Courtship Connection

Courtship Connection: Is Prestige an Aphrodisiac?

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The Courtship Connection has been on hiatus since the infamous night of the melon-baller. We are back with a vengeance now. We’re doing a last sweep of D.C.’s single lawyers and then moving on to a new town. We’ll let you vote on which lucky city and its lawyers get to be subjected to my questionable matchmaking attempts.

First, we need candidates. Send suggestions for the next Courtship city to tips@abovethelaw.com. We’ll then let you vote. Don’t worry: Miami, L.A., San Francisco, Chicago and Dallas are already on the candidate list.

Now on to news of our latest victims match. I brought a previous candidate off the bench for this one, as I’m short on men (and lesbians — D.C.’s problem is that it has too many single ladies, and not enough of them like the other single ladies). Do you remember the guy who refused to get lost in his date’s brown eyes? Sex-starved but with high standards for chemistry. He agreed to go out on another blind date, but had a request: he wanted his match to be from the T14, even though he is not a grad of the upper echelon of law schools himself. I granted his wish.

Was prestige all that was needed to set his loins afire?

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Courtship Connection: If Your Date’s Bringing a Cantaloupe…

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I’ve only been on one blind date in my life. Arranged by a journo friend, it was actually more like a sneak-peek date, since the suitor and I Facebook-friended and g-chatted prior to getting drinks for the first time.

My Courtship Connection participants are not so lucky. Their dates are completely blind — they don’t even know one another’s names prior to meeting. All they know is that they’re going to be meeting up with a lawyer or law student. I’m still in mild disbelief that risk-averse legal types are willing to participate, but I suppose the risk of being partner-less in perpetuity is greater than that of a single, potentially-horrific date.

So, how do you best set the tone for such a night? I always ask participants to wear or bring something distinctive so they can find one another. I recently paired a do-gooder attorney with a legal academic; the two seemed like hipster types to me, but I was hesitant about sending them all the way to H St. NE, so instead I chose The Passenger for their rendezvous. Our self-described “cheery, active, irreverent” lady lawyer said she’d be “wearing high heels and carrying a cantaloupe.”

So guess what our “hippie economist” brought? Hint: it’s phallic….

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Courtship Connection: Likes – Cooking; Dislikes – Kissing

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What’s more hopeless than sending two lawyers out on a blind date and hoping they hit it off? Answer: Sending thirty-something lawyers out on a blind date and hoping they hit off.

It’s safe to assume that a person (and especially a woman) still single in their 30s is a picky type. As Elie recently lectured a trio of spinsters +30 single ladies, “You could have gotten married at some point in your 20s and you chose not to. There’s not something wrong with the guys you date; there’s something wrong with you.” It’s possible that Elie learned all that he knows about women from Lori Gottlieb.

Despite odds being stacked against me, I decided to match up two D.C. lawyers in their mid 30s. They have different political stripes, but both named Atticus Finch as their favorite legal character, and would gladly give up gavels for spatulas. Asked for three words about themselves, he said he was a “funny nerdy cultured chef” and she said she was a “city-dwelling chef/policy-wonk.” They sounded like they should be able to come up with a recipe for romance…

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Courtship Connection: Sloppy Seconds

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A couple of participants played Courtship Connection musical chairs

At the heart of our Courtship Connection series is the premise that lawyers play well together in romantic relationships. Hopefully the story earlier this week of an engagement between two lawyers going horribly wrong won’t discourage future participants from taking on a fellow lawyer as a playmate.

Previous Courtship participants aren’t discouraged, at least. Perhaps you remember the whiskey-swigging law student who was “prettier/kinder/smarter” than the Blue Moon-drinking fellow student I paired her with? In her write-up, she expressed an interest in the “nice, smart, and talkative” Big Gov lawyer who wasn’t swept off his feet by a fellow conservative attorney over dim sum on Valentine’s Day. She was up for “steamed buns” but, sadly, he wasn’t.

Our picky Elephant says that “a friend” alerted him to whiskey girl’s call to action. He emailed me to say he was up for it, so I sent them out to The Tabard Inn in Dupont Circle. He wound up getting that action. At least, I think he did…

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Courtship Connection: Get Some Sleep Prior To A First Date

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This installation of the Courtship Connection has some important advice for blind daters. If you are feeling sick or if you are feeling exhausted, or if you are suffering from those two conditions combined, you should just reschedule.

(Last week, one of our participants was sniffly on her date and still managed to make a love connection, but we should all think of that as the exception and not the rule.)

I had high hopes for these two do-gooder lawyers in their late 20s, who named First Amendment law and environmental law as their favorite classes in law school, respectively — and who managed to translate their noble passions into professional gigs. Both Donkeys — d’uh — he said that if he weren’t a lawyer, he’d be a “singer for an unsuccessful band,” and she said she’d be a “yoga teacher, park ranger, and world traveling vagabond.”

Such a precious pairing! I sent them to Adams Morgan’s Tryst on a Tuesday evening to drink environmentally-sustainable coffee and chat about how to keep Obama in office come 2012. She was enchanted and even went so far as to send a text post-date. Unfortunately, that text went ignored. Here’s why…

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Courtship Connection: Gentlemen Bros Prefer Blondes

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Well, well, well. After a string of miserable failures unsuccessful matches, I’ve finally introduced two lawyers in Washington, D.C. who both filed motions with me for a second date.

So how’d I do it? Throwing a blonde lawyer into the mix helped…

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Courtship Connection: Get Lost in Those Brown Eyes, Please

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A law student said this picture best captured the feeling of his date

Last week, we had two more blind dates in the swampy city: a pair of lawyers and a pair of law students.

Both dates left me feeling that I really need to start recruiting more candidates from outside of the legal field. (Note to Lat and Elie: Could you get your colleagues to send some Dealbreaker and Fashionista readers my way?)

The late 20s-early 30s lawyers I sent out both went to school in Boston, both described themselves as Dem-GOP mixes (she said she was a hybrid, he ‘fessed up to being a libertarian), and both named Scalia as their man at One First Street. Asked to describe themselves in three words, she gave me an alliterative four — “sweet, sarcastic, smart, social” — and he used slashes with abandon — “Spunky/energetic, funny, old school/1950s-ish, conservative.”

I sent them to Proof wine bar on a Tuesday night. Here’s what happened next….

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Courtship Connection: One Hit, Two Misses

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Two dates, including one on Valentine's Day, fell flat.

Given the track record of Above the Law’s lawyer-matchmaking series, some may think we should change the name of the series to the Courtship Misconnection.

In one of our first Washington, D.C. couplings, on Superbowl Sunday, a male lawyer fumbled his date with a “disarmingly feisty and unabashedly vivacious” female associate. (Beware the women who self-describe as “feisty,” says Slate.) Undeterred, I’ve continued to set up dates in the nation’s capital.

I sent two Biglaw types to Solly’s on U Street last week — a late 20s female Donkey who wanted a trunk and an early-thirties male Elephant who requested ass. If not a lawyer, she said she’d be a cage fighter, and he said he’d be a writer. I thought I had an excellent “opposites attract” formula. I was wrong.

She described the date as a “pretty lackluster affair” and he said no “love connection was made.” “You are no Patti Stanger,” female Donkey wrote me (a little bitterly). Boring dates may be even worse than disastrous ones.

Luckily, the other two dates recounted here were more entertaining. One, because it was a blind date on Valentine’s Day, and the other because it’s our first occurrence of Courtship Connection leading to a lawyer’s pants being torn off…

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Non-Sequiturs: 02.14.11

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* The anatomy of Courtship Connections. Kash explains why it’s so difficult to set lawyers up with each other. [Forbes]

* Alan Dershowitz and Julian Assange make a love connection. [Politico]

* Does compassion really have any place in the law? [Underdog]

* Many of the lonely among you will be drinking heavily tonight. That’s okay. We’ll deal with your alcoholism once Hallmark leaves you alone. [Lawyerist]

* Let’s hope ABA President-Elect Nominee Laurel Bellows shows law students some love. [ABA Journal]

* No love for social media experts in this week’s Blawg Review. [My Law License via Blawg Review]

* And in case you missed it, the Saturday Night Live cast tips us off on a hot new legal practice area — after the jump….

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Courtship Connection: A Rocky Start in Washington, D.C.

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Only one person had a good time on this date. (Stock photo.)

With Valentine’s Day swiftly approaching, now seems like a great to time to relaunch ATL’s Courtship Connection — our well-intentioned but only sporadically successful program for hooking up our single legal-eagle readers.

Like the Real World, the series is back and in a new city. Judging from the date we’ll now recount, our matchmaking adventures in D.C may be as disappointing as the eight strangers MTV picked to live in a Dupont Circle house last year. (But hey, dating through Above The Law has got to turn out better than dating through Craigslist in D.C.)

This was an East Coast (him) meets West Coast (her) match. Both were of the politically-liberal persuasion. I matched these two top law grads in the 25-35 age range in part because I thought they would look good together. Both are hotties. When asked to describe themselves in three words, neither could stick to the word limit. He said he was a “brainy, preppy reformed frat-guy” and she said she was “disarmingly feisty and unabashedly vivacious.”

I should not have been so superficial. While he enjoyed her vivacity, she enjoyed… writing up a feisty recap of the date….

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Capital Courtship Connection: Calling Single Lawyers in D.C.

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Courtship connection.jpgWhen we launched the ATL Courtship Connection in New York, we received a number of plaintive emails from lawyers in other cities asking us to give matchmaking a whirl in their towns. Judging from these emails, Chicago, L.A. and D.C. are all cities with numerous single lawyers desperate enough adventurous enough to turn their love lives over to Above the Law.

Loyal Courtship readers know that we had a mixed track record setting up legal types in the Big Apple. There were a few duds, a couple of studs, one make-out session, and one utter FAIL. To our knowledge, though, there were no LTRs (or STDs) as a result of our playing Cupid.

We’ve decided we might have better luck in another city, so we are bidding Manhattan and its surrounding boroughs farewell for now, and taking this matchmaking service down I-95 to Washington, D.C., a.k.a. the best city in which to be a lawyer.

Read on for details…

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Courtship Connections: A Dog of a Date

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Couple forgot to take a photo. Consolation shot of a friend's puppy.

Spring is usually thought of as the time when dating season goes into full swing, but we think summer is when it really heats up — perhaps because of the way that clothing disappears as temperatures skyrocket, as noted in this New York Times piece about half-naked people at a MIA concert on Governors Island. Shirtless women have also been spotted outside of the ATL offices in Nolita.

We hoped the summer heat would generate sparks for two legal types on a recent Courtship Connection date. We set up a litigation associate at a top firm with a government attorney, based on their shared admiration for Justice Brennan. And for cutting things up: If she weren’t in Biglaw, she’d be a pediatric cardiac surgeon, and if he weren’t working for the state, he’d be a chef.

We sent them to Las Ramblas, a tapas restaurant in the West Village, on a Saturday night. He said:

So leave it to Kash to set us up on perhaps the hottest day of a month-long heat wave, despite several alternatives that could’ve worked. I felt like I was melting for most of the night. Heat aside though, I had a good time overall. I thought my date was quite attractive, a couple inches shorter than me, petite, dark hair, wearing a burgundy sundress.

How hot was their date?

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