The settlement with Goldman Sachs was not a glorious episode in the history of the Revenue.
–UK High Court Judge Andrew Nicol, employing the spirit of British understatement in a written opinion dismissing a claim by activists that the tax settlement Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs made with Goldman Sachs in 2010 was an unlawful “sweetheart deal.”
If you’re a former Supreme Court clerk, the legal world is your oyster. In the words of one observer, “Supreme Court clerkships have become the Willy Wonka golden tickets of the legal profession. So many top-shelf opportunities within the law, such as tenure-track professorships and jobs in the SG’s office, [are] reserved for members of the Elect.”
If you work at a hedge fund, maybe after a stint at Goldman Sachs or a similarly elite investment bank, you’re the Wall Street version of a SCOTUS clerk — at the top of the field, but with way more money. There aren’t many Lawyerly Lairs out there that cost $60 million (the cost of hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen’s new Hamptons house).
What could lure four high-powered lawyers and hedge-fund types, including two former clerks to the all-powerful Justice Anthony Kennedy, to leave their current perches? How about the chance to earn the kind of money that would make a Supreme Court clerkship bonus look like a diner waitress’s tip?
Jaynie Mae Baker
* What do Tiger Woods’s sexts, Anthony Weiner’s wiener, and the newsworthiness exception to copyright infringement have in common? They’re all in this colorful Ninth Circuit dissent. [National Law Journal]
* Dewey have any idea when this “clawback” deadline will stop being extended? Partners have again been granted another extension to sign on the dotted line, but this time for only 48 hours. [WSJ Law Blog]
* If your reason for resigning from your position as a congressman has to do with “increasing parenting challenges,” becoming the managing director of Biglaw practice group likely isn’t a wise choice. [POLITICO]
* A shareholder suit filed against Goldman Sachs over mortgage-backed securities and early TARP repayment was dismissed. I didn’t watch the Daily Show last night, but I’m sure Jon Stewart had a great joke. [Reuters]
* Musical deans? Hot on the heels of Jeremy Paul’s announcement that he was leaving for Northeastern, Professor Willajeanne McLean has been appointed as interim dean at UConn Law. [Connecticut Law Tribune]
* Law school didn’t build that: as it turns out, a juris doctor isn’t as versatile a degree as it’s made out to be. Just because you managed to get a good non-law job, it doesn’t mean a J.D. helped you. [Am Law Daily]
* Jaynie Mae Baker, the Millionaire Madam’s sidekick, has struck a plea deal with the DA. She won’t be going to jail for her adventures in high-class hooking, and might walk away without a criminal record. [New York Post]
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…
Ladies, Ryan Gosling feels your pain.
* Apparently, it is illegal to father a second illegitimate child in Mississippi. I guess the first one is a freebie or a Mulligan, or whatever. If for some reason I ever have a personal need to know this tidbit, please shoot me in the face immediately. [Legal Juice]
* A class-action lawsuit will be filed tomorrow against the producers of The Bachelor, alleging race discrimination. I’m more concerned about the show’s overall crimes against good taste. (Zing!) [Legal Blog Watch]
* Just like a certain Biglaw firm, Goldman Sachs is dealing with a large number of partner defections. Goldman has a pretty good PR spin though: jumping ship is actually a sign of loyalty to the company. Right, just like the crew of the Titanic. [Dealbreaker]
* Today is #EqualPayDay. If you’re like me and didn’t know what that means, all you need to know is that the fairer sex is still not paid as much as big dumb oafs like myself. If you want to do something to fix this, Ms. JD has some ideas. [Ms. JD]
* Bigotry and prejudice are never okay. UNLESS you want to hate on a new-ish (yet exceedingly popular) religion that is also conveniently in opposition to your liberal political motives. In that case, right this way, sir… [Instapundit]
* If you don’t pay your taxes, the government wants to be able to take away your passport. So, hypothetically, if I were planning to flee the U.S. for, say, Spain, to avoid paying my taxes… I should leave, well, now. Umm, IwillseeyoulaterIhavetorunOKbye. [The Atlantic]
We don’t usually make predictions about the longevity of the marriages we cover. It just seems excessively harsh to say, “This couple is going to get divorced.”
