– Melissa Nelson, the dental hygienist who was fired for being too hot (aka an “irresistible attraction”), in response to Daniel Tosh’s question — “Did you walk out real slutty?” — posed during this week’s episode of Tosh.0 on Comedy Central.
(Nelson, who lost her gender discrimination suit at the Iowa Supreme Court, received a Web Redemption on Tosh.0, where she dressed as a sexy dental assistant. Continue reading to see the clip.)
Now in its eleventy-billionth season, The Bachelorette is one of my guiltiest of pleasures, if only because it’s so ridiculous. If for some reason you haven’t seen the show, here’s the plot: 25 guys get together to show off their machismo and vie for the heart of one of the rejects from The Bachelor in an epic battle to get a taste of those sweet sloppy seconds on national television. In an ideal world, the show’s subtitle would be something like “Because We’re Sick of the Women on Match.com and Their MySpace Angles.”
Anyway, this show usually attempts to pair successful gentleman callers with your average girl-next-door types (and yes, these days, girls next door quit their jobs and move back in with their parents specifically so they can be on a reality TV dating show). Ever since the show featured a more respectable female suitor (read: a dental student) in 2011, ABC’s been upping the ante with respect to the qualifications of the mostly all-white male contestants.
The show hasn’t even aired yet, but we’ve got an inside tip on one of the men who will appear on this season’s trainwreck. One of them is a federal prosecutor, and he’s a major, major stud.
Here at Above the Law, we write about career alternatives for attorneys from time to time, but it’s been a while since we last brought our readers an exciting story about extracurricular activities for attorneys. That being the case, here’s a little fun fact for you: many of the female members of this fine profession have, at one point or another in their lives, been on cheerleading squads.
Whether you’re a law student or a Supreme Court justice (yes, RBG once shook her pom-poms on the field), moonlighting as a cheerleader has its perks. What better way to learn how to BE AGGRESSIVE! B-E AGGRESSIVE! B-E A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E! in the courtroom?
Today’s legal cheerleader has an impressive rack résumé: she used to work in Biglaw, she’s now working as an ADA, and most importantly, she moonlights as a cheerleader for the Atlanta Falcons. Wouldn’t you like to have a lovely litigatrix like her on your side?
Let’s take a look at her cheerleading bio and, because this post would be WWOP, some photos of this gorgeous glamazon….
Once again, we’re wading into the shallow waters of celebrity careers gone awry. Sometimes actors of the B-list variety just want to do something more with their lives — aside from nurse a stint in acting that’s on its last legs. And, just like everyone else who’s unsure of what that “something more” really is, law school beckons with its promises of fame and fortune.
Jerry O’Connell did it most recently, and many others took the plunge before him (apparently careers in the law work well for the child stars of yesteryear). But who’s the latest victim of the celebrity law school trap?
It’s someone who doesn’t want to wait for her life to be over before accomplishing something with it….
* Should a widow be able to extract sperm from the body of her husband, who recently committed suicide, so she can have a child with him? Some thoughts from Professor Glenn Cohen of Harvard Law. [Bill of Health]
* Speaking of suicide, controversy over the prosecution of the late Aaron Swartz rages on. [How Appealing and Instapundit]
* Professor Ann Althouse isn’t a fan of the “if we can save one life” argument for gun control. [Althouse]
* I don’t know anything about football, but even I chuckled at this. [Life in Biglaw]
* “Without the formation of character, the rest is futile.” An Article III judge’s take on the law school crisis. [Simple Justice]
* Because nobody likes sloppy seconds, the merger talks between Pillsbury Winthrop and Dickstein Shapiro are now off the table. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* David Tresch, an ex-Biglaw CIO, was indicted last week on wire fraud charges. “Bitch better give me back my money,” said Mayer Brown. [ABA Journal]
* Does Jeffrey Toobin understand the Voting Rights Act? This law professor seems skeptical. [PrawfsBlog]
* Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, because this Saturday is Gun Appreciation Day. Go celebrate your Second Amendment rights — but do it responsibly, please! [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Remember Ryan Chenevert, the young lawyer who took home the title of Cosmo’s Bachelor of the Year for 2012? Check out the very tongue-in-cheek interview this hottie did with 225 Magazine, after the jump….
It’s the last day of December, so it’s a good time to look back on the year that was. We’ll do what we’ve done for the past three years (wrap-up posts from 2009, 2010, and 2011 can be found here, here, and here) and identify the ten biggest stories of the past year as decided by you, our readers. With the help of Google Analytics, we’ve compiled a list of our top ten posts for 2012, based on traffic (as represented by pageviews).
By the way, for the third year in a row, the most popular category page on Above the Law was Law Schools. People have now been intensely focused on the declining value proposition of going to law school for as long as it takes to earn a Juris Doctor degree. Isn’t it time that we graduate from the current educational model?
The second and third most-popular categories on ATL in 2012 were Biglaw and Bonuses. Although this year brought us the largest law firm failure ever, nearly all other firms indiscriminately doled out offers to summer associates, and bonus season looked better for the first time in years. While the legal profession is still in transition, things are certainly looking up, and through the highs and the lows, we’ve been there to cover it all.
So what were the ten most popular individual posts at Above the Law in 2012? Let’s find out….
So, as many of you have heard by now, Iowa’s Supreme Court recently issued a unanimous opinion which disguises lecherous workplace behavior as a valid legal avenue to terminate employees. You see, bosses can now fire employees whom they deem to be “irresistible attractions,” regardless of whether the employee has ever engaged in flirtatious behavior. In Iowa, it’s now completely acceptable for bosses to fire employees simply for having sex organs that they, in their managerial roles, are unable to use as they see fit. Dear God, you’ve got breasts? You’re so fired. Your ass looks good in slacks? Don’t even bother going back to the office.
This seems a bit sexist, but we suppose these kinds of things do happen when your state’s highest court is a huge sausage fest. And before you start whining about how unfair and discriminatory this is, don’t even bother, because it’s not. Iowa’s Supreme Frat House has decided that this is sort of behavior is controlled by feelings and emotions, not gender. This can’t possibly be gender discrimination, because bosses that want to bone their female employees shouldn’t be expected to control their feelings and emotions.
And it doesn’t matter if that same boss wouldn’t feel the same way about a male employee because of his gender, because the bros on Iowa’s most important bench don’t even care if this opinion makes sense….
* NALP is becoming the harbinger of doom for law practice. Here’s some cheerful news: the percentage of female associates in Biglaw dropped for the third year in a row. Perhaps they’re going the way of the Clifford Chance mommy. [National Law Journal]
* Biglaw hotties are coming to a continent near you! Davis Polk & Wardell will be adding a litigation practice to its existing shop in Hong Kong, and they managed to poach two big name Clifford Chance litigators in the process. [DealBook / New York Times]
* According to the ACC, in 2012, base salaries for general counsel rose 1.9 percent, while cash bonuses dropped 7.9 percent. But really, who’s going to complain about a six-figure bonus? [Corporate Counsel]
* A Delaware jury ruled that Apple infringed on several patents in a mobile-device technologies case filed by MobileMedia Ideas. Somewhere, Samsung’s bigwigs are laughing their asses off. [WSJ Law Blog (sub. req.)]
* A woman was arrested in Spain for trying to smuggle in cocaine from Colombia. Seems pretty standard, except for the fact that she was hiding the coke in brand new breast implants — three pounds of it! [CNN]
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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.
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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