Whenever a person passes away while they are literally at their desk, we feel compelled to mention it. When these kinds of things happen, it affects a much wider circle of people than the family and friends of the deceased. It’s almost impossible not to think of your own mortality — and what you are doing with the limited time you have — when confronted with a person who passed away while diligently working and serving his clients.
For many people, working in Biglaw until the day they die would sound like a nightmare. The nature of the profession is that the high salaries and high status attract a number of people to the field who have no desire to actually practice law or service clients over the long term. There are so many people in Biglaw who are there to make enough money so they can do other things with their life. There are so many who are trying to get out before they end up there forever.
But there are others who are in Biglaw because they like it. There are those who honestly love the work, people who get so much intellectual and even emotional satisfaction from the work that their salary and status are non-concerns.
From all indications, Mark P. Edwards, a partner at Morgan Lewis & Bockius who died at his desk on Friday, was one of those people. His friends and family will mourn that his life was too short, but hopefully they will feel that he died doing what he wanted to do….
Continue reading “Morgan Lewis Partner Passes Away in Office”
Earlier this week, we asked readers to submit possible captions for this photo:
Let’s have a look at what our readers were able to come up with, and then vote on the finalists….
Continue reading “Caption Contest Finalists: Have a Seat…”
If we try hard enough, I bet we can blame the entire collapse of the American economy on some Lehman Brothers dudes who had too much Four Loko.
We’ve been following the successful crusade to get the original Four Loko banned because of its “dangerous” combination of caffeine and alcohol. Outlawing one specific mixture of alcohol and caffeine in a society where both alcohol and caffeine are abundant has always seemed stupid to me. It’s blaming a drink manufacturer for other people’s lack of personal responsibility. Four Loko, when enjoyed responsibly, was no more dangerous than any other alcoholic drink. When it was enjoyed by idiots, stupid things happened. Banning Four Loko just encourages blaming others for your own stupid and drunken behavior.
We recently saw what has to be the height of this Four Loko lunacy. A college student was shot to death last year, and now his family is suing the makers of Four Loko….
Continue reading “Parents Try To Blame Four Loko For Son Getting Shot”
Ed. note: This post is by Will Meyerhofer, a former Sullivan & Cromwell attorney turned psychotherapist. He holds degrees from Harvard, NYU Law, and The Hunter College School of Social Work, and he blogs at The People’s Therapist. His new book, Way Worse Than Being A Dentist, is available on Amazon, as is his previous book, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy (affiliate links).
It’s mid-September. I’m talking with a client , a 3L at a top-tier school.
“Here’s how it works,” she explains. “There’s the have’s and the have-nots. Either you have a job offer, or you don’t. If you don’t, it sucks. You feel like an illegal alien.”
Unfortunately, she’s a have-not…
Continue reading “The Haves and the Have-nots”
A reader alerted us to the following Google ad, which showed up in a Gmail sidebar next to a law-related email chain:
Whoa! Is this for real? Is a second-year student at Cardozo Law School actually advertising himself via text ads on Google, promoting himself as “[a] great choice for Summer Associate”?
Are Cardozo law students truly this desperate? Is this why the career services dean quit to teach yoga? Should Cardozo focus less on teaching students how to walk and more on teaching them how to conduct job searches?
Or is this too harsh an assessment? Let’s learn more about the 2L behind this unusual ad.
Continue reading “One 2L’s Innovative Approach to Job Hunting”
* Yet another appeals court has has ruled that Obamacare is constitutional. Aww, can’t we wait for the other side to catch up a little before it goes to the Supreme Court? [Wall Street Journal]
* How did it go for this controversial ballot initiative? As it turns out, the personhood amendment was so stupid that it couldn’t even pass in Mississippi. Color me surprised. [New York Times]
* Raj Rajaratnam has to pay $92.8M in penalties in his SEC case, but come on, he’s a billionaire. Much like the honey badger, Raj don’t care, and he certainly don’t give a sh*t. [Bloomberg]
* We thought this might be a swing and a miss, but the Dodgers won approval to pay Dewey & LeBoeuf and Young Conaway after hitting the Trustee’s curveball out of the park. [Businessweek]
* Best use of footnotes ever? Pitbull’s lawyers are trying to get LiLo’s case against him removed to federal court, and gossip rags are cited in the footnotes more than law. [Hollywood Reporter]
Elie wasn't the only ATL writer who dressed as a pirate this year.
Unfortunately, ATL editor emeritus Kashmir Hill has never been molested. But I think she’s getting rogered-but-good by her landlord.
Kash, who recently moved to D.C., sent us pictures of her Halloween party this year because, well, I asked, and one of the cool things about my job is that I can generally demand that women send in pictures of themselves without it sounding too creepy.
She had a pirate-themed party. But when she showed me why she went with that theme, my lawyer brain kicked in and instead of a suggestively dressed Kash, I saw a potential lawsuit in the making.
