Newt Gingrich
Congress can say, “All right, in the future, the Ninth Circuit can meet, but it will have no clerks. By the way, we aren’t going to pay the electric bill for two years. And since you seem to be rendering justice in the dark, you don’t seem to need your law library, either.”
– Newt Gingrich, one of the Republican candidates hoping to take on Obama in Election 2012, suggesting a possible avenue that Congress could use to rein in the “pox on the western part of our country” otherwise known as the Ninth Circuit.
On Friday, we told you about the angry recent law school graduate who emailed a scathing letter to the alumni officers at his alma mater, Loyola Law School – Los Angeles. The graduate, whom we nicknamed “Loyola 6L,” called out the school’s career services office and the dean, Victor Gold.
Loyola 6L sent out his letter on Tuesday of last week. Last Thursday, alumni services decided it was time to have an alumni mixer.
Coincidence?
Continue reading “Loyola Law – L.A. Tries to Placate Disgruntled Recent Graduates”
Last week, the American Lawyer shined a spotlight on extensive partner departures from McDermott Will & Emery. According to Brian Baxter of Am Law Daily, a whopping 38 partners have left MWE in 2011 so far.
Some of these defections have come in clumps. Most notably, as we mentioned back in January, nine partners left McDermott for Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, as part of CWT’s raid on MWE’s energy law practice.
But that explains just a quarter of the year-to-date partner departures from McDermott. Let’s look at some of the others, explore possible implications for the firm, and discuss what might be motivating the movement toward the exits….
Continue reading “What’s Going on at McDermott Will & Emery?”
Being a woman is a tough job, especially when you’re working in a Biglaw atmosphere. Among the long list of things that Biglaw women have to worry about — making partner v. making dinner, picking up documents v. picking up the kids, cleaning up the house v. cleaning up a brief — being cordial to coworkers sometimes tends to fall by the wayside.
So ladies, have you been wondering why your legal secretary avoids eye contact with you at all costs? Or in the alternative, have you been wondering why your legal secretary is giving you a look of death? Here, let me give you a clue: it’s because your legal secretary secretly hates you.
A new study has revealed, however, that maybe it’s not such a secret after all….
Continue reading “Why Legal Secretaries Hate Women Lawyers”
Last week, we asked you to report on how many hours you were on track to bill in 2011. Well, the results are in, and damn, people out there in Biglaw have been working like dogs.
I hope there is a big bonus payoff for all the hours people have been billing.
I also hope that people are still finding time to live their life. One commenter disturbingly said, “I’m currently at 2650 for the year. I was hoping to get to 3000 by year-end, although it will be a stretch.”
I think that this commenter is bragging that he’s on pace to kill himself. But all around Biglaw, people are putting in time…
Continue reading “The Hours Results: Y’All Been Working Really Hard”
It’s hard to create career paths for in-house lawyers.
It’s easy to describe the career path for a junior lawyer at a law firm (even though the path may be illusory for many): Work hard and well and become a partner; work harder and better and become a richer and more powerful partner. Retire. Die.
So long as law firms are growing, that path appears to be available to some percentage of junior lawyers, and all can strive to follow it.
Corporations are different. There’s one general counsel, who probably has six or eight people reporting to her. Unless the general counsel moves on, retires, or dies, none of the lieutenants is moving up. The lieutenants in turn all have six or eight people reporting to them. Unless a lieutenant moves on, retires, or dies, none of the sub-lieutenants is moving up.
What can you do to create a career path for someone who reports to you in a corporation (other than eating poorly and exercising little, which might create an unexpected opening in the ranks)?
Continue reading “Inside Straight: Train To Stay, Or Train To Go?”
Stop sexually harassing me.
* Now trending on the Election 2012 campaign trail for Republicans: attacks on the federal court system. Be prepared for SCOTUS term limits and other ridiculous propositions. [New York Times]
* After some bratty behavior from MGA Entertainment, Orrick was allowed to withdraw as counsel. Maybe they’re using the unpaid $3.85M in legal fees to buy noses for their dolls. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Paul Ceglia’s latest lawyer, Dean Boylan, is used to working with fabricated evidence. He was just ordered to pay $300K in damages for creating some fake kiddie porn. [Bloomberg]
* Cate Edwards got married this weekend. Was daddy sporting another $400 haircut when he walked her down the aisle? [Hollywood Reporter]
* Who wins the prize for being the number one deadbeat taxpayer in New York’s Upper West Side? A lawyer with $1.2M in tax liens, that’s who. [New York Post]
* “It would be better if you didn’t wear any underwear to work.” The trials and tribulations of being a female bartender in Manhattan, now brought to you in lawsuit form. [New York Daily News]
A war hero comes home.
* Lawyers with four to seven years of experience are apparently now in demand. You know why? BECAUSE THEY FIRED ALL OF THEM TWO YEARS AGO! [WSJ Law Blog]
* Occupy Wall Street is now getting free hugs. It’s like, when you register as a liberal, somebody comes in the night and shoves your testicles back up inside you. [Dealbreaker]
* I dream of a day when eyewitness testimony is viewed as unreliable as DNA evidence is now thought to be reliable. [An Associate's Mind]
* If you are a lawyer, it’s really never about you. [What About Clients?]
