NYU Law School

Ex-Associate at Three Top Firms Charged With Massive Insider Trading

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Matthew Kluger

There’s no contest today for Lawyer of the Day honors. The clear winner is Matthew Kluger, a former associate at three leading law firms, who has been charged in a massive insider trading case. Kluger stands accused of reaping more than $32 million in profit over the course of a 17-year conspiracy, which also allegedly involved a trader, Garrett Bauer. (Kluger and Bauer might not be as big as Raj Rajaratnam, who’s pretty hefty, but their supposed scheme is nothing to scoff at.)

The charges were filed by Paul Fishman, U.S. Attorney for New Jersey (disclosure: my former office). Fishman claims that Matt Kluger passed along insider information that eventually made its way, via an unnamed co-conspirator, to Garrett Bauer, who traded on it. According to the complaint, Kluger and Bauer invested more than $109 million in the scheme, which yielded profits of more than $32.2 million.

Where did Kluger allegedly obtain the inside information? From the three Biglaw firms where he once worked on M&A deals….

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Non-Sequiturs: 04.01.11

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* The Southern District of New York: gay bench, or the gayest bench? Like fellow S.D.N.Y. nominee Paul Oetken, Alison Nathan is an openly gay lawyer who clerked for SCOTUS and served as an associate White House counsel. [Poliglot / Metro Weekly; Main Justice]

* Maybe this is why Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld decided to leave New Haven and head up to Harvard. [Slate]

* Speaking of the Harvard-bound hottie, if you’re waiting for her to fail at anything, don’t hold your breath. [Disgrasian]

* Dolce & Gabbana say “Ciao!” to Italian tax evasion charges. [Fashionista]

Jeannie Suk

* Belated congratulations to Jeannie Suk, one-half of celebrity couple Feldsuk, who’s now the first Asian-American woman to serve as a tenured professor at Harvard Law School. [The Careerist]

* A cute April Fool’s joke from UT Law: check out the offerings in Dean Larry Sager’s Law Bodega. [Etsy]

* Elsewhere in April Fool’s news, “Dear SCOTUS FOIA Officer”…. [Law Librarian Blog]

* This is not a prank: a full ride to NYU Law. [Vault]

* These lawyerly lovebirds met as 1Ls at Georgetown Law and would love the support of ATL readers in Crate & Barrel’s “ultimate wedding” contest. [Ultimate Wedding Contest / Crate & Barrel]

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The Choice: 0Ls Try To Figure Out Which Law School Is Right For Them

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This is the time of year when future lawyers have to make a crucial choice that will follow them for the rest of the legal careers: where to go to law school. The choice of law school is critical, maybe unfairly so. When you look at medical schools, the hard part is getting into a medical school. But in the legal profession, your choice of law school will be a huge factor in what professional opportunities you can take advantage of with your J.D.

Perhaps in past years, this choice was really easy for 0Ls: they could just go to the highest-ranked school they got into, and then hope for the best. But given the realities of the legal economy, 0Ls need to look at a number of factors beyond the U.S. News law school rankings: how much the school costs, what job markets the law school feed into, and so on.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve received a number of inquires from 0Ls asking for advice about which law school to attend. We’ve pulled out two of the best questions, and now we want to open it up to the Above the Law readers to give these students — and all 0Ls — the combined wisdom of the ATL community.

These are really tough choices, and we know reasonable people will disagree. Hopefully you guys can help these 0Ls feel comfortable with their decisions, whichever way they go….

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Law License Plates: School Spirit?

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On Friday we posted a photo of a law-related license plate that struck some of you as rather obnoxious. We asked you to send in pictures of additional legally-themed vanity plates, by email (subject line: “Vanity License Plate”).

We received a number of interesting submissions. Check out the first one….

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Legal Eagle Wedding Watch: The Turman Show

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LEWW is back, plus one more adorable kid and minus a lot of sleep. Prime wedding season is nearly upon us, but today our task is to get you caught up on some of the nuptial fabulosity that occurred in our absence.

(And by the way, if you missed the NYT’s December feature on the bride and groom who met at their kids’ nursery school and left their spouses to be together — and the whole should-we-celebrate-infidelity uproar that ensued — get your fill here. Good stuff.)

Today’s finalists:

Lauren Tortoriello and Jason Ertel

Eboni Marshall and Rossie Turman III

Elizabeth Raskin and Benjamin Warlick

Check out these newlyweds’ pictures and résumés, after the jump.

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Best Law Schools for Getting a Biglaw Job (2011)

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Why is he smiling? He landed a job at a top law firm.

