* Shinyung Oh is having a baby! Congratulations. [Because you never know ...]
* Should John Edwards go to jail? I think that when even liberals think your sexual dalliances are gross and they don’t want to have anything to do with you, you really are already in your own unique ring of hell. [Miss Trials]
* Big changes in Canadian legal journalism. [Law21]
* Texas sized capital case cover up? [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Today’s Polanski update involves comparing Polanski defenders to Catholic who covered for dirty priests. [Find Law via Althouse]
* Give it away, give it away, give it away now. [ABA Journal]
Latest Stories
Just the other day, we told you that things were looking pretty good for 2Ls who want to be part of Schulte Roth & Zabel’s 2010 summer program.
That positive report is of no consolation to participants in Schulte’s 2009 summer program. It looks like those kids had the bad fortune of going to law school a year too early. Their summer program was only eight weeks long, and yesterday Schulte finally got around to making offers. A tipster reports:
We’re all talking. Seems like Schulte was about 2/3rds [offer rate] or so … We had a listserv of everyone. Seems like a ton of no offers. They did no offers first.
The two-thirds of Schulte summers who received offers were not given a start date. But the benefit of having a listserv is that they are still pretty excited to have offers in comparison to their colleagues that were rejected by the firm.
Schulte declined to comment for this story. But we understand that it is full steam ahead for summer 2010.
Earlier: Schulte Roth Feeling Good About 2011
In an interview with C-SPAN, Justice Antonin Scalia once again graced us with his worldview. As usual, it is as beautiful and terrible as the dawn.
The WSJ Law Blog sloughed through the interview transcripts and pulled out this gleaming diamond of truth:
I mean there’d be a, you know, a defense or public defender from Podunk, you know, and this woman is really brilliant, you know. Why isn’t she out inventing the automobile or, you know, doing something productive for this society?
I mean lawyers, after all, don’t produce anything. They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom. That’s important, but it doesn’t put food on the table and there have to be other people who are doing that. And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise.
I have never agreed with Justice Scalia more than I do at this very moment. I … I’ve … got something in my eye.
I move that LSAC must send this quote to anybody that applies to sit for the LSAT. I further move that anybody scoring an IQ above 139 who does not receive a federal circuit clerkship or better must forthwith abandon legal practice and be forced into labor on renewable energy, cancer treatments, or summer blockbuster screenplay editing. Do I have a second?
Scalia: ‘We Are Devoting Too Many of Our Best Minds to’ Lawyering [WSJ Law Blog]
Earlier: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Hates Acronyms, Loves Marisa Tomei
Career Center: All the Leaves are Falling…
(Plus a list of September’s hot law firms.)
By
Above the Law
Which firms were the “hottest” firms for September — i.e., the firms whose profiles were most visited on the ATL Career Center, powered by Lateral Link? These were the top five:
1. This firm, based in D.C., “lives up to its reputation for being a lifestyle firm.”
2. This firm, also with a sizable D.C. presence, offers its lawyers “immediate substantive responsibility” on “high-stakes” matters.
3. This firm has a top-flight sports law practice, with clients including Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the National Basketball Association.
4. This firm has a definite international bent, with more than half of its clients located abroad.
5. This firm, a litigation powerhouse, boasts an “eclectic group” of attorneys, with a “mix of personalities.”
The Career Center is constantly being updated with responses from users and the latest news from the legal markets. Unlike many other resources, it’s dynamic, not static.
Some recent highlights from the Career Center’s firm snapshots, after the jump.
- American University - Washington College of Law, Crime, Law Schools, Libraries / Librarians, Masturbation, Rudeness, Sexual Harassment
Attack of the Stack Whacker at American University – Washington College of Law
By Kashmir HillA female law student at American University – Washington College of Law had an unpleasant Yom Kippur. First, she was at the library at 11 p.m. on a Monday night.
Second, she had some unexpected company.
From an e-mail that went out to WCL students earlier this week:
TO ALL STUDENTS, FACULTY & STAFF
INCIDENT REPORTIncident:
On Monday, September 28, at approximately 11:00 pm, a male visitor to the Pence Library exposed himself to a WCL female student while in the quiet reading room of the library. The male then ran out of the library and although chased by WCL students across Mass Ave was able to avoid getting caught. During the chase he dropped a bag containing personal papers possible indicating his name but no address.