Since ATL readers have been so helpful with my own landlord/tenant issues, I thought you guys might be able to provide Kash with some unsolicited advice.
And yes, I’ll show you her Halloween costume in the bargain….
Continue reading “Does Kash Have to Walk the Plank?”
Julie Taymor will probably make her lawyer give opening statements while suspended from a trapeze high above the courtroom.
* Julie Taymor, former director of Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark, is suing the producers of Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark, for infringing on her creative work. As with so many things in that production, I don’t think this is supposed to be part of the show. [The Hollywood Reporter]
* In this podcast, I give some advice on what to do with your summer, depending on your class year. Remember 1Ls, the summer Club Med jobs fill up fast. [Law School Interactive]
* I didn’t get to weigh in on the Herman Cain thing yesterday, but instead of blaming the alleged victim, I think the Cain campaign should blame the alleged victim’s lawyer. If regular Americans knew what kind of lawyer Gloria Allred was, Cain would be winning in the court of public opinion already. [Huffington Post]
* I always tried to make my memos to file funny. There’s comedy gold in a file at Debevoise should a future archaeologist ever dig it up. [What About Clients?]
* Somebody actually paid attention to Larry Crowne advertising long enough to be offended? [Lowering the Bar / Forbes]
* More women on the faculty lead to more women on the law review. Of course, more women on the law review increases the chances of law review inbreeding, which could one day lead to a race of excellent grammarians who nonetheless burn when confronted with sunlight or skin care products. [Ms. JD]
* Every law student should be on Twitter? Maybe. Things would certainly move faster if every lawyer could make an argument in 140 characters. [Girls Guide to Law School]
* You see how people are reacting to Penn State right now? That’s how people should have been reacting to the POPE for YEARS. Now when are the civil lawsuits gonna start? [SB Nation]
As you may have guessed from reading many of my posts, I am the self-appointed spokeswoman for women in small law firms. I recently read a post on the Careerist about women lawyers and ambition. Vivia Chen cites some sobering statistics from a survey done by More magazine: 43% of women (out of 500 35-60 year-olds surveyed) are less ambitious now than ten years ago; 73% would not apply for their bosses’ jobs (38% of them do not want to because they do not want to deal with the politics, pressure and responsibility); and 92% of women rate job flexibility as their number one career priority.
From this survey, Chen concludes as follows: “If you’re a female lawyer (or aspiring to be), you might be wasting your energy on the wrong endeavor. In fact, if you’re gunning for any high-paying, high-profile job in a male-dominated field, you might as well put the brakes on right now. Not only are your odds of success remote, but you won’t be happy.”
So now what do I say to my small-firm sisters? You are all lazy bums?
Continue reading “Size Matters: Them Lazy Broads?”
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“If you win this case, there is nothing to prevent the police or government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States,” said Justice Breyer.
The Supreme Court justices were decked out in their usual black robes today for U.S. vs Jones [pdf], a case involving the question of whether police need a warrant to attach a GPS tracker to someone’s car. But given their paranoia about possible technology-enabled government intrusions on privacy, it might not have been surprising if they had also been wearing tin foil hats.
Continue reading “SCOTUS Not Psyched About Idea Of Government Secretly Putting GPS Trackers On Their Cars”
This is perhaps the dog-gonest case ever to reach a federal appellate court.
– Judge Ronald Lee Gilman, writing for Sixth Circuit in O’Neill v. Louisville/Jefferson County Metro Government, a case that involved the forcible implanting of microchips in a family’s dogs without consent.
When a tipster sent us an e-mail with the subject, “Court awards $700,000+ in sanctions for destruction of FB page,” I thought it sounded like it might be interesting. Because hey, that’s a lot of money.
I didn’t realize it would also be one of the most depressing legal news stories I’ve read since this tragic murder-suicide.
The three-quarters-of-a-million-dollar sanction award was levied against the widower of a woman killed in a car accident and the widower’s lawyer. The ruling was an abrupt table-turn for Isaiah Lester, who had previously won a $10 million wrongful death suit against the driver whose truck overturned and killed his wife.
Keep reading for the depressing details….
Continue reading “Facebook Spoliation Costs Widower and His Attorney $700K in Sanctions”
Back in August, we reported on National Jurist’s fifth annual list of the 60 Best Value law schools. The Best Value ranking system takes into account the following criteria: in-state tuition, average student debt, the percentage of graduates employed nine months after graduation, and bar passage rates.
Two months ago, the list was unranked, but the final tallies for the honor roll have now arrived. As in years past, in addition to the rankings, National Jurist has given letter grades to the rest of the schools on the list, ranging from A- to F. Wouldn’t you hate to be a student or an alumnus of a law school with a failing grade?
Check and see if your school made the grade, after the jump….
Continue reading “The ‘Best Value’ Law Schools of 2011, Now With Numerical Rankings and Grades”
Today we wrap up coverage of the top California partners to work for, as selected by our readers (see Part 1 here).
