I’m a man who likes to drink. In public. Often to the point of intoxication. So I’m not here to judge anybody who goes out and gets drunk. I’m not a hypocrite.
But I will say that it’s been a while since I went out on an epic bender. Something about getting older. You just feel the vomitous black-out coming on and it’s hard to push beyond that barrier.
Well, it’s hard for me. Maybe not so much for Laura L. Flippin. She’s a lawyer, a partner at DLA Piper. The Washington Post reports that last month she got charged with public intoxication.
The police report states that Laura Flippin’s blood alcohol level was .253, which is flippin’ epic…
Continue reading “DLA Piper Partner Picks A Penalty For Public Intoxication”
It’s impossible to know what would have happened if I had done something differently. Ultimately, I have what was, and remains, most important to me — a happy, healthy son.
– Elana Nightingale Dawson, the recent Northwestern Law graduate who went into active labor during the bar exam, commenting on the good news of her passing the Illinois bar.
Everyone knows that being engaged is kind of like test-driving a car.
If you discover that the fancy car you’ve chosen to take out on the road doesn’t turn left, then you probably don’t want to buy that car. Similarly, if the fancy man you’ve chosen (a doctor, ooh la la) breaks up with you, tries to woo you back with expensive gifts, and then sues you, then you probably don’t want to marry that man.
And when something like this happens in Texas, it’s like watching a real-life episode of Dallas unfold before your eyes….
Continue reading “What Happens When You Get Engaged Too Soon? You Get Sued”
On Friday, we told you about the administrator at New England Law who embezzled over $170,000.
To be honest, that was the first time I’d heard of New England Law School, and I thought I knew all of the ABA-accredited law schools. But evidently, I haven’t taken the “T” (the Boston subway system) in quite awhile. Apparently, regular T passengers know of New England Law.
Though if you are the kind of person who believes subway ads, you might have a totally different impression of New England Law than anybody else….
Continue reading “Do People Choose Law Schools Based On Subway Ads?”
It’s that time of year again when the Career Center is taking your nominations for the top Biglaw partners to work for. Last year, we highlighted 69 exceptional partners from all over the country who are not only great at what they do, but who are also great to work for.
Now we’re looking for some new names to grace the pages of Above the Law. So if you know a phenomenal Biglaw partner who associates truly enjoy working for, take our short survey, brought to you by Lateral Link, and go ahead and lavish the praise on him or her.
Check back in the coming weeks as we reveal the results in a multi-part series.
The Financial Times Innovative Lawyers Awards ceremony, held in London last Wednesday, was most notable for the contrast between the puppy-like excitement of the lawyer nominees and the auto-pilot professionalism of the host, FT editor Lionel Barber, whose aura was of a man who’d rather be at home watching TV.
This was a shame, not only for the confused lawyers struggling to understand why Barber wasn’t high-fiving them as they collected their trophies, but because it overshadowed the setting of a world record. Never before has the adjective “innovative” — or its derivations “innovate,” “innovation,” and “innovator” — been used with such frequency in a single evening.
Between them, these four words featured in 14 of the 15 award names, peppered the subsequent acceptance speeches, dominated the copy of the awards brochure, and strangled the dinner conversation. Hypnotised by the repetition, I was convinced by the end that lawyers could see the future and were responsible for all of the great achievements of humankind.
However, having regained my sense of reality during the Tube ride home, it slowly dawned on me that most of the innovation I’d spent the last five hours being bombarded with wasn’t innovation at all, but simply lawyers doing their jobs. The “innovation in corporate law” award, for example, went to two law firms which acted on a merger, and the “innovation in dispute resolution” prize was given to a firm that won a case.
At other times, “innovation” was employed as a euphemism for not especially original ways to cut jobs….
Continue reading “Letter from London: Beware of the Innovative Lawyers”
The Penthouse Club is no Bada Bing.
