Farewell, Ally McBeal; Enter the Litigatrix
That's the title of our latest column for the New York Observer, which reflects upon recent television and film portrayals of women litigators.
It touches upon some of the same themes highlighted in Amy Kolz's excellent American Lawyer article from last year, but it's more focused on fictional female litigators, as opposed to real-life ones. Here's how it starts:
Whatever happened to Ally McBeal? If recent movies and television shows are any guide, the life of a female lawyer has gotten a lot less pleasant since the carefree, charmingly neurotic days of dancing babies and bathroom kisses. But today's portrayals may be more accurate, and certainly more critically acclaimed.Last January, Glenn Close won a Golden Globe for her compelling performance as Patty Hewes, a fearsome and wildly successful plaintiff's lawyer, on the addictive TV show Damages. The following month, Tilda Swinton snagged an Oscar for stepping into the pumps of Karen Crowder, a hard-charging in-house litigator, in Michael Clayton.
In March, Julianna Margulies (of ER) returned to television as aggressive defense lawyer Elizabeth Canterbury, the title character of Canterbury's Law. Even Katey Sagal, who embodied the famously vulgar Peggy Bundy on Married With Children, reincarnated herself this year as Marci Klein, the sleek, powerful, and ruthless founding partner of the law firm on Eli Stone.
You can read the full column over here.
Farewell, Ally McBeal; Enter the Litigatrix [New York Observer]

Some of you may recall the strange tale of
An interesting
This site tends to focus on large law firms when it comes to compensation coverage. There are several reasons for this. First, Biglaw shops tend to be more public about how they pay their people. Second, there's a larger audience for information about their pay scales. Third, even when firms don't make salary and bonus information publicly available, it's easier to get information out of a firm with several hundred lawyers -- there are more potential tipsters, and the risk of a leaker being discovered is much lower.
Here's our latest Non-Top-Tier Law School Graduate of the Day, an alumnus of a
Here's a sign of changing times: lawyers are picking up luxury real estate holdings that hedge fund guys can't afford to keep.
We received an interesting email about a month ago. We meant to write about it back then, but never got around to it. But since we haven't read about it elsewhere (please correct us if we're wrong), we figure it's still fair game for discussion.
Disorder in the court, disorder in the court! From the
Mr. Dowd has prosecuted and defended significant criminal matters at trial and in parallel proceedings before Congress and regulatory agencies for more than 30 years. His practice focuses on the trial of complex civil and criminal cases.
Okay, not exactly. But 


When we wrote about her
As you learn on your first day of law school, there are two sides to pretty much every case (or rather, every interesting case, or any case worth including in a casebook).
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A lot of our humor is kinda juvenile. So now we'll throw some erudition into the mix. Recently we learned of this fun fact:


