Courtroom or catwalk? Perp walk or runway strut? These are the “important” questions that the media has focused on in recent years when it comes to celebrities’ run-ins with the law. Headlines focus not on their underlying criminal offenses, but instead on their couture du jour.
This rings especially true in the case of Lindsay Lohan. From head to toe, LiLo’s courtroom fashion choices are hot-button issues that result in full-length articles in fashion magazines, gossip blogs, and even the New York Times.
When everyone is commenting on your clothing, you know that you’re doing something right (or something very, very wrong). And unfortunately for our favorite Mean Girl, those comments usually aren’t very nice….
* Should the Supreme Court be forced to televise oral arguments? Yes, but only on the condition that we get spin-off shows called Wise Latina Justice and Ruthie’s Law. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Rod Blagojevich won’t get leniency during sentencing. He’ll spend the next week lamenting the fact that can’t brush his beautiful hair like Marcia Brady while in prison. [Bloomberg]
* Brynee Baylor, a D.C. attorney, has been charged with fraud by the SEC. Hey, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to get yourself a pair of Jimmy Choos. You go girl. [Blog of Legal Times]
* Plan B, the morning-after pill, may soon be available on drugstore shelves thanks to the FDA. But so what? Plan A, keeping your legs closed, is a much cheaper alternative. [New York Daily News]
* Pakistani actress Veena Malik is suing FHM for $2M. She only wanted to go topless on the cover, but she claims they made her look full on nude. Have at it, pixel inspectors. [New York Magazine]
* Deborah Batts, the first openly gay judge to serve on the federal bench, got married this weekend. We hope she doesn’t become the first openly gay federal judge to get divorced. [New York Times]
* Things are getting hairy for Kim Kardashian, and not just because she’s Armenian. A hair removal company is suing her, saying she’s lying about how she gets all of that hair off her body. [Fox News]
* Lori David: she’s every teenage boy’s dream, and every mother’s nightmare. A hot Texas mom has been banned from the internet after sexting naked pictures to her son’s friend. [Daily Mail]
Let’s see what else the ladies are up to this morning….
* I’m sure the soon-to-be first-year associates out there could use this guide on who to bill their hours to. [Going Concern]
* Everybody has advice for when lawyers should step back and remain calm. When is the appropriate time for lawyers to freak out, start screaming and pounding things, and run around saying “we’re all gonna die!”? I mean, I try to do that at least once a week and it makes me feel so centered. [Tips for Young Lawyers]
* As the son of a Haitian immigrant, I do have some Creole roots. But I think it would be awesome to be full-on French for at least one day. I’d definitely have sex with a hotel maid, pee on an airplane, and find a German to surrender to. [Times of Malta]
* True story: when I was a kid, I thought the difference between white men and black men was their hair. So like, a brother with relaxed hair like Al Sharpton was “white” to me, and a guy with a big Jew-fro was “black” to me. I didn’t learn my error, until I walked that nice Jewish girl home from school that one time and saw the look on her parents’ faces. [Gawker]
* I don’t think a lawsuit can sufficiently capture what should happen to a doctor who incorrectly amputates a penis. Next time I go in for surgery I’m writing “do not remove under any circumstance” on that bad boy. Yeah, it’ll fit. [MSNBC]
* I’m flying this weekend for the first time in over a year (it couldn’t be avoided). I’ll need to brush up on what rights I still retain during air travel. As long as I acknowledge TSA’s droit du seigneur to my wife, I’m allowed to carry an unopened water bottle on board, right? [Legal Blog Watch]
* There’s a statement from the University of Baltimore on the Phillip Closius situation. They say their “forward momentum” will continue. Does that mean they expect future Baltimore Law students to be unable to run a Google search? [WSJ Law Blog]
* Lat imagined a future legal career for Casey Anthony that starts with a Anthony getting a GED (before clerking on the Supreme Court and becoming a law partner of Jose Baez). But doesn’t Hustler seem like something more in her wheelhouse? [Gawker]
* Have we done irreparable damage to our credit rating, unless we can prove we have a legal “fail-safe” in case a vocal Tea Party minority hijacks the entire freaking nation again? [Blackbook Legal]
* Hey baby, your placenta or mine? Four nursing students may have aborted their careers due to oversharing on Facebook — and now one of them is suing. [Wall Street Journal]
* Like sh*t through a goose: a woman claims she now has digestive problems because she got to second base with Donald Duck. [Washington Post]
* Can a school keep your kid from looking like a lesbian? These parents are fighting for their son’s right to look like Justin Bieber. [Indianapolis Star]
* No happy ending for Brett Favre. The QB tried to throw a pass to his masseuses’ tight ends, but he’s now getting sacked with a lawsuit. [New York Post]
* U.S. News wants you to know that if you go to Cooley, the only place your application will be transferred to is the paper shredder. [Get In: Law School / U.S. News]
* Rahm sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so stop writing parody songs about him, motherf**ker. [Change of Subject / Chicago Tribune]
Back in March 2008, we named Daniel Hynes our Lawyer of the Day. Hynes was convicted of theft by extortion after trying to shake down at least 19 New Hampshire hair salons by accusing them of gender and age discrimination (in the form of pricing haircuts differently for men, women, and children).
