why? The student isn’t trying to recover tuition dollars directly from the school. Instead, the student is involved in the arduous process of trying to get his debts discharged through bankruptcy. As we’ve mentioned repeatedly, you can’t discharge student loans through the bankruptcy process absent a showing of undue hardship.
The student is named Kenneth Desormes. The school is Charlotte School of Law. And he wants Charlotte to admit what they did to him…
HELP WANTED: We are looking for a writer to take over Morning Docket duties from the three of us. To learn more and apply, please see this post (a prior solicitation for MD writer applications). The only difference is that now the post comes with a modest monthly stipend.
* No criminal charges will be filed in connection with the removal of U.S. Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico. [The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times]
* Constance McMillen, the lesbian who wasn’t allowed to bring her girlfriend to her high school prom, has settled her suit with the school. [ABA Journal]
* A New York State appellate court will let a model’s malpractice claims against Boies Schiller walk the runway. [Am Law Daily]
* Former media mogul Conrad Black is released on bail, courtesy of a SCOTUS ruling. [WSJ Law Blog]
* A closer look at Rod Blagojevich’s decision not to testify at his trial. [New York Times]
* Chief Justice Margaret Marshall, author of the majority opinion in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (aka the MA gay marriage case), is retiring from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. [How Appealing]
* BP is generating work for transactional attorneys as well as litigators. [Am Law Daily]
As we mentioned this morning, a report from researchers at Berkeley Law suggests that legal education is a field dominated by white, male, elite liberals. The National Law Journal reports:
Law schools hire more openly liberal professors than openly conservative ones, but the plum jobs at the most prestigious schools don’t appear to be going solely to the liberals.
That’s the conclusion reached by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law who analyzed the ideology of recently hired law professors. Their study, “Ideological Diversity and Law School Hiring,” is the first to focus specifically on the political leanings of law professors.
Previous research concluded that law professors skew white and male, and tend to have completed their legal studies at top law schools.
There might be a liberal bias among law school professors? Shocking! Why are we just being informed of this?
But is it really as bad as the study makes it out to be? While the researchers determined that 52 of 60 professors showed a liberal slant, the report goes on to explain that the researchers couldn’t get a clear read on 60% of the 149 entry-level professors sampled.
And even if we agree that there is some liberal bias among law school professors, does the distinction matter? Is there really a “liberal” or “conservative” way to educate people about the law?
This sounds like an appropriate moment for an Above the Law debate. Editors David Lat and Elie Mystal sound off about whether law schools need to be more welcoming to conservatives. As always, we welcome your opinions in the comments….
* Last month, we asked if cheerleading is a sport. A judge has answered, “no.” [CT Post]
* Two words that should never be in the same sentence: “botched” and “circumcision.” [Bad Lawyer]
* Now that the FCC has been stopped in its anti-speech tracks, can the rest of television become as good as HBO? Because if I have to see one more promo for Rizzoli & Isles I’m going to have to burn my Abbie Carmichael blow-up doll. [Infamy or Praise]
* Here’s some deposition advice. Learning practical lawyering skills will be good for people who can no longer count on a few years of brainless doc. review while they get their feet wet. [What About Clients?]
* Try becoming a “shadow elite.” It’s like a ninja only much less cool. [Law and More]
* Is anybody else sick of real Lindsay Lohan news? Don’t worry. Today we bring you fake Lindsay Lohan news. [Laws for Attorneys]
Come on, it’s easy! You just shove all that stuff in your head, you write down your answers, and forget it the next day. Learn on the job like everybody else.
– Sheriff Andy Bellefleur of True Blood, trying to allay Jason Stackhouse’s fears of taking the written exam to become a sheriff’s deputy.
Back in April, we reported on an admirable organization called Law School Transparency. The goal of LST: “encouraging and facilitating the transparent flow of law school employment information.”
Given what’s typically at stake — three years of your life, and six figures of cash (or student loans) — the decision to attend law school is an important one. There’s a case to be made in favor of law school, and there’s a case to be made against it. (For the case against, see pretty much any post about law school by my colleague, Elie Mystal, or any of the bloggers on this blogroll.)
Regardless of the ultimate outcome, the decision should be made based on accurate and complete information. And that information should include data about employment outcomes for graduates of a given law school. If I get a J.D. from law school X, what kind of job can I expect to obtain?
This is where Law School Transparency (LST) comes in. What is LST doing to advance the ball in reporting employment data from law schools?
An Israeli court has convicted an Arab man of rape on very interesting grounds. Haaretz reports:
Sabbar Kashur, 30, had consensual sex with a woman after he posed as a Jewish bachelor interested in a long-term relationship.
When the woman found Kashur was not a Jew but an Arab, she filed a police complaint that led to charges of rape and indecent assault.
Kashur was subsequently convicted of “rape by deception,” and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
We’ve got a lot of people studying for the bar exam right now. We need to know: Could a person be convicted of the crime of “making a material misrepresentation to a woman to get her into bed because that’s what guys do,” here in America?
Welcome to Above the Law’s telephone message service. This service is for people who do not have internet access from their cellular phones. Comments made through this system will be placed randomly in each thread, because really, who gives a s**t anymore?
To make a “TTT” accusation, press 1.
To make a cutting remark about about Elie Mystal’s poor grammar and/or obesity, press 2.
To make a gay joke about David Lat, press 3.
To sexually harass Kashmir Hill, press 4.
To make an angry, incoherent comment about “liberals”, press 5.
To make an outrageously bigoted remark you wouldn’t dare make in public, press 6.
To make a comment which betrays your ignorance of history, economics, or whatever other subject is being discussed, press 7.
To post a random, unrelated news story, press 8, or just go to Fark.com or something.
To make a witty, reasoned, well-informed comment, please remain on the line; an operator will be with you shortly. While you wait, you may want to philosophically examine your current life, with specific focus on why you continue to associate with the people who pressed 1 through 8.
Bravo, Anonymous Coward. And a reminder to our readers to enter the comments section at their own risk (though there are some gems there, such as this one).
Donald Trump knows what it is to be down but not out. We’ve lost track of how many times he’s filed for bankruptcy. But he is a phoenix, who always arises from the Chapter 11 ashes, his flaming reddish hair unruffled.
Now Trump wants to offer the same opportunity to other high-flyers who were knocked down by the recession. The upcoming season of “The Apprentice” has a cast of those left jobless in the recent economic collapse.
When they were casting for the show, the producers reached out to Above the Law in the hopes of nailing down a laid-off lawyer for the cast.
The show was taped this summer. And it appears they found themselves a shiny, new laid-off legal eagle (UPDATE on July 23: Two of them, actually.) The producers haven’t released the official cast list yet, but our tipsters recognized one of the contestants in an ad plugging the show (via Popwatch):
So who is the lawyer, and what does his résumé look like?
No, that’s not a typo; we’re not talking about firefighting. We’re talking about fart fighting. From our sister site, the fabulous Fashionista:
There’s no graceful way to introduce this product, so we’ll just cut to the chase: “Subtle Butt” is a disposable patch of fabric with an “activated carbon layer… to which stench adheres and gets neutralized.” Except there’s nothing subtle about farting.
In short, Subtle Butt is a small square of fabric you stick to your underwear just in case you lay a real stinky egg. If it’s loud, you’re on your own. Subtle Butt does nothing to muffle sound. Gross.
This product sounds like a gas — and very useful for lawyers. Imagine you’re in a marathon negotiation session for a billion-dollar merger, or deposing the opposing party’s CEO, and that Mexican food you ordered from Seamless Web has given you flatulence.
Do you really want to waste precious (billable) time by stopping the proceedings and stepping out of the conference room, just to toot your own kazoo? If Subtle Butt has you covered, just let it rip — and cough really loudly or drop binders on the floor, to cover up the noise.
In light of Subtle Butt’s utility for attorneys, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the inventor is a lawyer….
Ed. note: This post is written by Will Meyerhofer, a Biglaw attorney turned psychotherapist, whom we profiled. A former Sullivan & Cromwell attorney, he holds degrees from Harvard, NYU Law, and The Hunter College School of Social Work. He blogs at The People’s Therapist.
As some of you have noticed, his weekly Wednesday column has been on hiatus. He offers this memo to explain his summer vacation from Above the Law.
What is it about lawyers and vacations? Like the old saying about long-horn cattle and a Texas fence — they just don’t get along so good. It’s like a physical aversion.
I worked with a client recently who was planning, in utter frustration, to quit his medium-size firm in a medium-size American city. The partner was lecturing him about his billable hours, but business was dead slow so there was nothing to bill for. The lawyer found out later that all his peers were simply billing for work that hadn’t been done yet, on the theory that they’d be laid off by the time the proverbial cow-patty and the fan were joined in unison.
He couldn’t bring himself to fake his time records to that degree, so he was stomping mad, announcing in stentorian tones that this was it, he was quitting. I urged him to stick around and see if he couldn’t get laid off with everyone else, so he could at least receive unemployment. No, he insisted – he needed out now.
Well, I reasoned, then why not take some vacation, so you can cool off and kill time simultaneously?
As multiple tipsters have been telling us, Dave Gordon, managing partner of Latham & Watkins’s New York office is putting down the mantle of leadership. But Gordon will be staying at the firm, continuing his private practice.
Gordon attracted attention after Latham laid off 440 people a year and a half ago. First-year attorneys were caught up in the layoffs as well, especially in New York. And some of the departed associates left with bitter feelings towards the firm, and Gordon specifically.
But Kirk Davenport, a member of Latham’s executive committee, assured us that last year’s layoffs had nothing to do with Gordon’s new move…
* There’s a fine line between flirting and stalking. [ABA Journal]
* The summer associate hiring numbers. [AmLaw Daily]
* In the case of “the man who may share ownership of Facebook with Zuckerberg,” Facebook got out of state court, but things aren’t looking great in federal court. Mark Zuckerberg is “unsure” whether he signed the contract in 2003 granting an 84% ownership of Facebook to Paul Ceglia. [CNN; Bloomberg]
* Conservatives do; liberals teach. (Though this whole study may be skewed given where it was done.) [National Law Journal via ABA Journal]
* Fortress Investment Group sues a New York law firm, alleging that it aided the Dreier Ponzi scheme by acting as an “opinion mill.” [Wall Street Journal]
Yesterday we wrote about a family lawyer who posed nude for Playboy. She’s the mag’s “Employee of the Month.” Here’s the Not Safe for Work (NSFW)link.
There were some questions as to whether this woman was actually a lawyer. Why would people think that? Getting naked in Playboy casting doubt on one’s legal credentials? Hogwash.
In fact, a reader has stepped forward to say that “Kimberly Kourt” (not her real name) went to a very fine law school…
* Century Regional Detention Facility is sentenced to Lindsay Lohan. Watch out, she looks a little menacing in her mug shot. [People]
* Fellow legal blogger and prominent immigration lawyer Lavi Soloway opines on the intersection of immigration reform, evangelicals, and same-sex marriage. [Politico]
[U]nderneath a sometimes gruff exterior, he has the proverbial heart of gold: no one I know is a more faithful friend or a more fundamentally decent person.
– Solicitor General and Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, in a letter to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) about appellate litigator Miguel Estrada, a Gibson Dunn partner and possible Supreme Court nominee in a Republican administration.
As the two firms told the Daily Journal, the talks were called off because of a familiar reason: potential client conflicts. According to a statement issued by Kilpatrick’s co-managing partner, William Dorris, “We explored merger discussions with our friends at Townsend, but clients always come first. When client-related conflicts could not be resolved, we could not proceed further.”
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.
After CNN editor Octavia Nasr got the boot for an indiscreet tweet, Fast Company was inspired to do a series of stories on companies’ social media policies: “guidelines about how its employees (and freelancers and interns) should represent themselves on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media destinations.”
Continue reading “Social Media Policies for Legal Types”
Back in April, we 
No, that’s not a typo; we’re not talking about firefighting. We’re talking about fart fighting. From our sister site, the fabulous 
* There’s a fine line between flirting and stalking. [
* Century Regional Detention Facility is sentenced to Lindsay Lohan. Watch out, she looks a little menacing in her 
Back in May, we 
Comment of the Day, Quote of the Day
Comment of the Day: The ATL Operator
By Kashmir HillFrom Morning Docket:
Bravo, Anonymous Coward. And a reminder to our readers to enter the comments section at their own risk (though there are some gems there, such as this one).
Tags: Beware the comments section, Comment of the Day, Do not press 4, Quote of the Day, Take a number, This is why we read the comments