* The legal sector lost 1,300 jobs in September. And because that’s not depressing enough, lawyers now have to compete for jobs with computers. Guess it’s time to learn binary. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Lawsuit Abuse Awareness Week kicked off yesterday in West Virginia. Too bad this campaign isn’t in Michigan, where a woman is suing over a misleading movie trailer. [Washington Post]
* Think you had it rough on the bar exam? Try being in active labor during the MBE. Our congratulations go out to Elana Nightingale Dawson for passing the Illinois bar! [Daily Herald]
* What’s the point of being in witness protection when you’re getting sued over dueling nudie bars in Texas? You may be the real life Tony, but you’re disrespecting the Bing. [New York Post]
* Pants on the ground / Pants on the ground / Lookin’ like a fool with your pants on the ground. A judge in New York finally took General Larry Platt’s words of wisdom to heart. [Daily Mail]
Al Davis
So apparently Steve Jobs died last week? Perhaps you heard about it. Seems like everyone raced to their Zunes to eulogize the man who, quite literally, revolutionized the way we ignore homeless people on our walk to work. Just a whole lot of blubbering and crying and waxing poetic about iPads and Newtons and other fully assembled and ready-to-go computational machines. So yeah, he was a huge deal and I’m not sure how we’ll ever make it in his absence.
It would take a truly remarkable man’s death to overshadow the Apple guru’s passing. And so we can be thankful for Al Davis, who shuffled off this mortal coil on Saturday, slipping the surly bonds of earth, blah blah, whatever. I probably don’t need to tell you this, but Al Davis epitomized everything this website is about. Through sheer cunning and derring-do, Davis committed his life to two things: lawsuits and trolling the everliving s**t out of the most successful sports league this country has ever known.
After the jump, just read baby….
Continue reading “Al Davis, R.I.P.”
Anwar al-Awlaki
Ed. note: In honor of Columbus Day (and Canadian Thanksgiving), we’ll be on a reduced publication schedule today. We’ll be back in full force tomorrow.
* If you are curious about that legal memo justifying the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, Charlie Savage describes its contents in this very interesting NYT piece. [New York Times]
* Ten years after the start of the anthrax attacks, some observers are asking whether Bruce Ivins, the Army microbiologist blamed for the attacks by the FBI, , was wrongly accused. [How Appealing]
Paul Bergrin
* Jury selection gets underway this week in the trial of notorious New Jersey lawyer Paul Bergrin (who’s being represented by a famous defense lawyer). [Newark Star-Ledger via WSJ Law Blog]
* Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law professor turned U.S. Senate candidate, is making “a proper case for liberalism,” according to E.J. Dionne Jr. [Washington Post]
* Andrew Cohen’s review of Justice John Paul Stevens’s new book, Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir (affiliate link). [The Atlantic]
* In case you missed it last week, here is Proskauer’s response to the discrimination lawsuit filed against it by its former CFO, Elly Rosenthal. [Am Law Daily]
One of the interesting concepts in Professor Rosenbaum’s book (affiliate link) is that the law lacks a soul. The law lacks tenderness. The law is objective and cold and inhumane. The law abhors emotion. I don’t think that’s true.
Every time I sentence a defendant, there is a lot of emotion. I think there is a lot of humanity in the law.
– Judge Denny Chin (2d Cir.), quoted in an interesting New York Times article focused on his sentencing practices (back when he was an S.D.N.Y. judge).
If you sinned enough to deserve this horn, you had a bad ass year.
* Instead of a human, TSA may employ a computer to look at your naked body scan. I think somebody misunderstood the memo; we want robots to be our sex slaves, not the other way around. [Not So Private Parts / Forbes]
* Lawyers need to dream bigger about their careers, says Cordell Parvin. Good advice. I want all the young lawyers out there to close their eyes and think, “I will have… a career!” Now, isn’t that helpful? [Cordell Parvin Blog]
* Fair use shouldn’t be that hard for other bloggers to understand. Or other lawyers to understand. In fact, if you come across a lawyer/blogger who doesn’t “understand” fair use, I think it’s fair to ask him if he understands that he’s an “a$$hole.” [Law Sites]
* Let me be clear about this, there is no conflict in life that you won’t be a little better prepared for if you’ve read and internalized the lessons from Sun Tzu. [Underdog]
* Patent judge cashes in. [The Patent Examiner]
* Do you know what ATL contributor Chris Danzig does in his spare time? Show up at the Oaklandish Harvest Hoedown at around 1:45 to find out. [Rockridge Out and About]
* Is there a lot of religious discrimination going on in sports? It’s got to be tough when you need to be home before Friday night lights. [Legal Blitz]
* Happy Yom Kippur. I must say, if I was Jewish, I would have been sinning like a mofo all this week. Meats and cheeses for everybody, know what I’m saying? [Washington Post]
Thank God!
– Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown commenting in response to opponent Elizabeth Warren’s recent jab that she “didn’t have to take her clothes off” to pay for college.
(Actually, Brown posed nude for Cosmopolitan in 1982, when he was studying for finals at Boston College Law School.)
I think we get so used to law schools taking money out of the hands of their students that we forget that there can actually be a crime when you appropriate student funds for yourself.
The Boston Globe reports that the controller of a Massachusetts law school admitted he embezzled more than $170,000 from the school over two and a half years. I know, wouldn’t it be great if they also admitted that encouraging students to go to law school at a cost of anything approaching $170K should be a crime?
It’s not, of course, but considering the school, it’s somewhat hard to figure out where the embezzlement stopped and where the collection of tuition and fees began….
Continue reading “Law School Controller Embezzles Funds: Turns Out, This Is Still a Crime”
Is the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer more attractive than the average attorney?
Last week, we posed a provocative question: Are The 1Ls Actually Dumber This Year? Based on the decisive vote in our reader poll, the answer appears to be “yes.”
Today we bring you another controversial query: Are male lawyers and law students getting uglier? Does the J.D. degree — and the student debt that comes with it — make them look fat?
Whether male lawyers are decreasing in attractiveness seems subjective. But there’s actually some evidence that the men of the legal profession are 66 percent less hot than they were last year….
Continue reading “Are Male Lawyers Getting Less Attractive?”
Our candidates for the coveted Lawyer of the Month title have been a bit tame for the past few months. This time around, we’ve chosen some lawyers and law students who represent our more prurient interests and our unabashed love for scandal.
Aficionados of hookers? We’ve got ‘em. Vicious tongue lashings? We’ve got those, too.
This installment of the competition is the sex, violence, and stupidity edition. Check out our deadly and disorderly nominees for the month of September….
Continue reading “Lawyer of the Month: September Reader Poll”
Reading the Wall Street Journal would probably be better than occupying the street itself.
No mob has ever changed the course of history. I’m sure we can all point out some famous mobs, but if you look beyond rabble, there is always a smart person or organization who knows how to use and manipulate the mob in order to make it an agent of change. French people organized in the streets a lot, and it took a Robespierre to turn them into a revolution. Angry poor white people have been ridiculously pissed off since the Civil Rights movement, and it took a Grover Norquist to turn that passion into an anti-tax platform that’s against the economic interest of the very mob that advocates it.
For the last two weeks, the Occupy Wall Street people have been a mob — a leaderless, unfocused, and harmless mob. They’re not even violent. And so they are (for some) easy to dismiss, ignore, and deride.
The lawyers in the audience should be thankful for that. Because if this collection of people could get their act together, they wouldn’t be occupying Wall Street. They’d be occupying K Street. They’d be occupying First Street. They’d be sitting in the lobby of the Lipstick Building or the Death Star asking questions of the people who help “the banks” get around any regulation the overmatched SEC can come up with.
The Occupy Wall Street people have no frame of reference; they’re like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie and wants to know… look, they’re just out of their element….
Continue reading “Occupy Wall Street Needs To Occupy A Library”
The most recent installment of Grammer Pole of the Weak showcased the sophistication of Above the Law readers. The poll results show that most ATL readers appreciate the distinction between “that” and “which” (which they like to show off in their legal writing).
Today we tackle an issue that is less clear-cut, which will probably result in a more closely divided vote than last week’s. Here is the issue: What is the proper capitalization for the first word of an independent clause that follows a colon?
If that sounds confusing, please keep reading for clarification….
Continue reading “Grammer Pole of the Weak: Post-Colon Capitalization”
So you’ve moved in-house or are planning to go in-house sometime. Be ready to think less like a lawyer.
Business clients think differently. I know, crazy, right? But, seriously, one of the biggest transitions from working as a transactional lawyer at a law firm and moving over to a company is learning to understand the business client’s perspective.
At a law firm, your client is typically another lawyer, whether it’s a senior associate, a partner, or an in-house lawyer. Lawyers hold court at the top of the hierarchy and are assumed valuable until proven otherwise. Legal work reigns supreme.
At a company, your boss will probably be an attorney but, as a transactional in-house attorney, you will most likely consider non-lawyers — people in other areas of the company — to be your clients. Plus, you’ve probably shifted from your law firm throne to mingling as one of the middle-management masses. At a company, mention “legal work” and “supreme” in the same sentence and you’ll get laughed off your middle-management office chair. On the contrary, you may sometimes need to remind business people that you exist (this can be kind of awkward, really) and that you can, you know, maybe provide value once in a while….
Continue reading “Moonlighting: Feeling the Kumbaya (Part 1)”
