I wouldn’t have felt good about [Gerald Ung] going to jail for 40 years for a bad decision made in 70 seconds. If he went to jail, it doesn’t take back the year of recovery and rehabilitation my brother has had to endure. There’s no malice towards the shooter here. And I wish his supporters would feel the same towards my brother. These are two guys who didn’t know each other who were thrown into an irreversible situation that ended horribly….
The truest thing I know is that a handgun should not have been on an intoxicated individual at 2 a.m. This is bigger than this specific situation. This is a societal issue that unfortunately has and will continue to kill and maim countless individuals because no one is willing to to say, “Enough is enough.”
— the sister of Eddie DiDonato, on her blog (gavel bang: commenter).
We’ve been trying to figure out how many top New York firms will adopt spring bonuses. It doesn’t appear that Schulte Roth & Zabel will be one of them.
Multiple tipsters report Schulte Roth conducted staff layoffs earlier this week.
But maybe we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that this means Schulte will not be paying spring bonuses. Is it possible that this move will free up money for a spring payout?
Continue reading “Staff Layoff Watch: Schulte Roth Has A Different Kind of Spring Surprise”
Canadian police might not know the difference between law students, Kim Cattrall, and victims of sexual assault.
Sigh.
You know, I kind of get what this police officer was trying to say. When speaking in front of a group of law students at Osgoode Hall Law School, a Toronto cop told women they could avoid sexual harassment and assault by not dressing like sluts.
As a black person, I’ve heard similar things. If you don’t want to get racially profiled, “don’t dress like a gangbanger” and all that. And that kind of advice is true to some extent. It’s not “fair,” but you have to be aware of how you present yourself.
The thing is, what kind of idiot white male cop thinks that female law students don’t already know this? I think women at a law school in Canada know damn well that they can’t walk around campus dressed only in a bra and hot pants. They should be able to walk around in whatever the hell they like without being sexually assaulted, but they know how the world works.
When did dress sense become a safety tip?
Continue reading “Police Tell Female Law Students ‘Don’t Dress Like a Slut’ To Avoid Sexual Assault”
* “As virtually any clown can attest, no one owns the idea of making a balloon dog.” Jeff Koons was on the wrong side of this awesome legal beatdown. [Freakonomics / New York Times]
* In honor of his memory, a new federal courthouse in Arizona will be named after Judge John M. Roll. [CNN]
* Sorry for the diabeetus. AstraZeneca apologized to its schizophrenic pill-poppers to the tune of $150M. At least that’s what the voice in their heads said. [Bloomberg]
* Didn’t this taco belle know that the value of her beauty queen contract would be diminished by the inflation of her ass? [San Antonio Express-News]
* Witch Law: brought to you by Malawi, the same place where it’s illegal to fart. The Harry Potter franchise must not be doing so well over there. [New York Times]
* In a $150M legal battle between a jailhouse lawyer and a Hofstra Law grad, who will win? Whose “degree” is more TTT? [New York Law Journal]
* A woman filed – and then dropped — a lawsuit for $5M over 80 cents. This must be a pitch for a new Bravo series: The Real Cheap Housewives of New Jersey. [New York Post]
* The Feds may have cash for clunkers, but Pennsylvania’s got cash for kids. The food in the jury room must be delicious if they’re taking this long to convict. [Wilkes-Barre Times Leader]
* Copywrong: exploiting copyright law to extort money over a photo of a little girl who died tragically is pretty disgusting. [KGUN9]
Hastings law professor Clark Freshman
* Do not handcuff law professors and search their homes for drugs unless you are absolutely sure you are right. [SF Weekly]
* Facebook adds relationship status options for “civil union” and “domestic partnership.” [Huffington Post]
* Quick, 1Ls: Do I need an easement or a covenant to erect a 24-foot cross that shines into my neighbor’s bedroom? [Pat's Papers]
* Hopefully the Alabama fan who took out his sporting frustrations on oaks in Auburn gets the stiffest possible penalty the locals can devise. [ESPN]
* Do you think we need copyright law to get “the next Shakespeare”? Do you really think that? Seriously guys: better a witty fool than a foolish wit. [Instapundit]
* South Dakota shelves a bill that might have made killing abortion doctors justifiable homicide. That’s good; it was going to cost a lot of money to place blindfolds on Mt. Rushmore so our forefathers couldn’t see our shame. [New York Times]
