If you’re a law student, you probably checked your email first thing this morning for one reason or another. Maybe you were waiting to hear back from a professor. Maybe you were praying for a snow day and hoping that classes were canceled. Either way, you probably weren’t expecting to see something like this from your law school:
What the hell? If the proposed war on gunners started today, Above the Law didn’t get the memo. Which law school sponsored a “Killing Spree”?
Ah, high school. Such fond memories.
Here at Above the Law, we know that lawyers like detailed instructions for completing even the simplest of tasks. It follows that the future lawyers of America need similar instruction. Recall that law students at Cardozo Law School needed to be told how to walk in the snow.
It’s the beginning of a new school year, and starting fresh at law school is hard. So, if you think walking is tough, just imagine the anxiety that law students across the country were confronted with when they received their locker assignments.
These kids must have so much pent up post-traumatic stress from getting shoved into their lockers in high school that they repressed the ability to use combination locks. Where do these students go to law school, and what is the school doing to assist them?
Continue reading “How Can Law Students Win the War Against Their Lockers?”
Recruiting athletes isn’t just for sports coaches. Many law firm hiring partners like to acquire athletes as well. The thinking is that successful athletes possess many of the traits sought in talented attorneys.
Athletes are disciplined, hardworking, and mentally tough. They are focused and strategic thinkers. If they play a team sport, then they probably excel at teamwork too.
So it shouldn’t come as a shock that Williams & Connolly, a firm full of fearsome litigators who love to win, has a great athlete among its 2011 summer associate class. This individual, who has traveled around the world playing his sport, is our latest celebrity summer associate. (We’ve previously profiled actor Wai Choy, a former co-star of Lindsay Lohan, and Phil Alito, son of Sam.)
Who is this star athlete turned Williams & Connolly summer associate, and what sport does he play?
Continue reading “Celebrity Summer Associate: A Star Athlete”
Welcome Texas!
As you are all know, the University of Texas School of Law has moved into the “top 14″ in this year’s U.S. News law school rankings. It’s a bit of cheat for U.S. News: Texas is technically tied for 14th, which means that the magazine has actually managed to cram 15 schools into its top 14. I’d complain more, but I’m a fan of a Big (We Can’t Count To) Ten school.
While we all know that Texas is in the top 14, very few of you remember the significance of the top 14 in the first place. The top 14 isn’t as arbitrary as it sounds. Since U.S. News started publishing these law school rankings, no school that ranked in the inaugural top 14 has ever been ranked outside of the top 14, and no school that did not rank in the top 14 that first year has ever cracked that list. Until now.
The top 14 has been a way to distinguish elite institutions that are nearly interchangeable with one another from really good law schools that are just a cut below. When viewed that way, Texas’s inclusion was probably long overdue.
Let’s take a look at some of the other movement in this rarefied group of law schools….
Continue reading “Open Thread: 2012 U.S. News Law School Rankings (7 – 14)”
Scrooge McDuck must have attended the right law school.
Another day, another set of law school rankings. The world’s appetite for these things knows no bounds. Earlier this week, we covered U.S. News & World Report’s best law schools as ranked by law firm recruiters — and the reader interest and traffic were off the charts. Apparently there’s no such thing as “rankings fatigue.”
(Wait until we launch our list of law schools ranked by the quality of the toilet paper in their public restrooms. Because that’s something that actually matters to law students — probably more than, say, the number of volumes in the library, or even the square footage of the place.)
Today we bring you law school rankings by Forbes. The eye-catching title of Kurt Badenhausen’s post: “The Best Law Schools For Getting Rich.” Because you all went to law school in the hopes of becoming rich, right?
(If so, that was pretty dumb. According to some observers, a junior associate’s salary means you’re poor, and even a midlevel- to senior-associate salary doesn’t make you rich. Partner-level compensation is better, but even a million or two won’t get you access to the top slam pieces.)
Okay, let’s take a look at this list of law schools ranked by their graduates’ median compensation. Some of the schools on it may surprise you….
Ed. note: Gabe Acevedo will be covering LegalTech for Above the Law this year. If you are interested in communicating with someone from ATL about LegalTech coverage, please contact Gabe at gabe@abovethelaw.com. Thanks.
It seems that judges are no longer afraid to unleash the power of the gavel when it comes to e-discovery violations.
There has been quite a buzz in the e-discovery community this week about an article in the Duke Law Journal by attorneys Dan H. Willoughby Jr., Rose Hunter Jones, and Gregory R. Antine, of King & Spalding LLP. Willoughby is the partner in charge of the firm’s Discovery Center, and Jones and Antine both practice in the e-discovery arena.
