Hey look! Nominations are now being accepted for Best Law Blog.
We have shame enough not to nominate ATL. But not enough to express the hope that someone else might — before Monday, when the nomination process closes.
Hope you’re having a great weekend!
Update: Thanks for the nomination! You can second the nomination by clicking on the little plus sign.
Best Law Blog [The 2007 Weblog Awards via How Appealing]
Most Popular Law Blogs [Blawg Review]
P.S. Also, thanks to everyone who responded to our last shameless plug. Because of your generosity, we’re now just $45 short of our fundraising goal for the New York City marathon. See here.
(Before the shameless plug, we were $725 shy of the mark. So thanks, ATL readers, for joining the fight against cancer!)
Latest Stories
- Boalt Hall, Britney Spears, Clarence Thomas, Judge of the Day, Non-Sequiturs, Peter Lattman, Television
Non-Sequiturs: 10.12.07
By David Lat* U.C. Berkeley has settled on a new name for its law school. Check it out, it’s quite brilliant. [Blogonaut]
(But we’ll probably still conduct the reader poll mentioned here, just for the heck of it.)
* Strained attorney-client relations between Britney Spears and Anne Kiley? Apparently Brit has “trust issues” (in addition to that whole missing-panties problem). [OK! Magazine]
* Wow, this guy is quite a tool. Thankfully he’s not a lawyer — which you could infer from the facts that (1) he lives in Atlanta and (2) he brags about his compensation. [Gawker; follow-up here and here from DealBreaker]
* Judge of the Day. [St. Petersburg Times via Blogonaut]
* Exciting happenings this weekend: (1) the CSPAN rebroadcast of the Clarence Thomas book party, and (2) the nuptials of the Wall Street Journal’s Peter Lattman. Congratulations and best wishes, PL! [WSJ Law Blog]
- Affirmative Action, Biglaw, Boutique Law Firms, Feminism, Gay, Gender, Job Searches, Patton Boggs, Racism, Sexism
ATL Field Trip: The Building a Better Legal Profession Press Conference
By David Lat
Andrew Bruck takes a question at Wednesday’s press conference.
Every now and then, we leave our apartment. We did so on Wednesday, to attend the press conference of Law Students Building a Better Legal Profession, where the organization unveiled its law firm diversity rankings (accessible here; Los Angles Times article here).
It was quite informative. For those of you who might be interested — and we’re guessing there are a number of you, judging from the robust commentary on our earlier post — read more, after the jump.
Continue reading “ATL Field Trip: The Building a Better Legal Profession Press Conference”
Last week, USA Today ran an article about “Email-Free Fridays” or “Zero Email Fridays.” Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal ran pretty much the same article.
But it’s an interesting piece, and it relates to an issue that many of us confront: email overload. The problem is especially acute for lawyers at large law firms, but it’s not limited to their ranks.
From the WSJ:
A growing number of employers, including U.S. Cellular, Deloitte & Touche and Intel, are imposing or trying out “no email” Fridays or weekends. While the bans typically allow emailing clients and customers or responding to urgent matters, the normal flow of routine internal email is halted. Violators are hit with token fines, or just called out by the boss.
The limits aim to encourage more face-to-face and phone contact with customers and co-workers, raise productivity or just give employees a reprieve from the ever-rising email tide. Emails sent by individual corporate users are projected to increase 27% this year, to an average of 47 a day, up from 37 in 2006…. And one-third of users feel stressed by heavy email volume, according to a 2007 study…. Many check email as often as 30 to 40 times an hour, the study showed.
Managers complain that rather than confronting problems, employees use email to avoid them by passing issues back and forth in long message strings, like a hot potato. Email reduces face-to-face contact among co-workers and clients; terse, poorly phrased messages further strain those relationships. And it is spilling into weekends, chaining employees to computers when they should be relaxing.
So, are email-free Fridays a brilliant idea? Or is this policy just not feasible? Take our poll:
P.S. We’re hopelessly behind in our email. After we deal with a message, we file or delete it, leaving only pending items in our inbox. Right now our inbox contains 2,471 pending items.
Unfortunately, due to the sheer volume of email we receive, we can’t respond personally to every message. If your email does require a response, and you haven’t heard from us for a while, please email us again, by way of friendly reminder. Or here’s a novel concept: try calling!
Fridays go from casual to e-mail-free [USA Today]
A Day Without Email Is Like… [Wall Street Journal]
Since we started off today on a somewhat sordid note, we might as well keep going down the same path. From the AP:
Adrian Exley was wrapped tightly in heavy plastic, then bound with duct tape. A leather hood was put over his head with a thin plastic straw inserted so that he could breathe, and he was shut up in a closet.