Morgan Chu
* Even in the extremely unlikely scenario that one of these radical tax plans is adopted, tax lawyers will still find work. Believe it. [Going Concern]
* Morgan Chu, the hotshot Irell & Manella partner accused of sexual harassment, won a motion to compel arbitration of the dispute. [Law360 (subscription)]
* If you took the “over” on the cold day in Hell when BP is allowed to drill in the Gulf again, you’re gonna lose that bet. [New York Times]
* It’s a bit anticlimactic. And we’ve been pulled apart by political divisiveness. But we are just about done with the Iraq War! Yay? Ticker tape in Times Square, or is it going to be all, “Welcome home, while you were away we misplaced all the jobs and money”? [Politico]
Some people — for example, Chief Justice John Roberts — are not fans of contemporary legal scholarship. These critics might say, “You’d have to pay me to read the writings of a law professor!”
Well, what if a law professor were willing to pay you to check out his writings? And what if the writings in question were not, say, 150-page law review articles on “the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th-century Bulgaria,” but fun stuff — like song lyrics?
Continue reading “Some Random Friday Fun: A Law Professor Turned Songwriter”
As we mentioned in Morning Docket, Thomas M. Cooley Law School has now filed a motion to dismiss the class action suit filed against it over its employment statistics. New York Law School was also sued and filed its motion to dismiss a couple of days ago. NYLS argued that the students shouldn’t blame NYLS for its reporting of employment data because NYLS meets the standards set forth by the American Bar Association.
Cooley’s motion to dismiss is largely duplicative. The motion has some colorful lines about how the plaintiffs’ complaint “reads more like a free-form rant on an Internet blog,” but at the end of the day, Cooley isn’t really defending its statistics so much as it’s claiming the school can’t be sued because it’s in compliance with the ABA’s reporting standards.
Fine.
So let me ask the question: how does the ABA feel now that member institutions are blaming the ABA’s weak regulation for the schools’ questionable statistics?
Continue reading “Thomas M. Cooley Law School Adopts the ‘Blame the ABA’ Theory For Defending Its Employment Stats”
"My date got leid," says Sexy Screech.
Since the dates in D.C. have been a little more exciting than those in Chicago, I decided to spoil you with one last set-up in the nation’s capital. I brought in a pinch hitter for this one. After a “disarmingly feisty and unabashedly vivacious” female lawyer shot down the frat boy I set her up with, she asked to be set up with someone more her type, “aka really hot, quirky, and a commitment-phobic womanizer.” Pinch Hitter emailed me, saying he fit the profile.
Feist-Master said she was up for round two, but then disappeared off of the face of the earth email. So I decided to pull a switcheroo, pairing the quirky commitment-phobe with another of the many single female lawyers in D.C. I chose a hot, young T-14 grad at a Biglaw firm, who self-described as “optimistic, spontaneous, and active,” and said she would be a journalist if not a lawyer. The two legal eagles both sounded like thrill-seekers to me, so I sent them to The Russia House after work on a Friday and hoped for an epic night.
Epicness ensued. This is the kind of first date story that Wannabe Lara Logan will be able to milk for years…
Continue reading “Courtship Connection: If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try to Get Her Wasted”
Old people are so cute. From the way they don’t understand how to use modern technology, to the way they cringe at the music of our times, it just makes you want to squeeze their wrinkly, little cheeks.
And old people in love? Well, that’s even cuter. So when we heard about a British couple in their mid-70s who had finally decided to tie the knot, it was a total cuteness overload. But all of the cuteness screeched to a halt when we found out that the loving couple’s special day had been ruined by allegedly over-amplified versions of ABBA songs.
This bride had no desire to be a “Dancing Queen,” and it wasn’t because she might’ve had to use a walker….
Continue reading “This Bride Had No Desire to Be a ‘Dancing Queen,’ So She Sued”
I was never a huge fan of firm mentoring programs. In the days after firms started cracking down on using mentoring funds for hookers and blow, mentoring became distinctly less exciting. For the male associates, it seemed to revolve around mass quantities of red meat and booze. For the female associates, it was a lot of talk about “feelings,” and “glass ceilings,” and figuring out how to get a manicure on the firm’s dime. And while pretty nails are always nice, it was just one more billable hour that I’d have to make up at night.
But perhaps creative mentoring isn’t dead after all. It seems as though the Minnesota Hispanic Bar Association might be trying to bring some fun back to its mentorship program. The MHBA recently distributed fliers on the University of Minnesota Law School campus that bear images of some pretty questionable-looking foliage.
Was this just an innocent mistake, or are Minnesota Law students being offered a chance to expand their horizons in more ways than one? You be the judge, after the jump….
UPDATE (6:30 PM): We’ve added statements from a board member of the MHBA and from the president of the Latino Law Student Association at the University of Minnesota, also after the jump.
