* California might start killing criminals again. [Johnny California]
* “America needs a tax code simple enough for the Treasury secretary to figure out.” [WSJ via TaxProf Blog]
* A South Carolina legislator wants to make it a felony if you use vulgar language around a minor. But don’t blame the great state of South Carolina for the idiotic things that are sometimes done in its name. [The Volokh Conspiracy]
* It would have been so much better if the mayor of Racine had just nailed a sheep. [Wonkette]
* In case you weren’t glued to a television all day, here are some highlights from Eric Holder’s confirmation hearing. [Above the Law]
* The fight to end double posting can be won. Knowing is half the battle. [Dealbreaker]
Howell Jackson will be taking a stab at filling Elena Kagan’s shoes at HLS:
Howell Jackson has agreed to serve as the acting dean of Harvard Law School (HLS), subject to the U.S. Senate’s confirmation of Dean Elena Kagan’s nomination to serve as U.S. Solicitor General, President Drew Faust announced today. Jackson, the James S. Reid Jr. Professor of Law, served as the School’s vice dean for budget from 2003 to 2006.
Jackson credentials seem strong:
Jackson is a graduate of both Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School, and earned his undergraduate degree from Brown University. An expert in the field of regulation of financial institutions, Jackson has taught at the Law School since 1989.
Which firms are on the cutting edge of the digital age? Law and Technology News has an opinion. The publication just released their sixth annual law technology awards:
The awards recognize outstanding innovation by law firms and law departments in their use of technology.
The big winner is Fish & Richardson for most innovative use of technology.
And Joy Heath Rush of Sidley Austin won the award for “Champion” of Technology. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds pretty cool.
Former SCOTUS Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is on a mission to educate. As reported last summer, she’s working with Georgetown University and Arizona State University on a “free, interactive, web-based program designed to teach and engage students in civics.” It’s called Our Courts, and it’s now live.
By having civics lessons in the form of online games, O’Connor hopes to trick the kids into thinking they’re having fun while they learn about the court system and constitutional rights. It brings back fond memories of The Oregon Trail, and an excuse to play video games in class. Though to be honest, we can’t remember what we really learned from that game, beyond the immense satisfaction of shooting down buffalo.
The site did a half-launch back in the fall, and has since re-designed. The games are still not live, but are promised by the start of the 2009 school year. This was the original home page (we’ve pointed out some elements that we wouldn’t want you to miss):
That design is no more. Out with the old, in with the new:
Somehow, the avatars are cuter than the real kids. Which home page do you prefer?
Not surprisingly, Ed Halverson didn’t go down without a fight:
Before he was sentenced, Edward Lee Halverson, 49, stunned a Las Vegas courtroom with a claim that he struck Elizabeth Halverson at their home Sept. 4 because his wife, who must use a scooter to get around, threatened to stab him.
“If she wouldn’t have pulled a knife on me and threatened me, I wouldn’t have clocked her,” Halverson said. “I defended myself.”
Nice line. But I liked it better when Mr. Blond said it: “If they hadn’t done what I’d told them not to do, they’d still be alive.”
Just to close the loop on Cadwalader’s London partner defection, firm chairman Christ White sent the following firm wide email:
Seven partners in the London office resigned from the Firm today to join Paul Hastings. The reduction in capabilities in London is unfortunate. However, these departures allow us to rebuild the London office into a profitable operation with a focus consistent with the Firm’s long-term objectives. We start this rebuilding process with a very strong foundation in Capital Markets, Financial Restructuring and Tax led by partners Angus Duncan, Richard Nevins, Nick Shiren and Adam Blakemore. Bob Link will move to London in February to lead the Firm’s rebuilding effort.
So, you’re sending the guy you just ousted to rebuild the London office that just got eviscerated?
In our occasional series on career alternatives for attorneys — i.e., things you can do with a law degree that don’t involve working for a law firm as an associate or contract attorney — we’ve already touched on the writer/author career option. But when we happened upon How I Went From an NYU Law Student to a Smut Writer, we couldn’t help but return to entertaining the idea of book-writing as an alternative career.
Admittedly, Rachel Kramer Bussel never actually became an attorney, as she dropped out of NYU Law before completing her J.D. She recently guest-blogged on Jewcy, a “premier Jewish media and entertainment outlet for progressive free-thinkers.” There, she explained why she traded the Bluebook for blue balls books:
Today I want to share how I went from an NYU Law student to the editor of 24 anthologies ranging from spanking to foot fetishes to exhibitionism to crossdressing. You could say it’s all because of Monica Lewinsky. She was the protagonist of my first published story, called “Monica and Me,” written circa 1999. It was a fantasy about, well, Monica and me, about what would happen if I (or rather, my narrator) met her at a booksigning.
Thanks to Google Books, you can read an excerpt from Monica and Me. Warning: After she described Monica as “ever-luscious” in the first paragraph, we found it hard to continue reading.
I took something true (my crush on her) and turned it into fiction for a book of celebrity sex fantasies called Starf*cker. That was just as I was leaving law school, uncertain about my future (I never graduated from law school). I went on to work at various administrative jobs, and kept on writing in my spare time. I wrote and submitted and [sic] erotica story every few months, many of them true, about my budding sexual explorations, and found getting published to be a thrill I fast became addicted to.
In addition to writing and editing porn, she teaches writing workshops. Bussel claims that you can eroticize just about anything. She says that two of the exercises in her workshops are “write a story involving a chair, and write a story involving George W. Bush.” The chair seems easy, but putting Bush in a porn story is just wrong. Right?
If you’re thinking about a foray into porn writing yourself, we offer an exercise of our own. Write a story eroticizing a massive doc review, your managing partner, and creative billing codes. Good luck!
I would like to bring your attention to the Moscow market. Moscow has a satellite office of nearly every major US firm, and every major UK firm. Most Moscow offices are between 20 and 35 associates, though some British firms are 100 strong. As you might guess the downturn has hurt the Russia market just as bad, if not worse than the US and UK. Law firms have started to fire/layoff associates, though they are not “playing by the rules.” In other words, they are firing people in underhanded ways, because they do not think there is any reputation risk. I suspect this is due in large part to the fact that the vast majority associates at these firms are Russian, and Russian associates do not necessarily read US/UK legal blogs (though some do).
Things look just as bleak for Clifford Chance’s Moscow associates as those in London. Russia has been hit hard by the credit crunch, and the ex-pat lawyers who moved there are being mercilessly dispatched.
The firm shed some 30 lawyers in the run up to Christmas as part of an exercise designed to trim the office’s numbers by 20% before year end. Insiders say that associates have been asked to sign agreements waiving their rights under the Russian labour code. Those who agreed to sign apparently only got three weeks’ pay – whereas those said no got up to six months’ salary.
If anybody has more information on the Russian purge, send in your information to ATL.
The confirmation hearings for Eric Holder as attorney general just started.
We’ll try to keep an eye on it for you and update you with interesting news and notes. Especially when the Specter in the punch bowl speaks up.
So far Holder has said the word “independent” twice and now we’re going through the list of black people who were shot in the sixties.
Update (10:31): Let me paraphrase question 1:
LEAHY: Waterboarding mutherf***** do you believe in it?
HOLDER: Waterboarding is torture.
LEAHY: Gonzales! Are you named GONZALES?
HOLDER: Waterboarding is torture.
Update (10:56): Round 1 of Specter v. Holder involved both fighters feeling each other out. Lots of clenching, no haymakers:
SPECTER: Let me remind everybody who Marc Rich is and why he’s a terrible person.
(time passes, seasons change …)
Mr. Holder, did you know about this?
HOLDER: Nope. My bad.
LEAHY: Time!
Score the round 10-10.
Meanhwhile Sen. Herbet Kohl (who also owns the Milwaukee Bucks) wants to know if Holder can ball with Obama. As commenter #5 might point out “that question would never have been asked if Holder was white.”
Thanks to the power of “the internet,” I’m able to remind you that in October the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius informed associates:
As in past years, base compensation adjustments will continue to be effective as of January 1 and will be reflected in your January paycheck.