That, apparently, was the way Exley liked it. But the way it ended — with Exley suffocating — was not what he had in mind when he traveled from Britain for a bondage session with a man he had met through a sadomasochism Web site.
Exley’s body was discovered in the woods last year, two months after he was bound up in the bondage “playroom” Gary LeBlanc had built in the basement of his suburban Boston home.
LeBlanc, a 48-year-old Gulf Oil sales executive, detailed his responsibility in the fatal bondage session in a five-page suicide note, just before he put a gun to his head and killed himself.
Now the question is: Since Exley consented to the sex play, can LeBlanc be held responsible for his death?
LeBlanc committed suicide, but the issue still matters:
Exley’s family is suing LeBlanc’s estate for unspecified damages, claiming wrongful death. Many bondage enthusiasts are watching the case closely, seeing it as a lesson in where to draw the line of responsibility on consensual but dangerous sex.
Additional sensational and salacious details appear in the full article.
Moral of the story: If you’re into this sort of thing, before doing anything, make sure your partner signs a waiver, assumption of risk, and release of liability form. Then transmit an executed copy to a third party prior to the liaison, so there’s contemporaneous documentation. Good luck.
Deadly consent: Bondage death raises legal issues [AP via CNN]
S&M for Beginners [Tango]
Here is the latest Job of the Week, courtesy of ATL’s career partner, Lateral Link. To refresh your recollection:
“Because Lateral Link does no cold-calling and is more efficient than traditional recruiting firms, successful candidates receive $10,000 upon placement.”
Position: Hedge Fund Specialist
Description: A $3+ billion hedge fund based in Greenwich, CT, is seeking a candidate to handle Hedge Fund and RIC taxation. The day-to-day responsibility is for fund group’s second stand-alone fund, a RIC. The Company handles special situations, event-driven, and distressed and focuses on five lines of business: bank debt, capital structure arbitrage, special situations / classical distressed, rescue finance, and direct lending.
* Work with tax director on fund structuring for and deal structuring for funds.
* Coordinate quarterly and annual RIC compliance in conjunction with Big Four firm engaged to do significant compliance and consulting work and prepare returns
* Analysis of fund’s deal activity to determine when tax treatment/timing differs from GAAP books
* Calculation of monthly tax provision for corporate subsidiaries
Position Requirements:
* Minimum 4 years tax experience, with significant hedge fund and/or RIC experience
* CPA preferred
* Self-motivated and works well in team environment
* Strong written / oral communication skills
* Ability to multi-task
* Bright, self-motivated person interested in working in collegial and professional environment that rewards quality productivity
To apply for this position, please visit laterallink.com.
We know how you all love to argue about affirmative action. It’s a hot-button topic here at ATL.
So here’s a proposal worth considering, from Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw (via Paul Caron):
If right-wingers are underrepresented in universities relative to the population and discriminated against by the left-wing majority, as [former Harvard president] Larry [Summers] suggests, should there be affirmative action for right-leaning academics?
It seems that, on principle, those on the left (who favor affirmative action to promote diversity and correct past injustice) should endorse such a university policy, and those on the right (who more often oppose affirmative action) would be against.
One could argue that a conservative law professor — especially a hard-core social conservative, not a law-and-economics or libertarian type — contributes as much to law school diversity (and discourse) as an African-American or female law professor from a socioeconomically privileged background, who went to an elite college and an elite law school, and has the standard liberal views of most legal academics.
Thoughts?
Mankiw: Affirmative Action for Conservative Professors? [TaxProf Blog]
Is academia serious about diversity? [Greg Mankiw]
The Liberal (and Moderating) Professoriate [Inside Higher Ed]
When we wrote about David Otunga, the Harvard Law School graduate and former Sidley Austin associate now known as “Punk” on the reality show I Love New York 2, we requested more information about a second contestant with a legal background: a current law student who goes by “Pretty.”
A number of you kindly obliged. We now know that “Pretty” is Juan McCullum, 24, a 2L at the Mississippi College School of Law. He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Mississippi State University, where he was a Student Association officer. He was working at the Mississippi Attorney General’s office this summer.
For more about McCullum, read this article, from the Clarion-Ledger. Or turn down the volume on your speakers and check out his MySpace page, which is almost as annoying as David Otunga’s.
Juan McCullum is a handsome guy, so his nickname of “Pretty” makes sense to us. But he may not be the “prettiest” person on his campus. That honor may belong to Katie Rader, a 3L at Mississippi College law school and one of the Hawaiian Tropic girls.
Check out her photo, after the jump.
And we’re not talking about CSM partners working young associates to death, riding them hard and putting them away wet. We’re speaking more literally.
We mentioned this story briefly at the time of his guilty plea, but his sentencing yesterday gives us the opportunity to revisit it in more depth. From the AP:
A tax lawyer who paid a woman so he could have sex with her two underage daughters was sentenced Thursday and declared a sex offender but wasn’t expected to spend much more time behind bars.
