* No Boomer, no! Judge refuses to help a Pennsylvania man become a dog. [Post Gazette]
* Women are breaking through the GC glass ceiling. [Corporate Counsel]
* Just a friendly flick? “Bottom-flicking” Georgia judge retires, while clarifying that he does not consider improper touching to be sexual harassment. [ABA Journal]
* This week in the law: Prop 8, Google and Verizon v. net neutrality, the broken justice system and the bad science which serves it. [Infamy or Praise]
* University of Chicago Law School antitrust professor Randy Picker jumps on the taco truck bandwagon. [Chicago Tribune]
* First Amendment expert Floyd Abrams takes on Wikileaks, Hillary Clinton, dog fighting, and freedom of speech. [Big Think]
* And you thought you had a hard time explaining a work gap on your résumé… [Piercing the Veil / Forbes]
* Before you exit Biglaw, make sure to check these 50 items off your bucket list. And then go ahead, deploy the slide and take a few brewskis for the road. [Technolawyer]
* Do you not understand that whole Google-Verizon net neutrality dealio? Here’s a guide. [Concurring Opinions]
* Career alternatives for attorneys: playwright? Arlene Violet, former Rhode Island attorney general, has written a musical about the Mafia that’s being produced. [Providence Journal]
* National security letter gag comes off after six years. Well, sort of. [Wired]
* Professor Brian Fitzpatrick wonders: Do class action lawyers make too little? [SSRN]
* Are you thinking about starting your own law practice, but intimidated by the administrative work involved? Read this. [NexFirm (sponsored content)]
* Judge John Walter (C.D. Cal.) has rejected Bill Lerach’s proposal to rack up community service hours by teaching law at UC Irvine. [National Law Journal via WSJ Law Blog]
* The American Bar Association (ABA) has come out in favor of marriage equality (i.e., same-sex marriage). [Poliglot / Metro Weekly]
* Former Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) — who was a lawyer (Harvard Law 1950), and who created a lot of work for his lawyers, at Williams & Connolly — was killed in a small plane crash. Senator Stevens, R.I.P. [Washington Post]
* Is attractiveness an asset or a liability for women searching for jobs? [Reuters Life]
* And what about if you’re a professor — is pulchritude a plus or a minus? [TaxProf Blog]
* Speaking of professors, they’re getting fed up with plagiarism — but their schools don’t want them to flunk students for the offense. [ABA Journal]
Our recent suggestion that Justice Clarence Thomas consider a presidential run in 2012 has caused some chatter in the legal and politicalblogosphere (as well as the ATL comments section, where the commenter “President Obama” took all comers). Despite this healthy buzz, CT has not yet indicated any plans to slap a campaign poster on his RV this summer.
We submitted inquiries about our proposal to Justice Thomas, through the Supreme Court’s Publication Information Office, and to Mrs. Thomas, through Liberty Central, her new conservative nonprofit. Neither had any comment. We hear through the grapevine, however, that the idea of “Thomas for President” has been proposed to the justice by clerks in years past (and not embraced by the justice; apparently His Honor is content to remain a justice, despite his conspicuous silence from the bench).
Law professors had interesting things to say about our idea of a Thomas presidential run. George Mason law professor Ilya Somin took us very seriously (perhaps a little too seriously). Northwestern law professor Steven Lubet pointed out that Charles Evan Hughes isn’t the only SCOTUS justice who has previously given up a seat at One First Street for a shot at the Oval Office. And although we suggested that Thomas shed his robes to make his run for the Republican presidential ticket, UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge noted that CT could keep them on…
A source at QE recently sent us an email with this dramatic subject heading: “A rapist among us.. Quinn Emanuel.” Here’s the allegation:
[Earlier this month] our Records Manager, [name redacted - hereinafter "Got-a-Record Manager"], was fired. He’s been employed at Quinn for over 2 years. Termination Reason: He was a convicted rapist. He’s been convicted since 1987. He was charged with sodomy and first degree rape. I shudder to think that we had a rapist among us and the firm who claims to do background check on employees did not even catch this. An employee did a simple Google search on him and came up with it…. How did the firm miss this?
The tipster provided links to Got-a-Record Manager’s (1) LinkedIn profile, showing his employment at Quinn Emanuel as a “Records Manager,” and (2) a sex offender profile on the Florida Department of Law Enforcement website, containing Got-a-Record Manager’s name and photo. If you enter Got-a-Record Manager’s (uncommon) name into Google, the first result in his sex offender registration and the third result is his LinkedIn profile.
How did this come up? According to our source, “People just like to Google others for fun, and this time someone got a surprise.” Indeed.
Was Got-a-Record’s criminal record “a surprise” to the powers-that-be at QE? We reached out to the firm for comment….
Ropes & Gray partner Rob Skinner was named a “Future Star” by Benchmark Litigation in 2009. They were surely impressed by his securities work on behalf of financial services clients. But Skinner may be a future star in musical theater, too.
That’s our prediction after watching a YouTube video from “Rob Skinner’s Midlife Crisis Cabaret,” a one-man show Skinner put on last month in honor of his 40th birthday. An attendee tells us:
Rob is a well-loved, youngish partner at Ropes, known for his being a bit over the top. After he turned 40, he wrote and arranged a one-man show, then rented out his local theater in Winchester, MA and performed it last month for friends, family, and a fair number of co-workers (plying us with drinks for a good while before hand). Not in any way a firm-sponsored event, although a fair number of partners were in attendance.
We discovered that partners are just as capable as associates of making fun of law firm life. Skinner did a Kermit-inspired number about lawyer TV shows. “The partners on TV shows are like Machiavelli. They own everything but their souls,” he sings. “They win their cases and have lunch with Satan, who joins them for 18 holes.”
We caught up with Skinner by email. Check out his hilarious video and an interview with this non-Satanic partner, after the jump.
In his speaking tours around the country, Clarence Thomas has a lot to say — sometimes critical things to say, about his fellow justices’ approach to oral argument and the lack of alma mater diversity among the Court’s clerks, for example.
But when Thomas is back at One First Street, sitting on the bench, he gets quiet. Very quiet. He hasn’t spoken a word during oral argument in over four years. He’s said before that it’s because he doesn’t see the point in badgering the attorneys arguing before the High Court. But we think there may be another reason: he hates his job. He’s suggested it himself.
In the Washington Post, we set forth a proposal for him: step down. And seek the Republican presidential nomination for 2012.
A bit about our reasoning, and a reader poll, after the jump.
Now that the question of Elena Kagan’s sexuality has been settled (kind of), critical attention seems to be turning to her lack of judicial and litigation experience. Although ABA President Carolyn Lamm tells NBC that she doesn’t think “not being a judge is particularly persuasive one way or the other,” some Republican senators have expressed concern over the fact that she’s never warmed a bench.
It’s not as if Kagan doesn’t know what a courtroom looks like, though. She clerked on the powerful and prestigious D.C. Circuit, for the legendary liberal J. Abner Mikva, and then spent time at One First Street, clerking for Justice Thurgood Marshall (OT 1987). As solicitor general, she’s argued before the High Court a half dozen times (although she wasn’t able to win over the Five of the Nine in Citizens United v. FEC).
But hey, at least she has a law degree. Not that she needs it to sit on the bench at One First Street…
Gerald Ung, the Temple University law school student arrested in January for shooting another man five times in front of the Old City Fox TV studio, this morning was ordered to stand trial on attempted murder and aggravated assault charges.
Philadelphia Municipal Judge David Shuter dismissed two gun charges because Ung had a legal permit to carry a gun from his native state of Virginia.
The article contains some additional (and apparently new) details about the underlying incident….
Today Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer made a rare appearance on Capitol Hill to testify before the House Appropriations Subcommittee, regarding the Court’s budget. It started out jovially, with Justice Thomas poking fun at Justice Breyer for agreeing with him for the very first time (at the 15 minute mark, regarding taking questions from the committee).