These six partners have diverse practices that range from real estate, to labor and employment, to IP, and work at some of the nation’s finest firms: Cooley, DLA Piper, Sheppard Mullin, Jones Day, Bingham McCutchen, and Best Best & Krieger.
Let’s find out why associates are thrilled to be working for these partners….
Continue reading “Career Center Survey Results: Top Partners to Work For – California (Part 2)”
It’s time to check in on the scandal involving the University of Illinois College of Law and its false reporting on the qualifications of its admitted students. Every time we do look at Illinois, the school tells us that “this time” they’ve figured out the full extent of the problem — and it’s a bigger mess than the last time they piped up.
On that scale, today is no different. When the story first broke in September, Illinois claimed that admissions data had only been falsified for one year. Then, a few weeks later, Illinois said that data for four class years had been falsified. Today, Illinois says it has completed a two-month investigation that cost the school $1 million. Now they’re saying that the admissions data for six class years have been compromised, based on a report prepared for the school by Jones Day and Duff & Phelps.
I wonder how many years of lying Illinois would have discovered if they spent $2 million?
But people will be distracted from the ever growing number of times Illinois is self-reporting it lied to people. That’s because today, Illinois has offered up a sacrificial lamb. There’s a head on a platter, there’s a body on the pyre, and Illinois College of Law would have you believe that it has identified the one, the only, the sole person responsible for this entire scandal….
Continue reading “Illinois Law and the Lone Gunman Theory of Admissions Fraud”
To qualify as a lawyer in the U.K., you first have to eat 12 dinners. Seriously. OK, it’s only barristers (British trial lawyers) who must meet this requirement. And they have to pass legal exams as well as eat. But the essence of my slightly sensationalised opening sentence is true: no dinners, no qualification.
Here’s what happens: students go to law school in the day, then every month or so go and eat a formal dinner at one of London’s inns of court (ancient clubs for trial lawyers). The medieval ritual has its roots in the pre-law school days when “sons of country gentlemen” from across Britain would come to lodge in the inns, attending lectures, taking part in mock courts, and dining together in the inns’ main halls (Harry Potter-style places that are famous for hosting Shakespeare’s original plays). Certain traditions are still followed, like toasting the Queen and refusing to shake hands with anyone (barristers are historically forbidden from shaking hands each other’s hands). But mainly it’s about getting drunk — on port, the U.K. establishment’s tipple of choice.
Why am I telling you about this? To give you a sense of port’s central role in the education of our young, as a primer for a story about the Oxford University Conservative association accidentally revealing its hate-filled Nazi soul at a recent “port and policy” night….
Continue reading “Letter from London: Port, Nazis, and In-House Lawyers”
Sandusky realizes he's been sacked.
* “The most valuable assets of a law firm go home every night.” If only Biglaw firms realized that prior to dissolution, we’d probably have a lot more happy partners and associates. [WSJ Law Blog]
* If we can’t deregulate the legal profession, then what can we do to improve it? One law professor suggests reforming law schools. Gee, I think I’ve heard that somewhere before. [Washington Post]
* Penn State totally fumbled the Sandusky sexual assault allegations. In other news, the purported child abuser’s autobiography is called Touched. I don’t know if I should laugh or cry. [Bloomberg]
* Kitty Genovese’s killer has been denied parole for the fifteenth time. And he should keep getting denied for as long as bystander effect is taught in Psych 101 classes. [New York Law Journal]
* Justin Bieber plans to prove that he’s still a virgin not the baby daddy of Mariah Yeater’s child. If he’s right, he’s going to sue and hope for one less lonely girl in his life. [New York Daily News]
Todd Remis and Milena Grzibovska
Ever since his heavy-handed lawsuit against his wedding photographer made national news, litigious groomzilla Todd J. Remis has been the butt of many jokes. And he’s also been the subject of much speculation, to wit: What the heck was he thinking?
The lawsuit seems inane and insane (especially when you consider that Remis and his wife are no longer married). But there must be an explanation, right? Todd Remis — a graduate of Bowdoin College, and a former research analyst at several Wall Street firms — is clearly an intelligent man. And his father, Shepard M. Remis, is a litigation partner at Goodwin Procter. So it’s not as if the aggrieved groom lacked access to wise counsel.
A college friend of Todd Remis tries to shed some light on the situation….
Continue reading “‘Groomzilla’ Todd Remis: What Was He Thinking?”
To me, a failure to distinguish between people who look at these dirty pictures and people who commit contact offenses lacks the nuance and proportionality I think our law demands.
– Professor Douglas Berman, commenting on the case of Daniel Enrique Guevara Vilca, a 26-year-old who was just sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for child pornography possession.
(The reaction of Paul G. Cassell, former federal judge and victims’ rights expert, after the jump.)
Continue reading “Quotes of the Day: Way Harsh”
