Spring! Cherry blossoms, opening day, and pedigreed lawyers uniting in marriage. We’re pleased to be back with another installment of Legal Eagle Wedding Watch, featuring these three impressive couples:
1.) Susannah Foster and Kenyon Weaver
2.) Kathleen DeLaney and Courtney Thomas
3.) Heath Kern and Joseph Gibson
More on our finalists, after the jump.
Continue reading “Legal Eagle Wedding Watch 2.24 and 3.2: Cancún Honeymoon”
Relax, folks. We are aware that the 2009 law school rankings of U.S. News & World Report have leaked, in advance of their official Friday publication date. They’re all over the blogosphere and the message boards (links collected below).
We’ve been sitting on this item for a little while — coordinating with our other posts this morning, taking into account our traffic patterns, etc. There is a method to our madness.
Ideally we’d hold this item even longer (which would allow us to do a more detailed write-up). But it’s clear that you’re all dying to talk about the rankings RIGHT NOW. And we don’t want to get any more emails and comments of the “why aren’t you writing about U.S. News” variety.
So here you go. Rankings and discussion, after the jump (i.e., click on the “Continue reading” link below).
Email screw-ups and law school listserves have provided us with tons of material in the past. Today’s cautionary tale comes to us from NYU Law School:
“Reply all” has its pitfalls, but so does the “reply to” address. Yikes!
[This student] was replying to an email from the professor sent out after the semester was over. The prof had sent the email via a listserver, so even if you just hit “reply” instead of “reply all,” everyone’s going to see it. The very same pitfall with the very same listserve caused a smart kid to broadcast an email griping because he had too many circuit court clerkship interviews one day.
And here’s the email that was sent to the listserv:
Prof. [xxxx],
I am writing to inquire about my grade in last semester’s [xxxx] class. I turned in the exam feeling that I had under-represented what I actually learned, but I was still somewhat surprised to recieve a C in the course. If you get a chance (and it is appropriate), could you tell me if the grade was purely the result of a sub-par exam or if other factors were included?
Thank you,
[xxxx]
By the way, this is not very skillful grade-grubbing. An email is too easily ignored, and it lacks emotional force. If you want to grade grub, set up an appointment with your professor, and do it in person.
Let them see you, in the flesh — and with tears in your eyes. Make them fully understand how they’ve shattered your dreams of a Vault 10 law firm job or a feeder-judge clerkship — unless, of course, they revisit their prior determination, and give you a grade that more accurately reflects your true abilities….
NYU School of Law announced today that it has hired Professor Kenji Yoshino as a tenured faculty member. He was a Visiting Professor at the school last year and again this Spring. Kenji graduated from Yale Law in 1996 and is influential in the fields of constitutional law, anti-discrimination law, and law and literature. It’s quite a score for NYU. Read the original email announcement after the jump.
Continue reading “NYU Hires Kenji Yoshino as Permanent Faculty Member”
Yes, LEWW hears the howls of protest from our readers about the weeks we skipped recently. We’ll do a makeup post soon, we promise. The weddings pages have been such a wasteland lately that it’s been hard to pull together the kind of legal and nuptial excellence you’ve come to expect here. And it’s crushing our spirit.
Take this week. The NYT featured just seven weddings total, with only two LEWW contenders and one Ivy degree (from U. Penn). Here are the two finalists:
More about these newlyweds, after the jump.
Continue reading “Legal Eagle Wedding Watch 2.3: Sterling Reputation”
We wish we knew how to quit… finding legal angles to every story under the sun. One such story is the recent, tragic death of Heath Ledger, the celebrated young actor.
We’ve noted the news in passing. Now we offer more substantive, law-related discussion (beyond fleeting references to NYU law students who went from their seminars about Jesus to join the crowd of gawkers assembled outside Ledger’s apartment).
1. Rights to remains. Sometimes this can become an issue, as it did in the case of Anna Nicole Smith. Earlier this week, the Ohio Supreme Court heard a case about a law providing that body parts removed during an autopsy are classified as medical waste (which usually results in the incineration, rather than burial with the body).
It fortunately appears this won’t be an issue in Ledger’s case. Although additional blood and tissue testing still needs to be done, his family will be taking custody of his body, according to the NYT’s City Room blog.