* Allen Stanford wants the SEC to pay him $7.2 billion for violating his constitutional rights. Who knew Stanford was being held in the same cell as Jonathan Lee Riches? [WSJ Law Blog]
* Hang on, back up a minute. Are we entirely sure we want people with brain injuries driving in the first place? [Law and Biosciences Digest]
* I don’t know what I think about girls entering wrestling tournaments with boys. Hockey is fine, but wrestling? I don’t know if it’s the violence, the intimate positions, or ingrained sexism that makes me uncomfortable. [Des Moines Register]
* If the District of Columbia were demographically similar to Madison, Wisconsin, instead of Atlanta, Georgia, they’d have voting representation in Congress with no problem. [DCist]
In Part 1 of the Career Center survey results on debt, we reported that 85% of the 3,700 survey respondents have outstanding student loan debt, with more than half of them owing $100,000 or more. We also found that 75% of respondents considered their debt at least as much as other factors when deciding on where to work. Today, we’ll take a look at a further breakdown of these numbers by job sector and amount of debt.
But first, let’s examine the extremes: respondents with the most debt, and respondents with no debt….
Continue reading “Career Center Survey Results: A Generation of Debtors (Part 2)”
Milbank Tweed? More like Milbank Cashmere. Associates at the firm can treat themselves to some luxury goods this weekend, in anticipation of the cash that’s coming their way in a few weeks.
Earlier today, the firm announced that it will be matching the Cravath spring bonuses. It’s a pleasant surprise to some….
Continue reading “Associate Bonus Watch: Milbank Makes Bank, Matches Cravath Spring Bonuses”
Ed. note: This is the latest installment of Size Matters, one of Above the Law’s new columns for small-firm lawyers.
I moved from Biglaw to a small firm in 2008. I had heard the term “litigation boutique” used positively. Also, I had heard tales of Biglaw associates going on to small firms and doing great things (although I did not actually know any). But, other than that “information,” I had no idea how to go about researching and choosing a small firm. Other associates who have chosen to go small have told me similar stories. There’s very little information about the various small law firms. Indeed, there is no Vault Guide and, until recently, no big-mouthed small firm associates sharing their tales.
So, what did I do? I got a headhunter and took her sales pitch as truth.
Times are different now. Not only because you have me (i.e., your greatest resource for information on small law firms; except, of course, for Jay), but also because headhunters are not as prevalent as they used to be. This is because, obviously, there are fewer jobs and because a lot of small firms have stopped using headhunters (query whether using headhunters is ever a good idea when going small — discuss).
Why is there so little information out there about small law firms?
Continue reading “Size Matters: How Small Is Too Big? A Vocabulary Lesson”
I should have written about this days ago, but the pain was still too near to me. The humans have lost to the machines. We might as well start digging towards the Earth’s core, where it’s still warm, and start building our own Zion.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know the terrifying story of “Watson.” It’s a computer built by IBM that just kicked Ken Jennings’s ass on Jeopardy. If you are not particularly scientifically inclined, I can see how that might not sound like a big deal. You probably remember Deep Blue beating chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and think that this kind of thing has been happening for a while.
That’s just what the machines want you to think. Teaching a computer to understand the subtle nuances of trivia — the puns, the innuendos, the ordering of information — is frightening. It’s a lot different than writing an algorithm that allows a machine to work through all possible chess moves and pick the correct one.
It makes you wonder: “What else could a computer be taught to do?” Over at the WSJ Law Blog, Ashby Jones wonders if the answer might be, “Your job”….
Continue reading “I, For One, DO NOT Welcome Our New Computer Overlords”
We all know that in this legal economy, 1L grades are critically important. There aren’t enough good jobs to go around, and coming out of your first semester with a strong transcript can really help. This is why some law students flip out over changes (real or perceived) to grading policies or curves.
