Archive for September 2011

Courtship Connection Chitown: Nothing To Feel Guilty About

By Kashmir Hill

Courtship Connection blew into the Windy City on the tail end of the summer. (You can still sign up here, single Chicagoans.) This week marks the city’s first two Courtship dates. One couple will go out tonight (good luck!). I’m hoping they have a better time than the two lawyers who met each other in front of a closed restaurant on Monday night.

The two Biglaw associates said there wasn’t “a spark.” Instead of a spark, there was a big height difference. It’s hard out there for the tall lady lawyers….

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Quote of the Day: The Joys of Being a Partner?

By Staci Zaretsky

I would love to dominate and humiliate and degrade you, privately of course.

— Robert Hoffman, a lawyer in California, in an alleged expression of his sexual desires on the “Casual Encounters” section of Craigslist.

(Hoffman has been charged with rape, forced oral copulation, and sexual battery. His lawyer, Stuart Hanlon, claims that a videotape of one of the encounters exists and may exonerate his client.)

First Circuit Has No Sympathy For Cops Who Say, ‘Don’t Tape Me, Bro!’

By Christopher Danzig

Long before I became a law blogger, I spent a good chunk of time working as a photojournalist. Periodically, I wound up photographing the police. Whether it was at an arrest at a football game, or an officer who suffered an unusual injury, officers rarely hassled me because I usually had a press pass and a big, professional-looking camera.

But anyone can film in public spaces. One of the most important — and overlooked — technological developments of the last five-odd years is the ease with which anyone can record police doing their jobs and throw the video on YouTube. The technology can be a great deterrent against police misconduct.

So it’s really, seriously disturbing when police try to intimidate witnesses into turning off their cellphone cameras. It’s even more nauseating when someone gets arrested for simply filming police activity. Luckily, a recent decision from First Circuit unambiguously told police to cut it out.

Keep reading for details about the man who was arrested for taping police in America’s oldest public park, as well as Judge Kermit Lipez’s benchslap of the officers who made the arrest….

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Congratulations to Justice Goodwin Liu!

By David Lat

Say hello to Justice Liu.

Congratulations to Goodwin Liu — until today Professor Liu, but after today, Justice Liu.

In July, California Governor Jerry Brown nominated the 40-year-old Liu, a law professor at Boalt Hall, to serve on the California Supreme Court. The nomination was subject to the approval of a three-member state commission.

What did the commission have to say about the Liu nomination?

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Legal Technology Leadership Summit: Accepting Nominations for the Corporate Legal Technology Leadership Award

By Above the Law

Get excited, because the Legal Technology Leadership Summit is less than one week away. It is set to take place from September 6 – 8, on Amelia Island, Florida. You can access the full agenda here if you’d like to see the interesting programs that are in store for all Summit attendees.

It is only fitting that we would honor a leader in corporate legal technology at the Summit, so we are currently accepting nominations for the first Corporate Legal Technology Leadership Award. This award recognizes the legal department and the legal technology innovator(s) that identified a problem, championed a solution, and monitored the outcome. The individual winner of the award will receive a Dell Inspiron Duo Tablet PC + Audio Dock, as well as a plaque commemorating the award.

Corporate legal departments or the representatives of the department may submit nominations. There is no fee to enter. To submit a nomination, please complete the online form available here.

A special thanks to our generous Summit Ambassadors, who are making this event possible: Applied Discovery, Autonomy, Clearwell Systems (now a part of Symantec), Datacert, Dell, Ernst & Young, Falcon Discovery, FTI Technology, Guidance Software, Mitratech, Nextpoint, Nuix, Pangea3, Planet Data, ProSearch Strategies, QuisLex, Recommind, Robert Half eDiscovery Services, TCDI, Valora Technologies, and WestlawNext.

We would also like to thank our Law Firm Sponsors: Dorsey & Whitney, Shook Hardy & Bacon, WilmerHale, and Winston & Strawn.

Click here to register for the conference. We look forward to seeing you there.

Temple Law Wants Its Alumni to Work on a ‘Lunch Truch’

By Staci Zaretsky

Here at Above the Law, we sometimes write about career alternatives for lawyers. We’ve noticed a trend: former lawyers turning to the food service industry. But no, they’re not serving overpriced scones at Starbucks — they’re selling cupcakes out of trucks.

As it turns out, working at a cupcake truck can be a lucrative career. In the past, we’ve profiled several successful lawyers with mobile cupcakeries, like Lev Ekster, Sam Whitfield, and Kate Carrara.

And Temple Law School has apparently caught on to the fact that a lawyer can rake in the dough as a baker, so they’ve posted an exciting job opportunity on their Career Planning Manager. See what’s cooking, after the jump….

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eDiscovery Outsourcing Nightmares? We Know, We’ve Been There. Re-Imagine eDiscovery, From the InsideOut™

By Above the Law


Even with the latest whiz-bang technology, eDiscovery remains a risk and cost nightmare for the most sophisticated legal departments. We believe the problem is not eDiscovery–the problem is how it is managed.

eDiscovery is most often outsourced to multiple providers and law firms, each using a different process that is divorced from your company’s internal environment. As a result, eDiscovery is managed from the outside-in, with little-to-no consistency across matters.

What does this create? A highly fractured and disjointed effort that leads to unnecessary motions to compel, sanctions and ever increasing costs, risks and negative publicity. All despite the latest in-house technologies.

Our founding team of lawyers and technologists witnessed this problem first-hand in their roles as former in-house lawyers and investigators at Fortune 200 companies. Leveraging this in-house perspective, we created InsideOut™, a discovery management model designed by in-house teams for in-house teams. InsideOut™ includes the following services:

  • In-house e-discovery assessment,
  • Preservation and legal hold,
  • Collections and forensics,
  • Processing and culling,
  • Database management and hosting,
  • Searching and early case assessment,
  • Custodian interviews
  • Document review,
  • Privilege logging, and
  • Production management.

Falcon manages InsideOut™ for some of the nation’s most distinguished corporate legal departments, including the 2008 Corporate Legal Department of the Year. InsideOut™ includes hundreds of proprietary processes, managed by our team of attorneys, certified project managers and technology experts. How does it work?

- First, we collaborate with you to create and/or refine a standardized in-house methodology for discovery response.

- Second, we implement and integrate this process and any enabling technology within the legal department and among outside counsel.

- Third, our attorney and technology teams collaborate with you and outside counsel to manage the process and the technology both within and across matters.

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Inside Straight: Don’t Be A Mentor!

By Mark Herrmann

I am not a mentor!

Never have been. Never will be. Don’t care to be.

I’m a lawyer. I’m a co-worker. In some cases, I may be a friend. But I’m not a mentor; I have no time for that crap.

When I was clerking (for the Honorable Dorothy W. Nelson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit), my judge was (and remains) a delight. She was a warm, engaging person who treated everyone as an equal. She was living proof that you don’t have to give up on human kindness just because you’ve become powerful. She taught, by example, many lessons about work-life balance and the meaning of humanity.

But a mentor? They hadn’t invented the word “mentor” (at least with its current connotation) back in 1983. I don’t think Judge Nelson gave the idea a moment’s thought….

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Morning Docket: 09.01.11

By Staci Zaretsky

Paul Bergrin

* Paul Bergrin wants to represent himself in his racketeering case. They say that a man who represents himself has a fool for a client, but that’s not the case when you’re considered the Baddest Lawyer in the History of Jersey. [Philadelphia Inquirer]

* Hordes of Biglaw lawyers couldn’t stop the DOJ from trying to block the AT&T/T-Mobile merger. New antitrust issues abound, like “higher prices, fewer choices and lower quality products.” They already have a monopoly on crappy coverage. [Am Law Daily]

* The truth? You can’t handle the truth! That, or you don’t really care about it when it comes to Barry Bonds. The big-headed baseball MVP will not face a retrial on his perjury charges. [CNN]

* Sasan Ansari, a convicted killer in Canada, will return to the University of British Columbia to complete law school. Good luck with your character and fitness evaluation, eh? [Vancouver Sun]

Jessica Beagley

* Jessica Beagley managed to avoid jail time at sentencing. Come on, judge, you could’ve at least given her a taste of her own medicine: hot sauce and a cold shower. [WSJ Law Blog]

* BitTorrent porn? On my grandma’s computer? It’s more likely than you think. After this California granny scolded Steele Hansmeier, the lawsuit against her was dropped. She mailed the firm a Werther’s Original in thanks. [Huffington Post]

* Nudity first, names later. I like this sheriff deputy’s alleged style. A girl in Utah is suing over a roadside traffic rendezvous that she says turned into an illegal strip search. [Standard-Examiner]

Lawsuit of the Day: 3M v. Lanny Davis

By David Lat

Lanny Davis

Physician, heal thyself? D.C. power broker Lanny Davis, a guru of crisis management, now has a crisis of his own to manage.

Davis has been hit with a federal lawsuit by, oddly enough, one of America’s largest corporations: 3M, the Fortune 100 company and Dow Jones Industrial Average component that’s famous for such products as Post-it Notes and Scotch tape. It’s surprising to see a mega-corporation like 3M going after a high-profile lawyer like Davis.

When you see a large corporation suing a prominent attorney like Davis — who, before launching his own firm last year, was a partner at such firms as McDermott Will & Emery, Orrick, and Patton Boggs — you might expect a malpractice claim. But that’s not the case here….

UPDATE (10:50 AM): Comments from Lanny Davis and his client, the Porton Group, have been added below. They point out that this is 3M’s third bite at the apple — the company previously filed two similar cases in New York state court. (The first suit was withdrawn, while the second still appears to be pending — rather strange, given the D.C. federal court filing.)

UPDATE (5:50 PM): Here is more information about 3M v. Lanny Davis.

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