But… this couple is going to get divorced. The 32-year-old grandson of Richard Nixon marries the 21-year-old daughter of a Greek billionaire in front of 700 guests, including Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger. At the Waldorf-Astoria reception, George Pataki grooves to a 24-piece orchestra playing AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.” We give it two years.
But on to some more promising unions. Here are your latest Legal Eagle Wedding Watch finalists:
Elizabeth Smith and Richard Cotton
Read all about these wildly impressive couples, after the jump.
If you are lawyer who is looking for a career change, you really might want to give blogging a try. You won’t make as much money as you would in a Biglaw job. You probably won’t make as much as you would working for a well-respected small law firm.
But money isn’t everything. Take it from me. Or Lat. Or Staci. For instance, right now I’m sitting in my backyard, my dog is curled up by my feet, and I have a fresh pot of coffee. Once I turn the ringer off on my phone (so I can’t hear my creditors calling), it’s a pretty good life. Beat that with a stick.
And it is with that in mind that we welcome another former lawyer to the Breaking Media fold. Check below to meet the new writer for our sister site, Dealbreaker…
Running from the law (firm)?
* He might be a “litigious little man,” but I still dig Prince. Patterson Belknap just wants his billable time and his [insert guitar riff here] kiss. [New York Daily News]
* Star Magazine says that Katie Holmes is a drug addict. Which drug? Scientology. She might win the libel lawsuit, but her ultimate judge will be Xenu. [Reuters]
* A judge in Illinois won’t let a defendant who looks like the Crazy Cat Lady from the Simpsons get her hair done or wear makeup at trial. [Chicago Sun-Times]
* A judge in New York, on the other hand, will give a defendant the tie off his neck and the Brooks Brothers shirt off his back just so he can look stylish in court. [New York Post]
* Just because your kid went to the prom with a Muslim doesn’t mean that you’re down with Islam — especially not when you want to make it a felony to follow Shariah law. [Washington Post]
* Christina Aguilera got arrested for being drunk in public. Someone needs to put that genie back in her bottle before she heads the way of other infamous Mouseketeers. [ABC News]
* How desperate do you have to be to molest your kid in exchange for a date? How stupid do you have to be to think child porn therapy is real? The answer to both questions is VERY. [Detroit Free Press]
* The SEC has accused Goldman Sachs’s ex-director of insider trading. The next insider trading he’ll probably be doing is for cigarettes in the pokey. [Wall Street Journal]
The fantastically successful firm of Goldman Sachs isn’t just “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” It also discriminates against women, according to the allegations in a lawsuit filed earlier today.
Three female ex-employees of Goldman Sachs accuse the venerable bank of maintaining an “outdated corporate culture” that discriminates against women in terms of pay and promotions. The Goldman Girls — not to be confused with Betty White et al. — seek class-action certification for a class consisting of all female managing directors, vice presidents and associates in the last six years.
The lawsuit alleges that women are underrepresented in GS management, making up just 14 percent of partners, 17 percent of managing directors, and 29 percent of vice presidents. Given what it means to be a partner at Goldman — the New York Times recently described it as “the equivalent of winning the lottery,” in an interesting article about some GS partners being stripped of partnership (law firms aren’t the only ones who can play that game) — the stakes are high.
That’s the straightforward stuff. Other claims in the lawsuit, as noted by Nathan Koppel of the Wall Street Journal, are “a bit more salacious”….
Continue reading “Goldman Sachs Accused of Sex Discrimination”
Last November, we scrutinized the compensation of one of America’s best-paid in-house lawyers: Gregory Palm, general counsel of Goldman Sachs. There was some nit-picking from readers about the precise size of his (pay) package, reflected in the various updates appended to the post, but there was unanimity on the main point: serving as Goldman’s top lawyer is a path to riches.
Over the weekend, the New York Times published a long, interesting, behind-the-scenes look at the negotiations between Goldman and the SEC that culminated in the bank’s $550 million settlement — negotiations in which Greg Palm played a leading role. For some good commentary on Louise Story’s article, check out Larry Ribstein (who sees the case as a strike suit that just happened to be brought by the SEC).
What we found most intriguing about the NYT piece — which weighed in at a hefty 3,200 words, as noted by the WSJ Law Blog — was the delicious dish about Gregory Palm’s pay….
Continue reading “Goldman General Counsel Greg Palm Is Still Richer Than You”
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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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