A one-time legal assistant to ousted District Judge Elizabeth Halverson won a $50,000 judgment Tuesday in the defamation case she filed against Halverson in 2007. District Judge David Wall on Tuesday ordered Halverson to pay the money and to return files to the assistant, Ileen Spoor….
Wall denied Spoor’s claim for $100,000 in punitive damages. Halverson did not attend the proceedings.
Had Her Honor attended, would the outcome have been different? As an oral advocate, she’s not half-bad.
So, what were the allegations against Elizabeth Halverson?
Not surprisingly, Ed Halverson didn’t go down without a fight:
Before he was sentenced, Edward Lee Halverson, 49, stunned a Las Vegas courtroom with a claim that he struck Elizabeth Halverson at their home Sept. 4 because his wife, who must use a scooter to get around, threatened to stab him.
“If she wouldn’t have pulled a knife on me and threatened me, I wouldn’t have clocked her,” Halverson said. “I defended myself.”
Nice line. But I liked it better when Mr. Blond said it: “If they hadn’t done what I’d told them not to do, they’d still be alive.”
More than three thousand ballots were cast, but there can be only one Lawyer of the Year.
Starting at the bottom, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich may not have hit the very lowest point in Chicago political history, but he did manage to get the lowest tally in our vote, with only 96 supporters.
Harvard Law Avenger Phil Telfeyan was a close second-to-last in your esteem, with a mere 110 votes.
Judge Halverson rounded out the bottom three at 167 votes.
That makes THREE! THREE! THREE candidates who did worse than Count Layoffula! HA! HA! HA! (He received a total of 233 votes.)
Listen dude, you really want the Spitzer? Apparently not. The prosecutor-turned-commentator came up only average in our slate of nominees, with 288 votes.
Nervous T-10 1L may not have found a job this year, but he touched the hearts of 428 voters, landing him in the Final Four.
Marc Dreier — if that’s his real name — swindled up 485 ballots, more votes than disgraced governors Eliot Spitzer and Rod Blagojevich combined. Way to rock the scandal vote, sir. You’re the Second Runner-Up for the 2008 ATL Lawyer of the Year.
That leaves us with the final two. Will last year’s runner-up, President-elect Barack Obama, finally be Number That One? Or will The Anonymous Laid-Off Big Firm Attorney finally get something to soothe his pain? (Elie won’t share his pot.)
Find out who will be crowned the 2008 ATL Lawyer of the Year, after the jump.
The Nevada Judicial Discipline Commission has done a great public service. They have collected all of the faults of (former) Judge Elizabeth Halverson into one 28-page document.
The commission found:
No employee, even those inured to a judge’s mercurial temperament and foul mouth should have to experience what Judge Halverson made her immediate staff live and work through on a routine basis.
Halverson — who maintains her innocence — has 15 days to appeal the decision.
Could this be the end of the public’s fascination with Judge Halverson? Unlikely.
But what is she going to do now? She’s going to need food, shelter, and most likely a pliant slave with massage expertise. Any ideas on an alternative career for ATL’s favorite judge?
Last month, after Judge Elizabeth Halverson lost her reelection bid, we lamented her imminent departure from these pages.
It seems that we spoke too soon. From the Las Vegas Review-Journal:
Embattled District Judge Elizabeth Halverson is in the hospital after she was assaulted by her husband, Las Vegas police said this morning. Her injuries are not life threatening.
Police were called to her house late last night to respond to a domestic violence call. Police said her husband, Edward Halverson, 49, hit her with a frying pan.
They always said the frying pan would be the death of her.
Edward Halverson was booked into the county jail on one attempted murder, one count battery with substantial bodily harm and one count battery with a deadly weapon.
This is not Ed Halverson’s first brush with the law; he’s a convicted felon. Judge Halverson may have been prescient when she nicknamed her hubby “Evil Ed.”
Domestic violence is a serious issue. We wish Judge Halverson a speedy recovery from her injuries. (We also remind her that our offer of a column on Above the Law still stands.) Judge Halverson hospitalized, husband jailed after attack [Las Vegas Review-Journal]
While the Judicial Discipline Commission weighs the fate of embattled District Judge Elizabeth Halverson, voters delivered their own verdict Tuesday, deciding Halverson must go.