If your goal in life, or at least your near-term career objective, is to land a job at a large law firm, which law schools would best suit your needs? When it comes to minting Biglaw associates and partners, not all law schools are created equal.

The National Law Journal has just come out with its annual survey of which schools the NLJ 250 law firms relied on most heavily when filling their first-year associate classes. The results are interesting — and also a little depressing.

We’ll start with the depressing part: hiring of top law school graduates continued to decline. As noted by Leigh Jones of the NLJ, “Hiring of graduates of the top law schools by the nation’s largest law firms slid by 10% during 2010 compared with 2009…. In 2010, the top 50 schools sent 3,822, or 27.3%, of their juris doctor graduates to NLJ 250 firms, compared with 30.3% of their 2009 graduating classes. The top 50 schools produced 13,989 graduates during 2010.”

Let’s look at the top 10 law schools, ranked by the percentage of their 2010 graduates who landed jobs at NLJ 250 firms (i.e., “Biglaw”)….

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Are Some NYU Law Professors Allowed to Submit Grades Later Than Others?

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We are well into February, and there are still law students who haven’t received all of their grades from first semester.

Why? I have no earthly idea. We’ve talked about this problem before: we get that professors really hate spending the time it takes to grade a bunch of exams. It’s boring. It’s arbitrary. It’s annoying to know that no matter how “fairly” you grade, you’ll have at least a few students who can’t handle the truth, waiting in your office to ambush you.

But it’s also your job. It’s your duty, owed to the students who are ruining themselves financially to help pay your salary, to provide them with grades in timely fashion. This is especially true in law school. And it’s especially true in a crappy economy. Law school grades matter, and it’s just cruel to keep students in the dark about them.

Now, if I show you a hundred professors who handed in grades late, you’ll hear a hundred different excuses about why grades were delayed: “I was preparing for a conference,” “My Commodore 64 broke down,” “I was having personal problems” — whatever. We get it; sometimes life intervenes and prevents professors from doing their jobs.

But at NYU Law School, some students are alleging that professorial favoritism is allowing some professors to turn in their grades much later than others…

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Legal Eagle Wedding Watch: Jews Versus Episcopalians

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We were somewhat surprised to learn that this actually isn’t the most depressing day of the year. That honor goes to the third Monday in January, not the first. There’s a whole mathematical formula about it. Anyway, here’s some LEWW cheer to brighten your gray Monday.

Administrative note: Signs are indicating that LEWW will soon be presenting Mr. LEWW with another heir. Wedding coverage will be scaled back somewhat while we recover from the blessed event, but you won’t care because it’s January, and nobody gets married in January.

But some got married in December — like these three couples:

1. Ellen Tobin and Todd Kaminsky

2. Rachel Laitala and Colin Greenspon

3. Mabel Hwang and Jonathan Weiss

Check out their bios and photos, after the jump.

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Legal Eagle Wedding Watch: Buffeted

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People, here at LEWW we hate reality TV. Really, really, really hate it. It makes us feel bored, uncomfortable, and grossed-out by humanity, all at the same time. We can watch sports, which we suppose is “reality” in some sense, but other non-scripted programming sends us lunging for the remote. Dancing with the Stars? Gagging at the concept. Jersey Shore? Never seen it; sounds appalling. Even the Food Network is too real for us.

And of course, just thinking about those reality wedding shows makes us break out in hives. That said, we are going to be all over the upcoming royal wedding. Step back, Chelsea, this one is going to be the real deal, and LEWW is already counting the days until April 29. Now, to find a legal angle . . . .

On to this week’s couples. We have four finalists for this special Thanksgiving edition of LEWW:

Audrey Christopher and Trevor Austin

Tali Farhadian and Boaz Weinstein

Susan Ambler and Ashley Ebersole

Allegra Glashausser and Michael Price

Read more about these couples, after the jump.

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Columbia and NYU Students Getting So Hot They Wanna Take Their Clothes Off

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What would Nelly do?

Something like this happens every year. Students at major New York law schools get too hot or too cold because the facilitates managers at their law schools turned on the heat too early or too late.

And when law students are made to feel uncomfortable, they bitch. To us, to their friends, to their deans. If law students really are hothouse flowers, then we know that changing their environment can have disastrous consequences.

Thanks to our new Google voice account (646-820-TIPS), people have been telling us just how hot it is at Columbia and NYU. 100 degrees, 1000 degrees, “it feels like I’ve been sent to the Mustafar system” (that was from a friend at NYU who doesn’t ever get laid).

But I’m asking why. This happens every year. It already happened this year at Cardozo. How many New York lawyers does it take to turn off the heat?

Apparently, the process is more complicated than I can possibly imagine…

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