Now, a quick update, from the ABA Journal:
The New Hampshire Supreme Court has upheld the extortion conviction of a lawyer who threatened to sue a Concord hair salon for charging women more money for haircuts than men or children.
Daniel Hynes is identified as a Manchester lawyer and a 2006 graduate of the Western New England College School of Law in a story published by the Concord Monitor in March last year. A jury convicted him of theft by extortion after deliberating for only 1 ½ hours.
One and a half hours? Ouch. And Hynes didn’t fare better on appeal.
Young New Hampshire lawyer Daniel Hynes, who is just 27, has earned a place among our Lawyers of the Day for extorting hair salons.
Feel free to use the Power of the Law Degree to ensure that your landlord heats your apartment adequately. But using it to threaten beauty parlors… that’s just wrong. From the Concord Monitor:
A Manchester lawyer who threatened to sue a Concord salon for pricing haircuts differently for men and women and then took money to settle the matter was found guilty of theft by extortion.
A jury took about 1½ hours to convict Daniel Hynes, 27, on Wednesday. Assistant Attorney General Elizabeth Baker said Hynes sent letters to at least 19 salons in the state.
One arrived Dec. 20, 2006, at Claudia’s, the North Main Street hair salon owned by Claudia Lambert. In the letter, Hynes said prices should be based on the time a cut takes or on the length of hair, instead of on gender. He wrote: “I demand payment in the amount of $1,000 in order to avoid litigation,” according to court documents.
Since he was not representing a client, Mr. Hynes defended his right to extort by citing the First Amendment and the right to petition the courts. We are surprised it took the jury an hour and a half to deliberate on this.
Hynes would have been wise to enlist a female friend to play his client in this fiendish plot. His reasoning comes across as a bit weak:
In one court document, he argued that the price structure that he saw as discriminatory had caused him stress and mental anguish, despite the fact that prices for men were less than those for women. He said he was being denied an “inherent benefit in being treated equally.” He pointed to a woman’s right to vote and said he benefits from her right, even though he is a man.
If Mr. Hynes is not disbarred, we’d like to talk with him about how we can get a haircut for under $100. Update: Find out how Daniel Hynes fared on appeal. Lawyer guilty of salon extortion [Concord Monitor]
* Professor Eugene Volokh wonders: Does engaging in a three-way with a current client and the client’s girlfriend count as having sex “with a current client” — a practice forbidden by state bar rules? [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Professor Ann Bartow wonders: Why call it “law porn”? [Feminist Law Professors via Blawg Review]
* Paralegal of the Day? [TPM Muckraker]
* A way for that Cleary Gottlieb Glamour editor to earn some extra cash on the side? [City Room]
* “Law school grads: burnt by the job search process? A journalist wants to hear about it.” [JD Underground]
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.
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.
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Courtroom or catwalk? Perp walk or runway strut? These are the “important” questions that the media has focused on in recent years when it comes to celebrities’ run-ins with the law. Headlines focus not on their underlying criminal offenses, but instead on their couture du jour. 