Halverson, who faces complaints of falling asleep on the bench and harassing her staff, received less than 10 percent of the vote, trailing opponents Stefany Miley and Jason Landess, who will move to the general election in November.
Alas, it appears that the ATL endorsement was not enough to save her candidacy.
A woman who declined to give her name as she walked out of Ruth Fyfe Elementary School said she and her husband specifically showed up at the polls to voice their displeasure with Halverson. The couple called her “goofy.”
“I voted against her because of the recent happenings, her health issues … everything,” the woman said.
Voter Barbara Lloyd said she too wanted to be sure Halverson wasn’t re-elected.
“I want her out of office,” Lloyd said. “I haven’t been impressed with her at all.”
Halverson’s run for office appeared to be bleak before she faced the discipline commission. According to her campaign contribution reports, she had $5,200 in her election coffers thanks to a loan from herself.
A disciplinary hearing for a suspended Nevada state judge has been postponed, after she reported she felt ill.
The Nevada Commission on Judicial Discipline suspended the hearing in its fifth day after Clark County District Court Judge Elizabeth Halverson’s lawyer said the diabetic judge experienced a hypoglycemic, or low blood sugar, episode.
The hearing is due to resume next Thursday and Friday in Las Vegas.
Further Update: More from our Halverson-obsessed tipster, after the jump.
[Ed. note: This post is by MARIN, one of the finalists in ATL Idol, the "reality blogging" competition that will determine ATL's next editor. It is marked with Marin's avatar (at right).]
From ergonomic wrist supports to dual computer monitors, law firms wring every ounce of productivity from the attorneys they haven’t axed (yet). But while firms close branch offices and fire scores of lawyers, we submit that the answer to the current economic slump isn’t merging firms – it’s merging people. Everybody knows that two lawyers are better than one. It’s time for firms to get both and pay half; time for attorney mating.
No more legions of staff attorneys or filibuster roll-calls. Say goodbye to team meetings that resemble the Last Supper. Through attorney mating, firms can combine, say, the skills of master litigators with those of corporate powerhouses in order to produce uberlawyers with the efficiency of ten Aeron chairs. Using genetic samples from parent attorneys and the latest in Photoshop technology, we’ll give you a sneak peak at the offspring of some of the most sought-after combinations.
Read more, after the jump.
America’s favorite plus-size jurist, Judge Elizabeth Halverson, is back in the news. The disciplinary hearing to remove her from the bench — figuratively, not literally — got underway today.
Earlier this afternoon, from a Halverson-following reader:
CNN.com has live video stream of the Judge Halverson trial/hearing. I just started listening to it, so there hasn’t been anything real juicy yet. The first issue was Judge Halverson’s ability to use the restroom and the adequacy of the facilities at the hearing location.
And an update:
[So far] nothing that is new news. Her bailiff has been testifying about all the things he had to do for her. They are on a lunch breach until 4 PM Eastern time.
Ah, Judge Halverson’s lunch break. Expect the proceedings to resume around…. 8 PM?
In defense of Judge Halverson, is she getting a fair shake from the State Commission on Judicial Discipline? From the AP:
Nevada’s state judicial disciplinary panel is being asked to ban a suspended judge from calling witnesses or introducing evidence during hearings next week that could strip her of her elected position.
Twelve Angry Men, move over; now there’s someone meatier. A juicy judicial celebrity sighting, from the Las Vegas Sun:
Suspended District Judge Elizabeth Halverson returned to the Regional Justice Center on Friday — for jury duty.
While waiting for an assignment, Halverson, who can’t roll through the courthouse on her motorized scooter without attracting attention, turned quite a few heads, including those of several prosecutors at the district attorney’s office, which is on the same floor as the jury service room.
Las Vegas lawyers: If you’re hoping to have Halverson on your jury, sorry. Her Honor wound up being assigned to a civil trial that was subsequently postponed, “bringing an abrupt halt to her brief public service on the other side of the bench.” Suspended judge can’t even get out of jury duty [Las Vegas Sun]
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;
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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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On her motorized Rascal scooter. From the Las Vegas Review-Journal:
