Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law.
His first name is pronounced like Eliot without the “it,” and his last name is pronounced like Cristal (the champagne).
Prior to winning the ATL Idol Contest, Elie wrote about politics and popular culture at City Hall News and the New York Press. Elie received a degree in Government from Harvard University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He still has a rash from all the poison ivy.
He used to be a litigator at Debevoise & Plimpton but quit the legal profession in lieu of stripping naked and lighting himself on fire.
Elie is a proud and basically competent husband. He is a contributor at True/Slant and enjoys the Mets, dogs, and arguing with strangers.
Hot for teacher.
* This is how bros roll in the U.K. There’s a Shearman & Sterling U.K. lawyer up in here. [Daily Mail]
* Being hot for teacher gets you suspended now. [Adjunct Law Prof Blog]
* It would have been fun to see well paid O’Melveny attorneys dumpster diving. [DNAinfo]
* An average American complains to the Ninth Circuit about its Proposition 8 ruling. [MetroWeekly]
* Nice to see a judge take domestic violence so seriously. [PrawfsBlawg]
* If anybody is going to get reparations, it should be American Indians. But… nobody is going to get reparations. [Washington Post]
* I’m going to be on Mike Huckabee’s show at 8:00 p.m. on Fox this Saturday. Andrew Breitbart will also be on the panel. What could possibly go wrong? [Breitbart]
Yale is making a slight change to its low-income loan forgiveness program, and it’s going to make it a little harder for people who leave Yale Law School into low-paying jobs.
Now, this isn’t anything to yell and scream about. Yale is still committed to making loan repayment feasible for people who don’t take the Biglaw money and run. And they still have one of the most generous programs in the country.
But the program is getting a little less generous. Which isn’t a great sign about the long-term ability of lawyers who have the financial flexibility to service poor or working-class clients….
Continue reading “Yale Law School Makes It Slightly Harder to Get Loan Forgiveness”
We’re still waiting to see if the lawsuits marshaled against law schools over their questionable employment statistics will have any effect. Obviously schools are misleading people about the employment outcomes of recent graduates — notice that the law schools aren’t even arguing that they give students an accurate picture. They just say their numbers shenanigans conform to the pathetic guidance laid down by the American Bar Association. But it’s still an open question whether this employment obfuscation will be legally actionable.
Basically, nobody cares if law schools lie to potential students.
But if the credit ratings agencies feel they’ve been lied to, that might be a whole different kind of problem…
Continue reading “Will Sued Law Schools Take A Hit To Their Credit Ratings?”
In case you haven’t noticed, 2012 is going to be the year where I try to take a more critical look at the level of career service that law students are receiving from their law schools. The legal job market has been crappy for a long enough time that law schools and career service officers should have adjusted their game plan. Rolling into 2012 with 2007 career service programs is simply unacceptable.
A couple of days ago, I offered some networking advice to the functional alcoholics in the audience. Sure, my thoughts were a little bit outside the box, but they were better than the kind of standard networking tripe most law students get from their overmatched CSO administrators.
Case in point, take a look as some networking advice sent around by the Dean of Students at a New York-area law school just last week. The advice was perfect if the dean was trying to ensure that the students made no impression, and left all employers wondering why they bothered to show up for a silly networking event in the first place….
Continue reading “Dean of Students Gets Networking Advice All Wrong”
Remember when Biglaw associates in New York got paid more than Biglaw associates everywhere else because it costs more money to live in New York than anywhere else? Yeah, those days are long gone. A few months ago, we pointed out that the NALP buying power index ranked the purchasing power of New York associates 42nd nationwide.
Maybe you didn’t believe NALP’s numbers?
Well, today we offer more evidence that if you are an associate working and living in New York, you are a chump. You are paying a higher cost of living than anywhere else in the country, and you’re not getting paid any more for the effort. In fact, if you work at Morrison & Foerster, you might be getting a smaller bonus just because you work in New York….
Continue reading “Associate Bonus Watch: Did MoFo Just Use Cravath as an Excuse to Screw Over New York Associates?”
How much English do you have to be able to speak in order to hold elected office? I don’t know, but apparently justices in Arizona think they know it when they hear it.
Continuing Arizona’s quest to become the most racist state in the Union, the Arizona Supreme Court affirmed a ruling that prevented Alejandrina Cabrera from running for a city council seat because she doesn’t speak English proficiently.
But we can’t just “blame whitey” for this one. Here we’ve got a Southwestern case of Latino-on-Latino crime.
Well, you know what they say: when in ‘Zona, do as the xenophobes do…
Continue reading “Arizona Supreme Court Upholds Discrimination Against People Who Can’t Speak English”
I didn't do well in the classroom, so I'm going to the courtroom.