But getting a bad grade is not the end of the world. Performing well on law school exams is a skill, one that doesn’t come naturally to everybody. And in light of the length of a person’s entire legal career, it’s kind of amazing that people stress out so much over 1L transcripts.
At Columbia Law School, the administration wants first-year students to keep a sense of perspective about their grades. In a very nice gesture, Dean of Students Michelle Greenberg-Kobrin sent the 1Ls a nice message that highlighted some of the poor grades achieved by some Columbia’s own faculty.
The message was clearly “Everything is going to be fine.” But not all Columbia students took it that way…
Continue reading “Columbia Reassures 1Ls By Sharing Professors’ Dirty Transcript Secrets”
We recently wondered, in the wake of Cadwalader announcing spring bonuses, whether Willkie Farr (and several other top New York firms) might follow suit.
Well, the wait is over. Willkie has announced spring bonuses, on the top-of-the-line Cravath scale….
Continue reading “Associate Bonus Watch: Willkie Matches the Cravath Spring Bonuses!”
The jury verdict in the attempted-murder trial of Temple Law student Gerald Ung came out on Tuesday, but people are still talking about the case.
Some readers have complained about our repeated use of Gerald Ung’s mugshot to illustrate our stories. In yesterday’s linkwrap, we mixed it up a bit, using a more formal photo of Ung.
The other day, a reader sent us a more colorful image of this new celebrity of the legal profession….
Continue reading “A Portrait of the Temple Law Shooter as a Young(er) Man”
In a postcript to our detailed post speculating about the future direction of the spring bonus phenomenon, we noted “an isolated report of one firm on the S&C spring bonus scale going back and raising to the Cravath scale,” but said we required additional corroboration.
We now have the requisite confirmation. On Tuesday, Simpson Thacher — which was the first firm to match the Sullivan & Cromwell spring bonuses, and therefore crucial in helping the S&C bonuses spread to other firms — announced that it would adopt the Cravath spring bonus scale (which is even higher than S&C’s).
Let’s go back to our listing of which firms have announced spring bonuses at which levels. Now that STB has raised to Cravath levels, only Sullivan & Cromwell and Cleary Gottlieb remain on the lower scale.
What will happen next?
Continue reading “Associate Bonus Watch: Simpson Raises to Cravath Spring Bonus Scale”
Ed. note: This is the latest installment of Inside Straight, Above the Law’s column for in-house counsel, written by Mark Herrmann.
First, a shameless plug; then, back to business.
The plug: I’ll be giving my “book talk” about The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law in several locations in the next couple of weeks, including in a conference room at Skadden and in auditoriums at the law schools of Northwestern and Indiana University. If you have a group that might be interested in the talk, please contact me. We’ll sneak you into one of the upcoming talks, and you can decide whether my spiel would actually fit your occasion.
Now, the business. And it’s real business this time around — a business issue that has caught the attention of an awful lot of in-house counsel. The issue has to do with the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s deliberations over whether to alter corporate disclosures about loss contingencies. (Sorry, guys. No pictures of naked Canadian judges after the jump here. You’ve gone from the sublime to the ridiculous, or vice versa.)
Here’s the backstory: Investors legitimately want to know whether companies are about to lose a ton of money in litigation. So investors want companies to make fulsome disclosures about their “loss contingencies,” which picks up a lot of territory, including pending or threatened litigation.
Companies, on the other hand, are reluctant to disclose publicly that they anticipate losing a lawsuit. If companies were to make that type of disclosure, their litigation opponent would be energized and the settlement value of the case would skyrocket….