But an hour in, things got testy between the congressmen and the justices. Josh Blackman brought to our attention that the issue of Supreme Court clerk diversity came up. Congressman Ander Crenshaw asked the Justices why the members of the Elect are overwhelmingly graduates from Yale and Harvard. He delicately asked if they’re more qualified or if there are a disproportionate number of them applying for clerkships.
This led to a fifteen-minute discussion about clerkship diversity that started with alma maters, then moved to ethnic diversity. In response, Thomas threw the other SCOTUS justices under the bus (e.g., “MY clerks are diverse”), then threw feeder judges under the bus, and then threw law schools under the bus (e.g., “that pool comes from the law schools”).
But then Congresswoman Barbara Lee hit him with the bus…
UC-Berkeley once again topped Michigan in the (leaked so still unofficial) U.S. News law school rankings. Boalt Hall also dominated the Wolverines this month when it comes to secret society activity.
Whereas, members of Michigan’s “Barrister’s Society” threw their dirty laundry o’er the rooftops, resulting in campus-wide derision, recent activities by Berkeley’s “Gun Club” have left their fellow students appropriately mystified and intrigued.
A Boaltie tells us:
Last week, flyers featuring John Yoo’s face, with the phrase “I’m sorry, for everything” were posted around Boalt Hall.
Everyone assumed it was just the usual torture-memo protesters who flock to Berkeley, in the hope that it’s still the Bezerkeley of the 1960s, only to find a bunch of JD and MBA students hurrying by, scowling at their unshowered ways.
On Tuesday morning, the flyer reappeared in the student center, attached to the King of Beers….
"Think," one of the pieces on display at Agora Gallery
This past weekend, two of your ATL editors paid a visit to Agora Gallery in Chelsea. We wanted to see for ourselves the LEGO brick sculptures of Nathan Sawaya, the lawyer turned LEGO artist.
As explained in our profile of Sawaya, the NYU Law grad left Winston & Strawn for a $30,000-a-year job as a builder at LEGOLAND. Several years later, Sawaya is now a world-renowned LEGO artist, whose works sell for thousands of dollars.
So, what did we get to set our eyes on? And how did we like it?
The backstory behind the false rumor of Chief Justice John Roberts stepping down from the Supreme Court — initially reported (and then retracted) by Radar, and covered by us here, here, and here — continues to pick up mainstream media mentions as well. See, e.g., the Los Angeles Times and NPR.
We stand by our primary claim that this gossip arose out of Professor Peter Tague’s criminal law class at Georgetown Law, in which he tried to teach his students a lesson about the credibility and reliability of informants. But we would like to retract one aspect of our earlier coverage. We wrote:
Note the timestamps on the Radar posts. The first one came out at 6:10 a.m., i.e., the Pacific Time equivalent of 9:10 a.m. Eastern time. The retraction came out at 6:36 a.m., i.e., the Pacific Time equivalent of 9:36 a.m. Eastern — shortly after Professor Tague let his class in on the joke.
We now believe that the time stamps on the Radar post bear little or no relation to reality. David Perel, Executive Vice President of RadarOnline.com, admitted as much to Gawker, when he described the timestamps as “off.”
For those of you who are interested, we have a few more thoughts on the exact timing of events here.
Texas attorney Adam Reposa is not shy about singing his own praises. The man registered with the State Bar as “Bulletproof,” after all. He’s not jailproof, though. He was slapped with contempt of court charges for making the “jerk-off gesture” within sight of the judge, and sentenced to 90 days in prison.
After we posted our call for lawyerly business cards, someone sent Reposa’s along:
I’ve attached a copy of Texas attorney Adam Reposa’s business card — a friend of mine got it at a bar last year. I’m not sure if it’s clever — it probably violates 4 or 5 Texas Rules of Professional Conduct — but it is hilarious.
Check out the flip side of the card, which is just as egregious….