At least once a month, something happens that makes millennials seem insufferable. It’s like we’ve bred an entire generation of people who can’t take criticism. It’s an entire generation that hasn’t watched the Godfather and doesn’t understand the phrase “it’s business, not personal.” When they fail, they don’t redouble their efforts; instead, they get their feelings hurt, make excuses, and whine and complain to anyone who will listen.
So it is with some pathetic millennials from the Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law. Two students at the school received crappy grades. This is going to come as a huge shock to some of you out there, but it turns out that going to a lower ranked law school with the expectation that you’ll get a job if you finish in the top ten percent of the class doesn’t work out for 90% of the students.
Other people get bad grades and re-dedicate themselves to study, or (gasp) figure out something to do that they are actually good at. These kids, well, you can’t say that millennials are ashamed of being whiny bitches….
Continue reading “Law Students Sue School Over Being Graded on a Curve”
Is it right for a law school to send its students to tolerance camp? Mandatory tolerance camp? Mandatory tolerance camp, where unexcused absences will result in an intolerant notation placed in students’ permanent records?
When I came across the story of a state law school holding a “mandatory” diversity seminar that students were required to attend, my first instinct was to side with the students who objected to the required nature of the program. Generally, I’m not a fan of forcing people to be nice to each other, and you can’t force a man to change what’s in his heart. If students want to be racist or prejudiced to others in their community, that’s something that may demand an institutional response. But if some kids don’t think they’ll benefit much from “diversity training,” whatever that means, so be it.
But when the ABA’s committee on accreditation is telling law school administrators that the student body needs to work on its racial sensitivity, well, you can see how the law school is in a bit of a bind…
Continue reading “Can A Law School Force You To Be Racially Sensitive?”
Yesterday, my colleague Staci Zaretsky decided to make the case for why all the people who are dutifully paying off their law school debts should feel superior to those who default on their law school debts, or seek to discharge them through bankruptcy. As she wrote in her post, “Have I ever thought about filing for bankruptcy? Hell no. It might be hard, but I’m accepting responsibility for my actions. I’m paying back what I owe — slowly but surely, with not a single missed payment.”
Well, la, de, f***ing, da. It’s all well and good that Staci has never ever thought about availing herself of a financial protection that is readily used by rich people (and companies) should they make a ruinous financial investment. I’m also really happy that Staci apparently knew everything about what she was getting into before she decided to go into a whole lot of debt to the Western New England University School of Law.
But I’m sticking to the point that most people in their early 20s have no clue about what getting into six figures of educational debt will do to the rest of their lives. I still think that absent parental support of any kind, people in over their heads in debt should be able to file for normal bankruptcy without needing to show undue hardship.
The story shouldn’t be about students looking for an “easy” way out of their obligations. The story should be about helping 22-year-olds fully understand what they are getting into, and looking at all the options available for people to get out of horrible financial mistakes of the past….
Continue reading “There’s No Easy Way Out Of Student Debt, But That Doesn’t Stop Some People From Feeling Superior”
This is a real drink in a real glass with enough ice that it'll be appropriately watered down for networking.
There’s a list that’s been going around the past two days that purports to be A Drink-by-Drink Guide for networking events.
Don’t get your hopes up. It’s not really drinking advice for legal networking events. It’s regular advice for legal networking events that happens to use the word “drink” — instead of “level” or “number” — to demarcate the five tips in the article.
It’s fine advice, especially if you are so awkward socially that you can cool off a hot craps table simply with your inability to execute a high-five.
However, as a functioning alcoholic (emphasis on FUNction), I’ve got some real advice on how alcohol can help get you through these painful and boring networking events without being so terrified of not getting a job that your scent of desperation makes everybody want to stand three feet away from you.
Here’s how to look cool and confident while knocking back a few without getting so sloshed you end up on Above the Law in the morning….
Continue reading “How Alcohol Can Help You Network”
Don’t you just hate it when rude and inefficient airline administrators ruin your vacation by stranding you on the ski leg of your vacation in Aspen, causing you to almost miss your cruise leaving out of Florida? It’s so annoying to have to stay in a series of luxury hotels across the country because the airline industry can’t get its act together.
I’m doing a silly parody of rich people problems, but honestly, if I have to choose between well-offf Americans and the fools and crooks who run the airline industry, I’m going to throw my lot in with the rich people every time. Especially when some employees are allegedly hurling racial insults at them.
It was a wild holiday vacation for the the Shulick family of Philadelphia. Luckily, patriarch David Shulick is a lawyer, so he knows that when the airlines push you around, you can sue….
Continue reading “Lawsuit of the Day: Nightmare Vacation for Rich ‘Honkeys’”
Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe has been a leader in instituting a merit-based compensation system. Two aspects of their system make Orrick’s commitment to merit-based seem genuine:
1) Partners put in significant time so that merit evaluations are more than just hours cut-offs.
