A Legal Tabloid - News, Insights, and Colorful Commentary on Law Firms and the Legal Profession
Managing Editor: David Lat
Editor: Elie Mystal
Assistant Editor: Staci Zaretsky
Contributors: Kashmir Hill, Marin, Mark Herrmann, Jay Shepherd
Christopher Danzig
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.
Early last week, we asked readers to submit possible captions for this photo of a bro and his Cravath duffle bag:
Over the weekend, you voted on the finalists, and now it’s time to announce the winner of our caption contest. As a special bonus, we also have a comment from a “bro” who says he’s the one featured in the photo….
* What if — gasp — we rewrote the U.S. Constitution today? Take a look at this discussion once you’ve picked up your shattered originalist jaw from the floor. [Room for Debate / New York Times]
* A photo of $211,223.04 that Matthew Inman of the Oatmeal raised for charity. Hopefully this means that the Oatmeal/Charles Carreon lawsuit circus is finally leaving town. [The Oatmeal]
* “Bada da da daaah… I’m loving it! Now give me my Big Mac or I’ll shoot you in the face.” [Legal Juice]
* A San Francisco restaurant finds an creative way around California’s new foie gras ban. Force-fed duck liver 4Lyfe! [Inside Scoop SF]
* The Supreme Court Term feels like a distant memory, but now’s a good time to look back on it with added perspective. Courtesy of MoloLamken, here’s a great guide to the big business cases of the Supreme Court Term just ended. Download or print it, then read it at your leisure. [MoloLamken (PDF)]
We only have two weeks left until the test. It’s about that time: our columnists’ brains are fried. They have been studying so long it seems they may have forgotten the most basic of non-lawyerly communication skills.
Let’s check in with Jeanette, Nathan, and Andrew as they compare their lives variously to Groundhog Day, feverishly come up with mnemonic devices, and transliterate show tunes into bar exam songs.
In one of his ballads, Jim Croce warned that there are four things that you just don’t do: “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape/ You don’t spit into the wind/ You don’t pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger/ And you don’t mess around with Jim.” He could have added a fifth warning to that list: “And you don’t let pistol-packing mother catch you naked in her daughter’s closet.”
Law school is freaking expensive. Duh. If you can’t afford the education without loans, some people would vehemently argue that you shouldn’t go at all. But if you’re dead-set on the legal profession and you’re desperate for ways to pay for it, people are coming up with all kinds of creative solutions. Some people fundraise on the internet… and some sell their old assault rifles.
So if any of our readers need a new fully automatic M16 AND feel like helping an aspiring law student reach his dreams, have we got a deal for you….
It has been a bad week for those poor naïve souls who imagine judges as wizened, white-haired, grandfatherly figures. At least at the state level, we are learning about judges with tempers more along the lines of grumpy pitbulls than anything else.
This week, we heard about a judge in Washington who has been charged by a state judicial board with violating codes of conduct. The Washington State Commission on Judicial Conduct accused Judge John Wulle of failing to “to maintain order and decorum in proceedings” and engaging “in a pattern of discourteous, impatient and undignified behavior.”
So, how exactly did Judge Wulle allegedly misbehave? Let’s take a read, and, even better, we’ve got video….
* Nothing says justice like for-profit probation companies. [New York Times]
* Was this really a courtroom exchange involving Redskins tight end Fred Davis, or was it a weird performance art piece/Abbott and Costello comedy routine? [Washingtonian]
* There is no such thing as a free trip to Disney World. Well, technically there is. There are many, in fact, at least until you get caught. [Legal Juice]
* The insane legal fight between the Oatmeal and Charles Carreon continues to get weirder. Oh yeah, and serial suer extraordinaire Jonathan Lee Riches has hopped into the fray as well. [Lowering the Bar]
* RIP Andy Griffith, a.k.a. Matlock, one of the most famous television attorneys of all time. My grandmother is probably very sad today. [WSJ Law Blog]
What is the deal with Biglaw partners and getting in trouble for drinking and driving? Just yesterday, we wrote about a Winston & Strawn partner and would-be ambassador to the Netherlands whose nomination was scuttled after getting charged with a DUI. And many of you are familiar with the unfortunate drinking-related courtroom escapades of Laura L. Flippin of DLA Piper.
The newest partner drinking story comes to us from the Far East. This Biglaw partner was not only allegedly driving under the influence, but he apparently crashed his fancy sports car in the process….
We’ve reached July, and there is less than a month until the test. Does this qualify as the home stretch? How are our esteemed Bar Review Diarists doing?
Well, they are working hard and doing what they can to not lose their minds (as bar review studiers are perhaps wont to do). Let’s check in with Jeanette, Nathan, and Andrew as they continue stumbling through the bar exam desert….
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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