The article, entitled Sanctions for E-Discovery Violations: By the Numbers, was mentioned in the ABA Journal and the WSJ Law Blog, tweeted extensively, and summarized in vendor blogs such as Catalyst and Clearwell.
So what are the authors’ findings? Let’s take a closer look…
Continue reading “Judges Making More of a Case for E-Discovery Sanctions”
Amy Chua
If you’re going to be a diva, then own it. Was this lesson lost on Yale law professor Amy Chua, the author of an incendiary essay in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, and a new book about Eastern versus Western parenting styles, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother?
Professor Chua seems to have it all: brains and beauty; an incredible academic career, with an endowed chair at Yale Law School; a hunky husband, fellow YLS prof Jed Rubenfeld; and two lovely and accomplished daughters. (Speaking of Chua’s kids, does anyone know where her oldest girl, Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, is attending, or applying to attend, college? To Asian parents, sending a child to a top college is the ultimate vindication.)
Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld
But Amy Chua may need to work on her bitch-goddess qualities. After her controversial essay about the superiority of Chinese mothers and hard-ass Asian parenting set the blogosphere on fire — and sent her book rocketing to #5 on the Amazon bestseller list — Chua backtracked a bit, instead of defiantly standing her ground.
In interviews with the San Francisco Chronicle, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, among other outlets, the self-proclaimed “Tiger Mom” seemed to turn into a pussycat….
Late last night, Congress passed a compromise tax bill that will, among other things, cap the estate tax at 35% (with a $5 million exemption). If not for this compromise, the estate tax would have returned in 2011, at rates as high as 55 percent (with a $1 million exemption).
Hallelujah. Anytime you can save wealthy dead people millions of dollars during a time of crushing federal deficits, that’s something you just have to do. Way to go, Obama. When I voted for you in 2008, really I was just trying to vote for four more years of Bush’s ruinous fiscal policies.
Obama isn’t just saving money for all the dauphins eager to get their hands on their inheritances; he could be saving lives. Duke Law professor Richard Schmalbeck apparently thinks that rich old people might have killed themselves in droves over the next two weeks. Schmalbeck suggests that after spending a lifetime working hard and earning money, hundreds “or even a few thousand” of the aging rich might have committed suicide in the waning days of 2010, in order to pass on as much of their money to their children as they can before the estate tax returns in 2011.
I shudder to think that somebody would commodify their own life in such a way. But then again, I’m not rich. Maybe you only get rich in this country by being the kind of person who would gladly kill yourself if the price is right…
Continue reading “Estate Tax Compromise Could Save Thousands of Lives (of Millionaires)”
Last spring, Duke Law students had a fit because Duke undergrads were taking up valuable space in the law library. I admit, I enjoy having a little bit of fun with Duke Law students (haters gotta hate), but I’m with them on this one.
Undergraduates have two or three libraries (or maybe more, I don’t know if Duke is one of those schools where every major department has a library in its campus headquarters) where they can go play footsie and pretend to study. Or they can go to the business school library (the MBA kids are all at the bar “networking”) or the medical school library (the would-be doctors are busy being bought by drug companies or conducting unnecessary tests).
But at the law library people need to work. You can’t learn the law without spending a lot of time quietly reading the opinions of old white men (shut up “law firms,” nobody spends three years and $100K to learn practical lawyering skills). Those cases aren’t going to brief themselves! Law students need a quiet environment to think deeply and prepare for the eight hours of terrified regurgitation to come.
It looks like the administrators of Duke finally got the message…
Continue reading “Duke Undergrads Expelled From Duke Law Library in Preparation for Finals”
You know what scares me? There’s a version of my career where I end up as the bizzaro version of Tucker Max. The “fat, black, and married” version of Tucker Max. The “other guy” who used douchebag behavior to get through elite institutions, just like Tucker Max.
It’s like, if I everything goes wrong for me but I end up with a book and a movie deal, I’ll be a Tucker Max clone. It’s not likely, but the mere possibility of it keeps me up at night. I’m a nice guy, really, I am. I’m not nice to, like, people or anything, but I have a good soul. I don’t want to be the black Tucker Max! And I’m not.
But then I read things like Max’s latest tweet, and I think “Dear God, is that what I could become?”…
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.
Also, we have the two below in-house openings:
Keep reading »
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?
Keep reading »
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