2) Orrick is transparent about how many people get paid.
You can’t run a merit-based system with a Jones Day-like approach to transparency without everybody feeling like they are secretly getting screwed. If you do it out in the open, at least the low-hanging fruit will know that other, better work paid off for others in their class.
So let’s look at the memo. While Orrick generally does a good job of looking at associate productivity instead of mere man-hours, make no mistake, the firm still wants you to bill, and in a timely fashion….
Continue reading “Associate Bonus Watch: Orrick’s Merit-Based Matrix Continues to Be the Most Transparent”
I’ve never been a fan of U.S. News obsessing over how much money law schools spend on their facilities. I feel it artificially inflates the cost of going to law school in a digital age where so much of what you need can be found online.
But there are some things that you can’t do online. Not yet at least. Like going to the bathroom. Perhaps if Steve Jobs were still alive, the iPoop and the Waterless iPoop would be just around the corner. But we were robbed of that great man.
Maybe all you need to know about the difference between top law schools and not-so-hot law schools really does come down to toilets. At Harvard, they name them after rich alumni. At North Dakota Law School, they barely have them….
Continue reading “Adventures at Low-Ranked Law Schools: Don’t Call It a ‘Toilet,’ They Don’t Even Have Toilets”
Insert face of law school student above.
Instead of hiring a new professor to teach Cross-Cultural Comparison of Masturbatory Prohibitions, I want law schools to start paying six-figure salaries to the people they hire to work in their career services offices. I want U.S. News to include the number of CSO professionals and money spent on CSOs as data points in their law school rankings. I want deans to start asking rich alumni if they would like to donate to help fight mental disability and extreme laziness in career services offices.
Because honestly, the lack of effort put in by career services professionals at the nation’s law schools really seems to be out of hand. Maybe they’ve just been collectively beaten down by the years of terrible job prospects and the throngs of students in need of help. Maybe they believe that there really is nothing they can do, and they are significantly more worried about protecting their own jobs than finding jobs for eager law students. Maybe the lack of institutional support and respect for their efforts makes them feel like second-class citizens whenever the Professor of Impractical Studies That Serve No Clients walks into the room.
I don’t know why we’re here, but when you can’t even trust your CSO to effectively cull Simplicity to remove stupid and insulting job prospects like the ones below, it’s time to change the entire approach to law school career services….
Continue reading “Is Your Career Services Office This Lazy?”
This is a gruesome story and sad story. The Chicago Tribune is reporting that a 78-year-old man jumped out of his office at 111 W. Washington Street….
Continue reading “Apparent Attorney Suicide in Chicago”
It’s Friday, let’s play a game. A word search. Guess the URL for entertainment lawyer Roger A. Pliakas, Esquire.
Hint: Sean Connery would take therapist…
Continue reading “Lawyer URL of the Day”
Last year, Sullivan & Cromwell announced spring bonuses on January 21st. Today is February 3rd. It might be time to panic.
The conceit of this entire bonus season has been that the ridiculously low bonuses bar set by Cravath, Swaine & Moore was just an opening figure. People really didn’t expect that Cravath would halve bonuses. I mean, it’s CSM. They can count. Their profits went up. Why would they pay out 50% less than last year?
Well, I guess the answer “because they can” is going to have to be enough for Biglaw associates everywhere….
Continue reading “Spring Bonuses? Anybody? The Silence Isn’t Funny Anymore.”
* Lawyer who allegedly sued people for illegally downloading such classics as “Teen Anal Nightmare” and “Juicy White Anal Booty 4″ has been charged with a felony. Will he be the next star of “Federal Anal Penitentiary Penetration: 3 – 5.” [Ars Techina]
* Why read Google’s new privacy policy when Kash can do it for you? [Not So Private Parts / Forbes]
* This is a great post about why we need lawyers and judges to be dispassionate. In this tragedy the light punishment probably fits the questionable crime. [Simple Justice]
* SOPA was more than a bad law. It was a total failure to understand a new political reality. [The Volokh Conspiracy]
* Is that somebody criticizing David Boies’ work on AIG? Are people allowed to do that? I don’t know, I try not to look directly into the sun lest my eyes be burned out by its magnificence. [Dealbreaker]
* Ivy Gate wonders why the New York Times wedding section didn’t pick up the Bobbit wedding we reported about earlier today. It probably has nothing to do with the 175 year age difference. [Ivy Gate]
* Video at Lat talking at Michigan Law. Lat has now visited every “T-14″ law school. He’s completed that faster than I’ve been able to complete my own goal of owing money to every T-14 law school. [Michigan Law]