James Colliton pleaded guilty this month to second- and third-degree statutory rape and patronizing a prostitute. He received a sentence of one year on each count, to run concurrently.
But because he has already been jailed for 19 months, Colliton, 43, was eligible for immediate release. His lawyer, Howard Greenberg, said he expected the defendant to be released Thursday.
So where’s Colliton headed? Due to his felony conviction, he won’t be able to return to the practice of law (at least not immediately). But might Cravath give him a non-legal or administrative job, perhaps in Recruiting? He likes working with young people.
(Such a gig, however, probably wouldn’t pay Colliton the $500,000 salary that he earned as a senior or permanent associate at Cravath — more than partners at some firms.)
NYC Lawyer Sentenced for Underage Sex [AP]
‘Lolita Lawyer’ among worst of sex offenders [New York Daily News]
Former Cravath Associate Pleads Guilty in Underage Sex Scandal [New York Law Journal]
In Plea Deal, Ex-Cravath Lawyer Admits To Sex Crimes [WSJ Law Blog]
Earlier: Tax Lawyers in Jail
- Celebrities, Crime, Dahlia Lithwick, Deaths, Divorce Train Wrecks, Environment / Environmental Law, Iraq, Morning Docket, Rape, SCOTUS, Supreme Court, Weddings
Morning Docket: 10.12.07
By B Clerker* Al Gore, law school dropout, wins Nobel Peace Prize. [WSJ Law Blog; Washington Post; New York Times]
* Houston crime lab drops the ball, again. [CNN]
* Iraqi families sue Blackwater in U.S. court. [CNN]
* Lithwick’s take on the interesting SCOTUS case, Medellin v. Texas. [Slate]
* McCartney-Mills divorce settlement could break records. [MSNBC]
* After typo, infants in Arkansas can’t not be allowed to marry. [CNN]
* Across the pond, Allen & Overy hopes to pick up recruits — quite literally. [Charon QC: The Blawg]
* One path to a judgeship: marry a prominent political fundraiser. [Daily Business Review]
* Alberto Gonzales and George Terwilliger should get along famously. [Washington Briefs]
* The fame of the S&C bonsai trees spreads, as ATL earns a shout-out in the Washington Post’s Express. [Read Express]
He likes PD butts, and he cannot lie. From the New York Daily News (of course):
The sexist comment by LaGrange Town Justice Edmund Caplicki, made in July 2005, was reported to the state Commission on Judicial Conduct, which yesterday publicly scolded the jurist for his “inappropriate” remark.
Caplicki, 62, told the watchdog group he was merely parroting the comments Boyer’s client – a man accused of theft – had made about the lawyer’s backside. But the panel noted the jurist not only quizzed three other male defendants on whether they agreed with the evaluation, but then mentioned it again to Boyer….
Boyer’s supervisor at the Dutchess County Public Defender’s office had the incident reported to the commission. Friends described Boyer, 42, as being anything but thin-skinned. “She has a very cordial, respectful and diplomatic approach to everything,” an assistant at Boyer’s law office, Larry Clark, told the Daily News. “It’s very hard to get a rise out of her.”
“But apparently not so difficult to get a rise out of Justice Caplicki,” as one of you notes.
Someone should put the Ed Caplicki in touch with Peter Barta, another connoisseur of court-appointed ass. And keep His Honor away from Ursula Ungaro at judicial conferences.
Public censure for judge who said lawyer had ‘nice butt’ [New York Daily News]
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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: [email protected].
Since late last year, things have been booming in Hong Kong / China in cap markets, especially Hong Kong IPOs. M&A deal flow has recently been getting a bit stronger as well. Although one can’t predict such things with any certainty, all signs are pointing to a banner entire 2014 for the top end US corporate and cap markets practices in Hong Kong / China. This is not really new news, as its been the feeling most in the market have had for a few months now and things continue to look good.
The head of our Asia practice, Evan Jowers, has been in Hong Kong for about 10 days a month (with trips every other month to both Shanghai and Bejing) for the past 7 months (Robert Kinney and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong again March 15 to 23), and spending most of his time there meeting with senior US hiring partners at just about all the major US and UK firms there, as well as prospective candidates at all associate levels and partner levels, and when in the US, Evan works Asia hours and is regularly on the phone with such persons, as our the other members of our Asia team. Our Yuliya Vinokurova is in Hong Kong every other month and Robert is there about 5 times a year as well. While we have a solid Asia team of recruiters, Evan Jowers will spend at least some time with all of our candidates for Asia position. We have had long standing relationships, and good friendships in some cases, with hiring partners and other senior US partners in Asia for 8 years now.
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