Chris graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He is a former freelance journalist and assistant editor at InsideCounsel Magazine, where he covered legal technology. In his spare time, he listens to and plays loud music. He lives in San Francisco, California. He is in no way related to the singer of seminal punk band The Misfits.
It’s been quite a while since we checked in on the ongoing military prosecution of Private Bradley Manning, the United States serviceman accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of confidential documents to Wikileaks.
This week, as the court-martial is still crawling forward, Manning’s attorneys raised the point that it will be pretty hard (read: freaking impossible) to find a military jury that isn’t seriously familiar with his case.
That isn’t totally surprising. When you are the face of the biggest leak of classified information an American history, it’s going to be hard to find “peers” who don’t know who you are or what you’ve allegedly done. So what are you gonna do about it?
It’s easy and popular to criticize America’s tendency towards over-litigiousness. You can talk and argue all day over abstract ideas, but have you seen the numbers all laid out in a handy-dandy infographic? No? Well, we have a special treat for you….
Well, here we are, just one week ago until those fateful days. How are Nathan, Jeanette, and Andrew doing? Well, understandably they feel a little under the gun.
Our Bar Review Diarists all seem to have their own last-minute procrastination tools: Nathan went to a music festival, Jeanette watches bad television, and Andrew continues making far-out pop culture references. All perfectly normal, perfectly healthy….
Sometimes work is boring, yes. You do what you gotta do to pass the time. Facebook, Gawker, Above the Law… there are endless amounts of entertainment on the ol’ internet with which one can pass a dull afternoon.
So, with all the PG procrastination tools available online, it should not be that hard to just wait to watch porn until you get home!
Unfortunately, a state judge in Illinois allegedly couldn’t get to the end of the day without some visual inspiration. Now he’s in hot water over accusations that he was looking at hot websites while he was on the job.
Keep reading to learn more about our horn dog Judge of the Day, as well as the names of some of the sites he allegedly visited (don’t lie perverts, you know you’re curious)….
Forget the vast right-wing conspiracy. Forget the secret Communists hiding out in America. Over the weekend, the New York Times unleashed a massive article blowing the lid off the scariest conspiracy of them all: the secret Food and Drug Administration surveillance conspiracy.
Apparently, the FDA has been spying on some of its scientists, seeking out “enemies” of the agency, reading scientists’ private correspondence with everyone from journalists to attorneys to Barack Obama, taking screenshots of their personal computers, and more. The agency is facing accusations of privacy and whistleblower violations, and the scandal is so absurd that one senator has called the FDA the Gestapo.
Back in April, we wrote about Mark and Rhonda Lesher, a couple in rural Texas who won a massive defamation verdict against formerly anonymous online commenters. The online comments followed a trial during which they were acquitted of sexual assault. The multimillion dollar verdict appeared to set things right.
But it turns out there is much, much more to their story. Theirs is an unsettling tale of small-town justice, politics, and Mark Lesher, a lawyer-slash-“professional agitator,” who tried to do the right thing in a town that apparently wanted none of it.
Let’s start with news that the defamation verdict was overturned last month, and go backwards from there….
* A manager at a Long Island-based national women’s organization has been sued by her female coworkers for allegedly being too grabby and being “obsessed with butts.” Not sure what to think about the lawsuit, but you can’t really complain about the photo of the manager motorboating her (also female) friend included with the story. [New York Post]
* The organizers of the London Olympics are concerned about getting hacked. So like any smart business, they employed a legion of hackers (pardon me, “ethical hackers”) to protect their systems. [IT-Lex]
* In other Olympic news, Congress is PO’d that the American Olympic team uniforms were made in China. As Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit points out, though, the real problem is that they are ugly as hell. [Christian Science Monitor via Instapundit]
* George Zimmerman wants another new judge because he claims this one is “prejudiced against him.” Sorry, but judges aren’t like Magic cards, you can’t continue to trade up. [Big Story / Associated Press]
* You gotta fight / for your right / to flip the bird at the 5-0. (That said, assuming you have said right, it doesn’t make it a good idea.) [New York Magazine]
* Handbags at dawn: can’t get enough of the Gucci v. Guess case? Take a look at some comprehensive analysis on this fashion law showdown. [Law of Fashion]
* A state judge in Pennsylvania ruled that discovery of private content on Facebook is only “minimally intrusive.” In other words, if you still hadn’t heard, the “private” stuff you put on Facebook is really anything but. [CPR Law Blog]
It’s Friday, and I’m going camping for the weekend. After the jump, check out a video of where I’m going….
* Kristen Saban has already moved to dismiss the suit filed by her former sorority sister stemming from their alleged sororitastic catfight. [WSFA]
* Massage parlor busted in prostitution sting: a victory for human rights. Said massage parlor/brothel shares a building AND A SIGN with local law firm: hilarious. Of course there are pics. Do you even need to ask? [KREM]
* Speaking of sex for money, Canada no longer offers visas for foreign strippers, escorts, or massage parlor workers. [Newser via Legal Blog Watch]
* “I lost the Casey Anthony case. Vote for me for State Attorney!” Does the state of Florida realize the rest of the United States only keeps it around for comedic relief? [Daily Beast]
* I really don’t want to make this joke, but I feel like I have no choice: in San Francisco, two drunk guys walking around naked would not only not get arrested, but no one would even bother giving them a second look. [Legal Juice]
* More praise for the new book from our in-house counsel columnist Mark Herrmann. Nice work! [Class Action Blawg; Law and More]
* Seton Hall Law professors are organizing a mini-golf tournament. It’s called networking, folks. [Lincoln ESQ.]
As we previously mentioned in Non-Sequiturs, Love is being sued by litany of her former associates. Her former legal consigliere says he was not properly paid, and now her former personal assistant says Love asked her to act illegally and hire a hacker.
If this Essay serves no other purpose, I hope it serves to debunk, for any readers who persist in believing it, the myth that locking your trunk will keep the cops from searching it. Based on the number of my students who arrived at law school believing that if you lock your trunk and glove compartment, the police will need a warrant to search them, I surmise that it’s even more widespread among the lay public. But it’s completely, 100% wrong.
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Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
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It’s been quite a while since we checked in on the ongoing military prosecution of Private Bradley Manning, the United States serviceman accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of confidential documents to Wikileaks.