2. Pending projects. Heath Ledger’s sudden passing raises issues with respect to projects he was involved with. From the Hollywood Reporter:
Of particular importance to Hollywood will be the future of Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which had very recently begun shooting. After dealing with the shock of losing Ledger to unfortunate circumstances, the film’s producers and lawyers will have to consult with their production lawyers and the insurance firm that indemnified the film to decide whether to recast, restage and/or rewrite the film to work around Ledger’s absence, or whether Ledger’s death presents an irresolvable barrier to completion of the film.
More analysis, including discussion of insurance recovery issues, over here.
3. Funeral protestors. Exact funeral plans for Heath Ledger are not yet known. But when it does happen, it could get ugly. A tipster raises a legal question:
Check out this story [about how members of the antigay Westboro Baptist Church plan to protest at Heath Ledger's funeral, because of his work in "Brokeback Mountain"].
Here’s my question. These [SOBs] are saying horrible, offensive, disgusting things. When does the fighting words doctrine come into play, and does the fighting words doctrine protect me if I punch out one of these bastards? Because I would really like to.
Feel free to opine in the comments.
Update: More about that Jesus seminar, from the WSJ Law Blog.
Heath Ledger’s Death Leaves Big Legal Question [THR, ESQ. / Hollywood Reporter]
Anti-Gay Church to Protest Ledger Funeral [ABC News]
What Are They Teaching at NYU Law These Days? [Traditional Notions]
Where Were You When? [Concurring Opinions]
The Passion of the Christ: The Trial of Jesus [NYU School of Law]
In Chicago, gay lawyers get to attend exclusive parties. In New York, they enjoy a finer prize: luxury real estate.
The law schools of Columbia and NYU have been battling over faculty superstars for several years. And now NYU is bringing out the heavy artillery: multimillion-dollar condo purchases. From the New York Times:
Columbia University, in a never-ending search for a larger campus, has long had an outpost for faculty housing at 455 Central Park West — 53 apartments in an 26-story tower attached to the French Renaissance chateau at West 106th Street.
So it was something of a surprise when a foundation associated with New York University bought a large condominium in the complex. The unit, which cost $5.2 million, is built into one of the huge turrets of the chateau…. The duplex apartment has a round living and dining room with 37-foot high ceilings and Central Park views, along with three more conventional bedrooms.
Sounds fabulous! Who gets to inhabit this fabulous pad?
Law school list serve trainwrecks are a staple here at ATL. We’ve written about several — see, e.g., Cumberland Law School; Washington University School of Law — and they tend to be popular with readers.
A student at NYU Law School brought a recent listserv debacle to our attention:
[This listserve controversy] touches on many law school and other legal topics. They include grades, finals, state vs. T14 schools, Jesus, the Constitution, Jesus vs. the Constitution, and [people] who were arrested at Harvard [see April 24, 2:21 AM entry] and feel the need to announce it to the whole law school.
Perhaps it’s just exam stress all around, but having just taken my crim pro final earlier today, the last bit made things extra hilarious.
The reader then included several emails from the thread. But fortunately for us, another NYU law student already collected and posted them over here (which saves us the trouble of cutting and pasting).
More after the jump.
Continue reading “Because Listserv Clusterf**ks Happen at Top Five Schools, Too”
Okay, CLSers, so NYU Law School has surpassed you in the U.S. News rankings. But here’s some consolation: at least your law library is a zone of normalcy (as law libraries go, that is).
Late last year, NYU’s law library was taken over by a mystery smell. And now it has a new problem.
Check it out, after the jump.
Continue reading “Some Gloating Material for Columbia Law Folks”
We have to step away for a bit. But we’ll leave you with some food for thought (and argument): a piece we just wrote for the New York Observer, timed to coincide with fall interview season, about New York law firms. Here’s a brief excerpt:
“[J]ust as certain sleeve cuts are all the rage at Fashion Week, some law firms are “hot”—and some are not. Having interviewed with firms exactly 10 years ago, I was curious: Who is this fall’s “It” Firm?”
We expect that many of you will disagree with our conclusions, condemn us as ill-informed or biased (or both), etc. That’s okay. Our point is to provoke. We’d like to become for the law firm world what Michael Riedel is to theatre: “Post columnist Michael Riedel’s gleeful skewering of Broadway’s shows and personages has made him a must read—and a must-hate—on the Great White Way.”
You can read the full column over here. It’s the first in what’s going to be a semimonthly column we’ll be writing for the Observer on New York lawyers and law firms. Enjoy (we think).
Polish Those Portfolios! Legal Eaglets Seek Their Nests [New York Observer]
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Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
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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