* System for bail = EPIC FAIL. [Beacon Broadside]
* A review of the new blog: The Life of a Law School Wife. Enjoy the blog now. When it becomes The Life of a Biglaw Wife, it will be more depressing. [Legal Blog Watch]
* Do not mess with old white dudes — and we’re not just talking about Biglaw partners. [The Legal Satyricon]
* New White House counsel Bob Bauer made less than one million last year as a partner at Perkins Coie, though more than the average partner at the firm. [BLT]
* In Boxing vs. Mintz Levin member Jonathan Ballan and his son’s bar mitzvah, Yankee Stadium rules in favor of boxing. [Deadspin]
* Glenn Reynolds likes pirates. [Instapundit]
* Tiger Woods apologizes for being entitled and addicted to sex… [CNN]
* … Meanwhile, we apologize for the tech problems this week. We hope it’s not too late.
A 2009 Georgetown Law grad, Russ Ferguson, has penned a column for the conservative American Spectator suggesting that deferred associates who have signed up to work in the public interest may not want to take Biglaw spots when they open up to them.
What’s that sound we hear? Oh, it’s the class of 2010 singing Hallelujah.
Ferguson recounts the history behind the generous $60k – $80k public interest fellowships from law firms — a history you all know well. Then he goes on to say that the firms’ Go-Away-For-A-Year money may have been too convincing. From the American Spectator:
[A]s newly barred lawyers have taken this public interest option, many have found jobs they like and enjoy. They picked up some ethical sense in school and enjoy doing work that connects with their values. They sympathize with their classmates who ended up at firms and are working long hours doing work they dislike, but they don’t want their jobs. They calculate how much they are making per hour, and find that they are better paid — at least at first — than those at firms.
True. But $60k – $80k may be a generous salary at their particular agency or organization. These folks may well have to take a paycut to stay on. (Though as long as they make $65,000, they should be breaking even on their law school investment.)
Ferguson told ATL that many public interest employers have contacted him since he wrote the column. “Originally, public interest employers expected these new lawyers to leave at their first possible chance,” he said. “Employers expected these lawyers to be often asking for days off to fly out to job interviews. Instead, they have been asking to stay put.”
Sure, serving the public interest is spiritually fulfilling, but it’s not filling the coffers. Is Ferguson right about people turning up their noses at Biglaw for Social Security benefits law? A poll, and more discussion, after the jump.
Think back to first-year contracts class, specifically, discussion of the U.C.C. and non-conforming goods. Then check out this article, from BBC News:
An Arab country’s ambassador to Dubai has had his marriage contract annulled after discovering the bride was cross-eyed and had facial hair.
The woman had worn an Islamic veil, known as the niqab, on the few occasions the couple had met.
Who says Islam is anti-woman? For certain women, niqabs and hijabs and burqas may be beneficial.
So, when was the alleged perfidy revealed?
Should Judge Richard Posner leave the Seventh Circuit and run for president? He certainly has the beginnings of a platform.
And, despite some possible leftward drift, Judge Posner’s tendencies still seem to point in a libertarian direction. From The Atlantic:
1. Remove all limits on the immigration of highly skilled workers, or persons of wealth. (This should be done gradually, so as not to increase unemployment while the unemployment rate remains very high.)
2. Decriminalize most drug offenses in order to reduce the prison population, perhaps by as much as a half, which will both economize on government expenditures and increase the number of workers. (Again and for the same reason, phase in gradually.)
3. Curtail medical malpractice liability, which increases medical costs gratuitously (because the courts are very poor at identifying actual malpractice) and, more important, engenders a great deal of very costly, and largely worthless, “defensive medicine.”
Perhaps to avoid the snowpocalypse in D.C., Justice Clarence Thomas went down to the Sunshine State this week, where he spent time speaking with law students at Stetson University and the University of Florida.
Though he’s the sphinx of the High Court, Justice Thomas is loquacious when not in oral arguments. He’s an engaging speaker: personable, genuine, funny.
Though we cringed watching video from his Thursday talk at the University of Florida. He talked about the elitism in SCOTUS clerk hiring and complained about “smart bloggers” — or “self-proclaimed smart bloggers” — labeling his clerks “TTT” last year. “That’s the attitude that you’re up against,” he told the UF law students.
We hope that comment was not inspired by these pages. In 2008, CT’s law clerks came from George Mason, Rutgers, George Washington, and Creighton law schools. If there were any “TTT” references to them here, they were in the comments section and did not come from our “smart” mouths, er, fingers. (Reader comments should not be confused with ATL editorial comment; this is why we hide the comments, for your protection.)
We worship The Elect, regardless of alma mater. Lat has been heaping slavish adoration at the feet of SCOTUS clerks since 2004.
More thoughts from Justice Thomas on clerk hiring, paying off his student loan debt, and law firm layoffs, after the jump.
Back in October, we wrote a piece for the Washington Post about retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s new educational video games. She’s spearheading a project called Our Courts, which seeks to improve civic education in middle schools. One game, Supreme Decision, lets the kiddies weigh in on a First Amendment case in the Supreme Court. The other, Do I Have A Right? (DIHAR), lets players start a law firm and serve clients with constitutional issues.
The subject of law firm management is a subject near and dear to many ATL readers’ hearts. We have noticed that commenters often have many suggestions for how it can be done better. So we have decided to put you to the test with a DIHAR tournament.
The winner of the tournament will get more than just bragging rights. The award for the ATL reader with the highest score is a starring role in an upcoming Our Courts game.
More information, plus complete contest rules, after the jump.
Ed. note: This post is authored by Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney of Kinney Recruiting, sponsor of the Asia Chronicles. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates and partners in Asia than any other firm in the past five years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com
Happy Chinese New Year! We were extremely busy the past few months, including most of our US based team working from our Hong Kong offices during November and December.
As a follow up from our recent post, which listed our 62 US associate and counsel placements in Asia last year (vast majority in HK / China), please note that thus far in January ’12, we have already made seven US associate and counsel placements in Asia. This is an especially impressive number, considering the biglaw lateral hiring market in Asia is down right now (see state of the market brief overview below). These new placements are of new hires in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai, who were interviewing with their new firm for a month or more and they are spread out among different practice areas, including project finance, litigation, fund formation, M&A and cap markets. We are close on four additional new associate placements, in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai, that we expect to close soon. We do not discuss partner placements in these articles, but the pace of partner recruitment in Asia (a large part of our business) has continued.
Hedge Fund In-House Openings in Hong Kong
We are seeing a small run of new in-house openings in Hong Kong at hedge funds. We are currently filling three different in-house positions at three different hedge funds in Hong Kong, two of these searches we are handling on an exclusive basis. All three will most likely be filled by a US associate, with about 4 to 6 years of experience. Mandarin not required. Candidates from NYC and London will be considered, but at one of these funds the new hire will likely come from Hong Kong / China or Singapore (with HK being the strong preference).
Please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com if you are interested in these hedge fund openings. As you probably would expect, the competition for these spots will be fierce and the funds will be very selective when choosing which candidates to interview.
In 2009, a small group of Harvard Law School students noticed an absurd monopoly in the bar prep space, held by an unchallenged leader with a non-evolving product. In response, these students teamed up with Harvard Law alumni to launch BarMax on January 14, 2010.
The mission: democratize bar prep by embracing new technologies to provide the very best bar exam review courses at a fraction of the cost normally associated with these courses.
Since then, with the encouragement of thousands of students and an unwavering commitment to their success, BarMax has established itself as a comprehensive alternative to the stagnant, over-priced status quo.
As we continue to expand, we do not want to lose sight of the basic premises that led us to create BarMax in the first place. If you are a law student who believes that there is something fundamentally wrong with being forced to take out yet another loan to pay for a $4,000 bar exam prep course, you are not alone.
* No Boomer, no! Judge refuses to help a Pennsylvania man become a dog. [Post Gazette]
* And you thought you had a hard time explaining a work gap on your résumé… [
Our recent 
Continue reading “More on ‘Clarence Thomas in 2012′”