In fact, I reminded you just last week that Morgan Lewis previously stated:
As in past years, base compensation adjustments will continue to be effective as of January 1 and will be reflected in your January paycheck.
But yesterday, Morgan Lewis decided:
We have taken a number of steps to manage our business conservatively. One of these is a decision to maintain of counsel and associate base salaries for 2009 at the same levels as those individual lawyers were paid for 2008.
In response to the question “how do you feel about this,” a morning tipster said:
I feel like I hate these lying f****** s***eat*** f***s.
* Jackpot! “A Mississippi woman thought she had won a slot machine jackpot when a display lit up $1 million, but the casino says the maximum payout was clearly posted: $8,000.” [The Associated Press]
* Eric Holder, President-elect Obama’s appointed attorney-general, will have his confirmation hearing today. Senate Republicans are expected to accuse him of partisanship. [Bloomberg.com]
* London’s Clifford Chance signed a “best-friends” agreement with India’s AZB promising that they will recommend each other to international clients. [The Financial Times]
* Female lawyers, hold on to your pay checks. Today the Senate will discuss equal pay for equal work. [The Rutland Herald]
* Be nice to your secretary. A former office manager/secretary at a Madison, Wisconsin firm admitted to embezzling $57k from the firm. She says she took the money to pay for financial troubles, but later admitted she spent some of it gambling at casinos. [The Capital Times]
* For all those legal nerds interested in Prop. 8, check out this column by George Will. [Seattlepi.com]
While David Lat’s west coast rampage continues — he just finished speaking at UCLA — the good people from the Federalist Society furnished us with a podcast of Lat’s lunch talk yesterday with Chief Judge Alex Kozinski (9th Cir.).
If you weren’t able to make it yesterday, or you live in the part of the country that the Sun God Ra has marked for eternal suffering, check out the podcast below.
A college graduate without student loan debt is akin to reading a kind quote about Kim Kardashian in a tabloid—it’s rare.
In the past eight years, student loan debt has nearly tripled to a whopping $1.1 trillion, and in the past 10 years, the percentage of 25-year-olds with such debt has risen from 25% to 43%
It’s gotten so bad, in fact, that New York Fed economists warned last month that the burden of student debt could stilt consumer spending by twentysomethings, as well as further hamper the recovery of the housing market and economy.
To get a better idea of what massive student loan debt (we’re talking over $100,000 massive) looks like, we talked to an attorney who graduated with a large student loan debt. We also consulted LearnVest Planning Services CFP® Katie Brewer to see just how their repayment plans stack up.
S. Fischer, 36, Attorney Graduated: 2001
How Much I Borrowed: $100,000
What I Still Owe: $45,000
LexisNexis and OverDrive®, the digital library solutions provider chosen by 22,000+ libraries, schools and colleges worldwide, have joined forces to provide a library management solution that suits evolving legal research requirements mobility, simplified library management, and space and budget reductions.
Reduce your library costs and extend the budget.
With LexisNexis® Digital Library, overhead and administrative costs for maintaining a print library are reduced dramatically. Adopt an easy-to-use platform that requires minimal staff resources so your organization can make the most out of your library budget. Plus, multi-year purchase options let your library lock in savings.
Empower your librarians.
Your firm’s librarians will have more time to conduct value-added research. They’ll have greater insight into what resources the staff actually uses so they can make adjustments to the collection quickly using a single website. Librarians can gain greater control, which can lead to better library utilization and increased strategic value to the firm.
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.
The traditional job application and interview process can be impersonal, and applicants often struggle to present themselves as more than just the sum of their GPAs, alma maters, and previous work history. ATL has partnered with ViewYou to help job seekers overcome this challenge. ViewYou NOW Profiles offer a unique way for job seekers to make a personal, memorable connection with prospective employers: introduction videos. These videos allow job candidates to display their personalities, interpersonal skills, and professional interests, creating an eDossier to brand themselves to potential employers all over the world. Check it out today!
* California might start killing criminals again. [Johnny California]
