It has been some time since we’ve had a good old fashioned law school lunch fight. But it was only a matter of time until cafeteria tempers at one law school or another boiled over once again.
This time, it’s not only tempers, but various illnesses and maladies apparently spreading across the angsty University of Michigan Law School cafeteria.
Let’s get our hands dirty….
Continue reading “Law School Lunch Fights Revisited: Biological Warfare”
Brett McGurk
Let me begin by making one thing clear: I support the nomination of Brett H. McGurk to serve as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Republic of Iraq. He is eminently qualified for this post, in light of his extensive experience, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, dealing with the complex and sensitive issues that exist between the United States and Iraq.
Brett McGurk’s brilliance lies beyond dispute — he’s a member of the Elect, after all — and the same is true of his heroism and commitment to public service. In the late 1990s, while he was a summer associate at Cravath, he and a fellow summer rescued two drowning women during a beach outing gone awry. After graduating from Columbia Law School, he devoted his legal career to government service — clerking for Judge Dennis Jacobs (2d Cir.) and the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, working as a legal advisor to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, serving on the National Security Council, and counseling two past ambassadors to Iraq, Ryan Crocker and Christopher Hill. McGurk possesses vast expertise about Iraq, acquired through the many years he has spent advancing U.S. interests in the region — at considerable personal risk to himself.
If you are a high-minded individual, you can stop reading here. If you are less high-minded, keep reading to learn about the sexy email messages that Brett McGurk allegedly exchanged with a prominent (and attractive) journalist….
Please note the UPDATES added at the end of this post.
Continue reading “An Ambassadorial Nominee and Ex-SCOTUS Clerk’s Racy Emails”
A hacked Romney is a sad Romney.
* Scott Walker, the not-exactly-beloved governor of Wisconsin who cut collective bargaining rights for most public workers, is still popular enough to survive a state recall election. In related news, the nation’s Republicans wish to report that, yes, they feel great this morning. [New York Times]
* If they keep dismissing jurors in the Roger Clemens trial, pretty soon it’ll be 12 Angry Men the sequel: 12 Empty Chairs and a Mistrial. [Bloomberg Law]
* Someone hacked Mitt Romney’s email. Gawker published a massive expose didn’t even peek at the emails and informed the Romney camp straightaway. Wait, really? [Gawker]
* The New York City Bar Association says it’s okay to do online research about prospective jurors, as long as the jurors don’t know about it. So, basically, that means you can’t friend the cute redhead on Facebook, even as part of your “research” for the case. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* Who knew that the Barnes & Noble children’s section is apparently a pedo hangout? [The Consumerist]
* An employee in the Texas State Attorney General’s office was convicted of abusing her position to commit identity theft. And it was fun, fun, fun, until she was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in the slammer. [Courthouse News Service]
We’ve written time and again about the dangers of using the reply-all email function, but it seems that those in Biglaw just can’t take the hint. It’s how allegedly lecherous Quinn Emanuel partners get outed. It’s how apparently discontent MoFo partners share their feelings about the firm. It’s how Skadden partners make their evaluations of associates less than confidential.
And now, it’s how senior associates at Clifford Chance implore their colleagues to stop furiously masturbating to them….
It has been quite a while since we have covered a grand mal discovery screw-up here at Above the Law. For a while, we almost started to believe the legal industry as a whole had finally caught up to technology — or at least had figured out how to keep major mistakes under the radar.
Well, our dry spell has ended. As we mentioned yesterday in Non-Sequiturs, the California office of a Biglaw firm handling some high-profile litigation for Goldman Sachs accidentally released an unredacted version of some files that the firm and its clients have spent years trying to keep secret.
Oopsies…
Keep reading to learn more about the case and see which firm reportedly disseminated evidence of the bank’s “naked” short selling…
Ah, law school graduation. It’s a time for you and your classmates to reminisce about all of the good times you’ve had together, and some of the bad times, too. These people have gotten you through the past three (or four) years of your life, and they’ll always remember you in the most flattering light.
Unless, of course, your complexion is cause for major concern.
It’s not every day that your law school classmates are reportedly email-bombed with photos of you that look like before-and-after Proactiv ads. But that’s what one recent Cooley Law graduate alleges in his complaint against the photo studio that took his senior picture….
Chicago is an incredible city. But sometimes the weather, the grime, the southside violence, and the politics can be a little overwhelming. Add the intensity of studying law at a school like the University of Chicago, and you have a recipe for stress and some fiery tempers.
When it all gets to be too much, and you just need to scream at someone for no reason, what can you do?
Jump on your law school listserv, of course….
Continue reading “U. Chicago Law School Listserv War: ‘How Embarrassing’ for Everyone Involved”
It’s time to announce the winner of March’s Lawyer of the Month competition. Readers had five male candidates to choose from, ranging from celebrated conservative litigators, to loud-mouthed state officials, to troubled Biglaw partners. But in the end, only one man had the bravado necessary to beat out the rest — some “gumption,” if you will.
Let’s see who took home the title of Lawyer of the Month for March, an honor surely worth replying-all about….
Continue reading “March Lawyer of the Month: A Biglaw Partner With Some Admirable ‘Gumption’”
They say that March comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb. And in the case of last month’s legal happenings, that saying held true for the most part. Because even stuttering lambs are still gentle creatures, right?
All in all, March was filled with excitement (of the sexual variety) and disappointment (of the layoff variety) for lawyers. We even got a lesson in how to (and how not to) argue before the Supreme Court.
So who are our nominees for March’s Lawyer of the Month competition?
It seems to me that the Student Bar Association president at NYU Law School is drunk with power. And considering we’re talking about the “power” of a freaking law school SBA, that’s pretty funny, like watching the tallest midget insult all the other midgets by calling them “shorty.”
We’ve written about this guy, who we’ve dubbed “Party Law,” before. In September, he was busy removing the SBA treasurer because of alleged financial shenanigans. The treasurer denied wrongdoing and hilarity ensued.
But that was back in September, during those halcyon days at the beginning of his term, when all was sunshine and hope. Now we’re coming towards the end of Party Law’s reign (I assume we’re nearing the end; not that I want that, I wish Party Law could be elected President of the NYU SBA for life). Perhaps he’s trying to exercise a little dead-hand control over the SBA?
Let’s see who Party Law is trying to squash now…
Continue reading “NYU’s ‘Party Law’ SBA President Strikes Again”
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 »
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
Keep reading »
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