Archive for July 2011

Quote of the Day: Truth Is More Abrasive Than Fiction

By Elie Mystal

One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they’re looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an a**hole. This was the latter case.

– Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University, describing his first meeting with the Winklevoss twins. Evidently Summers had no problem with the dramatization of their meeting in The Social Network.

Legal Technology Leadership Summit: We’ll Bring The Heat, You Make The Rain

By Above the Law

So we’ve put together quite a group of people for the Legal Technology Leadership Summit. These speakers have already said they’ll be coming to Amelia Island, Florida, from September 6 – 8 — and more are on the way.

With all of these interesting people gathered together, we’re hoping that practicing attorneys will come join us and have a field day. Do you want to make partner at your law firm? Make rain. Do you want your small practice to survive and thrive through a challenging economy? Make rain. Two days at a resort in Florida jam-packed with potential clients is how you put fish in a barrel without angering PETA.

If you want to attend the Legal Technology Leadership Summit, you can sign up here. We’ve applied for CLE, so you’ll hopefully be able to pick up a few credits while you are meeting people and making connections.

For more information about the Summit, click here. We hope to see you there.

Exasperated Arkansas Town Ignores Constitution

By Elie Mystal

Arkansas town attempts to bring back totalitarianism.

Most people would expect that a post discussing unconstitutional behavior from a town in Arkansas would have something to do with religion. And in fairness, new ordinances from the city council of Gould, Arkansas do raise First Amendment concerns.

But the Gould city council isn’t trying to impose its view of God upon the public sphere. Instead, Gould just decided to ignore the protections for freedom of association. Apparently things have gotten so contentious between the city council and the mayor that the council has prohibited the mayor from meeting with people without the council’s approval.

And then the council decided to make it illegal to form any kind of group, whatsoever, without city council approval.

So yeah, Gould, Arkansas: Now technically home to one of the most totalitarian regimes in the Western Hemisphere…

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Celebrity Summer Associate: A Star Athlete

By David Lat

Recruiting athletes isn’t just for sports coaches. Many law firm hiring partners like to acquire athletes as well. The thinking is that successful athletes possess many of the traits sought in talented attorneys.

Athletes are disciplined, hardworking, and mentally tough. They are focused and strategic thinkers. If they play a team sport, then they probably excel at teamwork too.

So it shouldn’t come as a shock that Williams & Connolly, a firm full of fearsome litigators who love to win, has a great athlete among its 2011 summer associate class. This individual, who has traveled around the world playing his sport, is our latest celebrity summer associate. (We’ve previously profiled actor Wai Choy, a former co-star of Lindsay Lohan, and Phil Alito, son of Sam.)

Who is this star athlete turned Williams & Connolly summer associate, and what sport does he play?

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Quench Your Document Review Thirst With QuisLex

By Above the Law


Companies facing significant litigation or regulatory investigations must deal with the fact that they need to review ever-increasing amounts of data. They need to do so in a way that is defensible yet still cost effective, as studies show that review is the costliest element of e-discovery. This task is made even more difficult due to the fact that they often have to complete it under extremely tight deadlines.

Enter QuisLex, a premier litigation and corporate support services provider to Global 500 corporations and AM Law 10, AM Law 25, Global 100 and Magic Circle law firms. Founded in 2004 and headquartered in New York, QuisLex was recently ranked as a Band 1 LPO provider by Chambers Global 2011. QuisLex’s nearly 500 attorneys provide services from state-of-the- art, secure execution centers in India to QuisLex clients worldwide.

QuisLex uses a cross-functional Early Case Assessment team of Six Sigma black belts, process experts, statisticians and lawyers to analyze and mine data with two objectives in mind: working with counsel to intelligently reduce the amount of documents requiring review, and creating tailored workflows that make sense based on what the data tells them.

This is not only an effective cost management strategy; it’s a risk management one as well. Defensibly eliminating documents from the review pool before review starts reduces the chance of inadvertently producing privileged documents or disclosing issues that were not the subject of the review. In addition, QuisLex’s clients can use the results of this analysis to gain a strategic advantage when preparing for a meet and confer or negotiating session over search terms and the scope of the review.

“By instituting strong process controls at the start of the review, including deploying project management tools such as Six Sigma and LEAN, QuisLex both drives quality and reduces waste,” says Ram Vasudevan, QuisLex’s CEO. “We take a consultative approach, and leverage our experience with the client, the law firm, the review platform, the relevant industry and on comparable matters to design an optimal process for the review at hand. This starts at Early Case Assessment and continues through review and into any trial preparation activities.”

QuisLex is a proud sponsor of the 2011 Legal Technology Leadership Summit. Thought leaders and decision-makers will be attending the summit in September to learn about and discuss the ever-changing impact of technology on the legal world.

For more information about working with QuisLex, contact Bruce Masterson at Info@QuisLex.com or go to www.QuisLex.com

Adventures in Lawyer Advertising: Golden Showers Bring Big Dollars

By Natasha Lydon

We always appreciate when our readers send us tips about the seemingly endless supply of crazy lawyer websites and advertisements that are floating around in cyberspace. Just when we thought we’d seen it all, someone out there goes and raises the bar of craziness.

When we received a tip pointing us to the website of Barry Glazer in Baltimore, we actually thought it might be fake. Honestly, it almost seemed too ridiculous to be true.

Fortunately for all of us, Barry Glazer is quite real. Apparently his TV commercials have made him something of a legend in the Baltimore area, and not without good reason. One look at Mr. Glazer’s tagline tells us that we’re not dealing with your average lawyer:

“Legal advocate for the injured, disabled, and urinated upon”

Yes, you read that right. For four decades, Barry Glazer has been mounting a one-man crusade against insurance companies. In keeping with what appears to be a urine fixation on Mr. Glazer’s part, many of his ads deliver a simple message to these companies:

“Don’t urinate on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”

These pee-centric statements are just the tip of the iceberg that is the eccentricity of Barry Glazer. If nothing else, he is certainly the most interesting lawyer you’ll encounter all day.

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Morning Docket: 07.20.11

By Juggalo Law

* News Corp. has hired Paul Weiss attorney Mark Mendelsohn, a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act expert, to advise them. In related news, Chuck Norris has hired Wendi Deng Murdoch to advise him. [WSJ Law Blog]

* Utah’s goofy liquor laws are examined in this New York Times article. The restrictive laws clearly came out of Joseph Smith’s attempt to monopolize visions emanating from the bottom of hats. [New York Times]

* President Obama’s evolving views on gay marriage have led him to back an attempt to repeal DOMA. I’m no Frank Lutz, but I see a messaging problem on gay issues if he keeps up this whole “leading from behind” shtick. [Los Angeles Times]

* Kramer Levin is “client-focused” and looking for someone who is “entrepreneurial” and the “total package.” Words! [The Careerist]

* The Feds arrested a mess of Anonymous hackers yesterday. They dun goofed. [ABA Journal]

* Pittsburgh Steelers running back Rashard Mendenhall is suing Hanesbrands, parent company of the Champion sports apparel maker, for dropping him after some dumb tweets. Dude said some pretty stupid stuff about 9/11, but the true jewel of his collection was buried deep in this story. In a tweet aimed at women who don’t perform oral sex, Rashard said “It’s either gonna be you, OR some other chick.” Hahahaha. Oh, Rashard. [ESPN]

Who Are America’s Best-Paid General Counsel?

By David Lat

Which GC took home the most cash in 2010? For the first time, the winner was a woman.

Corporate Counsel just released its annual list of the highest-paid general counsel in the land. On the whole, the news is good: “If last year’s GC Compensation Survey showed the aftereffects… of the deepest trough of the recession, this year’s results show that chief legal officers made steady gains and recovered some momentum.”

This year there was at least one surprise: a winning woman. For the first time since the inception of the survey in 1994, the highest-paid general counsel on the list was a female attorney.

Who topped the list, and how much did she make? Let’s take a look….

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Non-Sequiturs: 07.19.11

By Elie Mystal

* Urging people to kill the president is protected speech, according to the Ninth Circuit. So if you are playing along at home, judges think that talking about killing judges is wrong, but they don’t care if you threaten the executive branch. [Wired]

* Did anyone start Dewey & LeBoeuf in their Dodger lawyers fantasy lineup? [Am Law Daily]

* I thought the Roger Clemens mistrial was due to government incompetence, but this guy thinks it’s due to government arrogance. [The Legal Blitz]

* Yes, I know Ben Wallace is thinking of going to law school. I wrote about it when I heard about it last fall. Sadly, I have no additional thoughts on the matter since my prior post. [ABA Journal]

* The U.S. Government has decided to stop pursuing Randy Quaid. When reached for comment, Russell Casse said: “They’ve got bigger fish to fry now, believe you me.” [Gawker]

* Delaware should make it more efficient for law firms to tax public mergers. If you don’t like it, you’re feel to come up with some other way for your firm to generate half a million in undeserved fees. [Dealbreaker]

* Cocaine’s a hell of a drug. [New York Times]

* Which is why some might try to pay an Ivy League tuition by selling it. [Village Voice]

Quotes of the Day: Dueling Perspectives on Judge Paul Oetken

By David Lat

As the first openly gay man to be confirmed as a federal judge, he will be a symbol of how much we have achieved as a country in just the last few decades. And importantly, he will give hope to many talented young lawyers who until now thought their paths might be limited because of their sexual orientation. When Paul becomes Judge Oetken, he will be living proof to all those young lawyers that it really does get better.

– Senator Chuck Schumer, commenting on the confirmation yesterday of Paul Oetken to serve as a judge on the Southern District of New York, by a Senate vote of 80-13.

(Because we are fair and balanced here at Above the Law, we offer a decidedly different perspective on the Oetken confirmation, after the jump.)

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Law Schools Head To The Bunker To Avoid New York Times Fallout

By Elie Mystal

And now comes the part in our story where law school administrations, stung by the criticism they just received in the New York Times, start spinning. Yes, yesterday the Times exposed the law school business model to a horrified public of non-lawyers. Today, law schools are obligated to say, “No, no, no, that’s not our business model.”

It’s a perfect response. Law students already believe that they are special and will somehow overcome various odds stacked against them, and so they are particularly susceptible to the argument that while other law schools might have problems, the school they picked is the honorable school standing apart from the disreputable actions of others.

It’s like when women say “I have the best husband in the world.” Sure, 90% of husbands hate chick flicks, wish there was a way to get a hot meal without listening to your BS, and would bone Angelina Jolie 30 times in a row before they even remembered your name, but you found the best husband evah! Because you are so damn smart and discerning.

A bunch of law schools have tried to distinguish themselves from New York Law School since this weekend’s article, but the most outstanding example of this kind of distancing comes from: New York Law School….

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Size Matters: Small Firms Growing In This Economy

By Valerie Katz

I have a friend who is looking for a job at a small law firm. (No, this is not one of those instances in which a person refers to herself as a “friend.” Do you see any quotation marks?) Not surprisingly, she is finding it difficult to land said job. As reported on Vault’s Law Blog, June was a particularly bad month when it came to legal unemployment.

My friend’s situation is not great. Of course, I did not say this to her. Indeed, like most conversations with my good friends, I say this behind her back instead. I am, after all, a good friend.

While things may not be looking so rosy for my friend as an aspiring small-firm lawyer, they are looking pretty sweet for some employed small-firm lawyers….

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Summer Associate American Idol – Learning How to Handle Criticism

By Above the Law

Last week we discussed the art of receiving feedback from your firm. The coin of feedback has two sides — praise and criticism. You learn more from the latter than from the former. If you are a solid citizen who is committed and enthusiastic, you can learn great deal from constructive criticism. You must understand why it is given and what it means. In this week’s Career Center Summer Associate Tips Series, Lateral Link’s Frank Kimball, an expert recruiter and former Biglaw hiring partner, discusses how to best handle criticism over the summer.

Criticism is usually well-intended. Firms want you to succeed; if you are bright, well-liked, and energetic, the natural human instinct takes over. The partners running the summer program want to run a successful program. Experienced lawyers love to find new lawyers who they can bring into their groups or teams. That, in one respect, is what the summer program is all about. Criticism is not delivered in the abstract. It is delivered (1) on the spot when you have made a mistake, (2) at a quieter moment during the project when the assigning attorney has a moment to breathe, or (3) during the regular review process.

Some lawyers are just unpleasant or angry people. Usually, however, the lawyer is angry about your mistake because it disrupted his or her schedule, confused his client, screwed up an issue in a brief, or otherwise made his professional life unpleasant. The lawyer might also be angry because it was his or her fault for not providing enough instruction or sufficient oversight (but don’t you point this out). Depersonalize your reaction and learn from it. Contain your own hostility, rage, anger, and other emotional reactions. Do not head to your office in tears, vent your emotions to other summer associates, or storm off into professional oblivion. At the end of the day, run five miles or bike around the lake. Go to the gym and beat the heck out of a punching bag. Get on Above the Law and yell at Elie for a spelling mistake in one of his posts.

For more tips on handling criticism and making the most out of your summer clerkship experience, click here. For additional career insights, as well as profiles of individual law firms, check out the Career Center.

Bar Review Diaries: The Final Countdown

By Christopher Danzig

This is the Final Countdown. Exactly a week from now, many of you will be stuck at desks for upwards of two days, working to finish that little formality they call the Bar Exam. This is the last time we’ll hear from our Bar Review Diarists before they cross the threshold.