Continue reading “Inside Straight: FAS 5 Fracas”
* Hawaii state legislators have approved civil unions for same-sex couples. Tiny gay couples… [Reuters]
* Louisiana applies special penalties to those who are convicted of soliciting oral or anal sex, under the Crimes Against Nature law. Kirk Cameron and this Kiwi fella seem to disagree with Louisiana on just how unnatural oral sex is. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Mel Gibson certainly didn’t help the movement to “naturalize” oral sex in his burn down the house and blow me tirade. [Los Angeles Times]
* Borders declared bankruptcy because America’s favorite book is magazines. [Bloomberg]
* Texas plans to slash legal aid for the poor; move remaining services to basement of Alamo. [Houston Chronicle]
* Yesterday, The Cooch made his case against Obamacare to the House Judiciary Committee. [Legal Newsline]
* “She shed some tears for his victims, then keel-hauled the black-hearted buccaneer.” [New York Post]
* Sewanee is not the Stanford of the South. [New York Times]
Usually I’m happy to stand with law students against the slings and arrows of outrageous law school administration.
But not this time. This time, instead of a noble law student fighting the good fight, I see an annoying whiner who wants law school to be about teddy bears and rainbows.
A student at the University of Miami School of Law is trying to get the student body to adopt a “Student Bill of Rights.” The proposal lists a number of things that “shall not be violated.” Even though I agree with some of these points, codifying them as “rights” makes me flaccid. We’re talking about law school, not summer camp. It’s supposed to be hard. It’s not supposed to be fair.
We can condemn law schools until the cows come home for inducing students to sign up under false pretenses. But once you matriculate, law schools turn into the warden from Shawshank Redemption: “Put your trust in the Lord; your ass belongs to me.”
As a law student, you don’t have any rights….
Continue reading “A Miami Law Student Wants a ‘Student Bill of Rights.’ Really?“
Halle Berry
* The California Supremes have agreed to tackle the Prop 8 standing question. [Poliglot / Metro Weekly]
* Musical chairs: veteran litigator Thomas Wiegand leaves Winston & Strawn and joins his good friend Steve Molo at MoloLamken. [Am Law Daily]
* A report on the appellate proceedings in the Drew Peterson case. [Chicago Tribune]
* Halle Berry’s baby daddy goes to court. [Radar Online]
* Fellowships for Aspiring Law Professors (2011 Edition). [TaxProf Blog]
* What explains the gender imbalance among Wikipedia editors? Legal bloggers have some thoughts. [Infamy or Praise]
Yesterday we reported on talks last week between Jones Day and key partners in the construction group of Howrey. It appears that the talks have borne fruit.
As reported yesterday by the Daily Journal (subscription), a group of seven Howrey partners — led by prominent construction lawyer Steve O’Neal, former chairman of the now-defunct Thelen law firm — left Howrey this week for Jones Day. The move was confirmed yesterday by Robert Mittelstaedt, the partner in charge of Jones Day’s San Francisco office.
Who are the departing construction-law partners? And which other partners might be leaving Howrey’s California offices?
Continue reading “Howrey Met Your Mother (Then Lost Her to Another Firm)”
This Valentine’s Day week, we express love for… our advertisers on Above the Law:
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Ed. note: This is the latest installment of Small Firms, Big Lawyers, one of Above the Law’s new columns for small-firm lawyers.
I live near Wellesley, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb usually described with words like “leafy” and “tony.” (I get “leafy,” but I’ve never really figured out “tony.”) Think soccer moms in yoga pants and BMW SUVs. On the edge of town, where it is less leafy and tony, there is a small tailor shop. The owners are immigrants; English is not their first language. This is clear from the computer-printed signs on their windows and walls. My favorite sign is the one behind the register:
“YOU NEVER LOOKED SO EXPENSIVE!!”
(Unnecessary quotation marks and extra exclamation point included.) I’m not exactly sure what they were trying to say. Maybe expensive wasn’t the word they were going for. Good? Chic? Tony? I don’t know. But the amusing phrase has stuck with me, and with many of my neighbors. I’m not even sure of the name of the shop, but everyone knows what I mean when I mention the sign. It’s a tailor-shop meme.
And a good one. In fact, I’d like to see small-firm lawyers make a similar sign and tape it to their mirrors. (Yeah, I know. I’m not a mirror-message taper either. But indulge me here.) Because the tailor-shop meme might remind them not to make the single biggest mistake that small-firm lawyers usually make: pricing their services too low….
Continue reading “Small Firms, Big Lawyers: Have You Gotten Stupider?”