Continue reading “Minnesota Takes the High Road to Mentoring”
La vengeance se mange très-bien froide. Or as a Klingon might say, “revenge is a dish best served cold.”
I’m pretty sure that the administrators at Loyola Law School of Los Angeles didn’t think they were walking into a smackdown when they sent out an email to alumni asking them to update their employment statuses. But smacked they were, down on their heads, as one student’s epic, slightly rambling response to the innocent request just tore up the school for its behavior towards recent graduates.
And this comes from a student who seems to be doing well, despite the challenging economy. You want to know the best way to “get back” at your law school, if you so desire? Send them an email that says: “I am going to be very wealthy here, and I will not be giving a dime to Loyola.”
Time for the cold revenge of living well?
Continue reading “A Recent Law Grad’s Attempt at Revenge on His Law School”
In last week’s Grammer Pole, you voted to overwhelmingly approve the use of split infinitives. Fifty-three percent of Above the Law readers said that splitting infinitives is acceptable, even if it should be done sparingly. An additional forty percent said, “Yes. It’s great to liberally split infinitives!”
This suggests to me that ATL readers are a pragmatic bunch when it comes to language. You’re not hung up on hoary rules that don’t serve a practical purpose in communication.
I think I can guess, then, what you think of the injunction against ending a sentence with a preposition….
Continue reading “Grammer Pole of the Weak: Ending Sentences With Prepositions”
A lot of people ask me how I ended up in this in-house gig. Oh fine, nobody has asked, but darnit, I’m gonna tell you anyway. And I’ll even include a couple of tips that I think helped me. I’ll assume you’re already familiar with a lot of basic interview tips, such as doing your research, preparing a great résumé, and not picking your nose in front of the receptionist, so I’ll avoid mentioning those.
I like to call the interview process I had for my current job the Shortest Interview Process Ever (SIPE, for short). If you’ve worked at a company before, you’ve probably noticed that companies absolutely love, love, love acronyms and use them all the time. Just FYI, your ability to learn acronym-speak is directly proportional to your success as an in-house lawyer, so feel free to start making up your own and using them on your BFFs!
At one point, after a few years in Biglaw, I called a recruiter I had used before and asked if there were any jobs out there. The recruiter was not happy to hear from me. But this was reasonable because, a few years earlier, he had helped to get me a job offer — that I didn’t take. At that time, I had four job offers (obviously, this wasn’t during the economic hellhole that we’re in right now) and decided to go with one other than his. So understandably, he wasn’t a happy camper to hear from me this time around….
Continue reading “Moonlighting: The Shortest Interview Process Ever (SIPE)”
* According to Jacoby & Myers, “winning is everything.” And by “winning,” they, of course, mean “settling.” Ten points to Gryffindor Jay Shepherd. [New York Times]
* Ah, DOMA. Like it or not, we’re footing the bill for a law the DOJ won’t touch. This guy wants us to stop putting money in Paul Clement’s pockets. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Cooley Law has filed a motion to dismiss the complaint over its employment statistics. Reasoning? BLAME THE ABA. [National Law Journal]
* “You are a beautiful grave — dead inside.” Be still my heart. What kind of a girl wouldn’t appreciate a love letter like this? A former tax attorney from Winston & Strawn, apparently. [New York Post]
* What happened at yesterday’s hearing on public nudity in the Bay Area? Soon the only buns you’ll see at restaurants in San Francisco will be on the table. [San Francisco Chronicle]
Madonna
On Tuesday of this week, I popped over to San Francisco for the Computer Forensics Show. It’s a small tradeshow targeted at attorneys, accountants, IT professionals, and law enforcement.
I sat in on one legal technology-related panel that was particularly entertaining and informative. Many, if not most, of the people in the room were not attorneys. It was interesting to be a part of a non-attorney crowd and a reminder of how many people really don’t understand basic legal technology principles. What I heard underscored was the importance of maintaining a technology dialogue between legal and other parts of the business.
It was also chance to hear some awesome war stories from a veteran partner at a major law firm. Why did Archie Comics threaten to sue a baby? Why doesn’t Madonna like porn? Why aren’t you allowed to have the domain name fcukpenguins.com?
Beam me to the jump, Scotty, and let’s see….
Continue reading “How Not to Screw Up on the Internet”
* Another victim of the vengeful prosecution of Tyler Clementi’s roommate might be the guy Clementi was hooking up with when Dharun Ravi broadcast it. [Gawker]
* As I said on Twitter, you have to give Obama a little credit: when he uses suspect legal reasoning to do whatever he wants abroad, he comes home with scalps. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Here’s a job opening for an attorney that might not actually exist. [Constitutional Daily]
* This job opening is much cooler. But, don’t get me wrong, no Cooley grads are allowed to apply. Seriously. [The Legal Satyricon]
* I think the lesson here is there’s no reason anybody should ever want to immigrate to Alabama. [Huffington Post]
* Our thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends of Halley Catherine Shaw, a law student at Texas Southern University who died in a car crash earlier this week. [ABA Journal]