They are leaving behind their anxiety, fear and anger about the test. They are starting to accept their fate — whether that means proudly entering laywerhood in the next few weeks… or sometime next February.

Let’s check in on Mike, Mariah and Christopher one last time before they leap out of the nest, hoping to fly on wings of truth and justice…

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Somebody Always Brings Pie

By Elie Mystal

We haven’t really been covering the News Corp. / News of the World scandal because I want to be invited on to Fox News again (j/k). Whether or not Rupert Murdoch or his company broke various U.K. laws is not something we’ve looked at in depth.

And we’ll not look at it in depth here. Instead, we’re just going to show you a video of a man being hit with a pie.

Because you never know when your client might be in this situation…

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Lawyer of the Day: Georgetown Law Grad Pulls Trigger, May Have Shot Career In The Foot

By Elie Mystal

You realize we live in a society that puts more warning labels on cigarettes than guns.

It’s still a very challenging economy for recent law school graduates. The class of 2011 has just hit the market and many of them are still without jobs. For the class of 2010 — well, if it hasn’t happened by now you have to start wondering if it is ever going to happen.

But there’s a job opening in Miami, thanks to a spectacularly boneheaded move by a member of the class of 2010. Apparently, a 2010 GULC grad got drunk and fired his gun in the parking garage of a condominium.

He wasn’t arrested, but he will resign, because you can’t get drunk and shoot off your gun and still be a Miami prosecutor…

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An Update on Deidre Dare, Allen & Overy Associate Turned Aspiring Authoress

By David Lat

Deidre Dare

Last month, we reported on the latest adventures of Deidre Dare, the sexy expat lawyer who once worked in the Moscow office of Allen & Overy. Her London lawsuit against the firm was dismissed, but Dare is now suing A&O here in New York, seeking $35 million in punitive and compensatory damages.

In the same post, we mentioned that Dare was seeking to raise $25,000 to publish Expat, a book based on her time in Allen & Overy’s Moscow office. Dare described it as “a novel about a group of Westerners living and working in Moscow, Russia and their extravagant but dangerous lifestyle,” with a plot “inspired by a British Petroleum scandal that happened when I was there.”

Dare was trying to raise the $25K on Kickstarter, the popular website that serves as a fundraising platform for creative types with a surplus of ideas and a shortage of cash. Did she succeed?

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A new day in transcript management has arrived!

By Above the Law

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Morning Docket: 07.19.11

By Juggalo Law

Paul Oetken

* Ja Rule, another resident of Lat’s hometown, was sentenced to 28 months in jail, for failing to pay taxes. Rather than making some joke about him not being Always On Time with his tax payments, let’s instead just celebrate the existence of this hilarious picture. [Associated Press]

* J. Paul Oetken was confirmed to the S.D.N.Y. yesterday by the Senate, making him the first openly gay man appointed to the federal bench. I think it’s great that Chuck Grassley announced shortly before the vote that he would be supporting the nomination, but I also think it was unnecessary and offensive that he ended his announcement with “nohomo.” [Poliglot]

* Rupert Murdoch’s testifying before Parliament this morning which promises to be the Super Bowl for anglophile nerds. Will the old man survive? [Bloomberg]

* The News Corp. phone-hacking scandal has led to plenty of work for attorneys on “both sides of the pond.” This case is like the BP oil spill of dead girls’ phones being hacked. [Am Law Daily]

* Did Casey Anthony search for chloroform once or 84 times? The world is on tenterhooks, whatever that means. [New York Times]

* Another town clerk has resigned in New York due to gay marriages. The trials God is putting these people through remind me of the story of Gob. I think I spelled that right. [New York Post]

Feeling Hot Hot Hot: From NYU LLM Student to Beauty Queen

By David Lat

Foreign LLM students are often like Rodney Dangerfield: they don’t get no respect. American-born JD candidates make fun of LLMs: their awkwardness, their accents, their ignorance of U.S. customs, and their repeated references to life and law in their home countries (“Back on Mypos, we don’t have contributory negligence….”).

Well, next time you want to make fun of an LLM student, check yourself. That LLM student might be the future president of his country — like Mikheil Saakashvili, the Georgian president who earned an LLM at Columbia Law School.

Or, better yet, that LLM student might be the most beautiful woman out of 600,000,000. The nation of India has a population of around 1.2 billion — and a former LLM student at NYU Law School was just crowned Miss India, making her that country’s #1 specimen of womanhood. Eat your heart out, Reema Bajaj.

The new Miss India’s name is Vasuki Sunkavalli. Let’s check her out, shall we?

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