They say hell has no fury like a women scorned. But the fury of Jezebel over bloggerly treatment of female harassment might be worse. So when one of my male co-editors responded to this tip with, “This is AWESOME. Who wants to do the honors?”, I realized I better handle this one.
At Duke, masturbatory attacks on unsuspecting female students in the Perkins Library stacks happened with some regularity. I thought this was the case at university libraries across the land, but my co-editors tell me such incidents did not occur at their alma maters. Apparently Duke has more in common with AU than with Harvard and Yale.
More on the Attack of the Stack Whacker, after the jump.
Continue reading “Attack of the Stack Whacker at American University – Washington College of Law”
Tomorrow, the people of Chicago will learn whether or not they’ve won the 2016 Summer Olympics. Today, new lawyers in Illinois will learn whether or not they’ve passed the 2009 Bar Exam.
Granted, becoming a new lawyer in this market is kind of like going to the morgue to score a date. But passing the bar on your first try is probably more important now than it has been in the past. We don’t know how many firms are planning on giving their incoming associates the Bird or the Fox; young lawyers don’t want to give firms any excuse to leave them out in the cold.
You should be able to check your results by logging into your account on iBaby.
We think you can check your results. Click after the jump for more information.
Last month, we linked to the Texas Bar profile for Jane Allen Clark. At right, it was racier than most of the bar association photos we come across.
We wrote at the time:
We called Jane Allen Clark to ask about the photo, and how she chose it. “I just liked it,” she told us. “We all want to look like L.A. Law, I guess.”
After getting our call, she speculated that “maybe [she] shouldn’t have used that particular photo.”
After the Above The Law post, she decided to get rid of this particular photo.
See the replacement after the jump. In our opinion, it’s much worse.
Continue reading “Misadventures in Lawyer Advertising: Jane Clark Swaps Out Her Hubba-Hubba Photo”
[Ed. note: The following piece was authored by The Legal Tease, of Sweet Hot Justice fame. Check out her other musings from Sweet Hot Justice here.]
I should’ve seen this one coming, I know. I’ve had enough experience by now with sexual humiliation at the hands of Big Law to have known better. But no matter how seasoned, how street smart you may think you are, this one sneaks up on you without warning. One minute, you’re cruising along on a string of all-nighters for a fire-drill deal with a senior associate you know only well enough to find mildly repulsive; the next minute, you’re pinning him up against the wall of a file room with your Prada pencil skirt hiked up around your waist, clawing at each other like starved lunatics. The culprit: Deal Goggles. And let me assure you from recent personal experience, by the time you realize you’re wearing them, it’s way too late.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: Right, ha, Deal Goggles…Beer Goggles. Whatever. I’m a professional–I have enough self-control to resist hooking up with some beast at the firm just because we happen to be working on a deal together.
Well, congratulations. You’re a better person than I am. You’re also apparently not a Big Firm lawyer and/or anyone who’s ever worked on a real Big Law deal. See, friends, when you’re on a real Big Law deal–which is to say, when you’ve been at the office for 96 hours straight, are undershowered, overstimulated, and surrounded only by empty Wok ‘n’ Roll containers and second lien intercreditor agreements–whatever shred of self-control you thought you had left has long, long since abandoned you. You’re lucky if you don’t wind up trying to drown yourself in the handicap toilet down the hall, much less trying to avoid an unexpected, comprising sexual situation with the nearest warm body. In other words, when you’re in the heat of a deal, all bets are off–and the Deal Goggles are on. So, please, if you want to circumvent the extra slice of hell I all-too-recently served myself, listen up and consider the following:
Save yourself, after the jump.
* Happy Birthday, People’s Republic of China. [New York Times]
* “Ronald Tackman is basically Keyser Soze,” says New York Magazine. Either that or he’s watched Idiocracy. [New York Magazine]
* The Global 100. [American Lawyer]
* The rich didn’t get richer this year, according to the Forbes 400. Maybe the plebeians will put down their pitchforks and torches ? [Forbes]
* Bye bye, BofA chief Ken Lewis. [Wall Street Journal] (subscription)
* Disney owns Pooh too. Boo hoo. [Courthouse News Service]
* A new Broadcom ruling reminds businesspeople to distinguish between the company’s lawyers and their personal lawyers. We don’t all look the same! [National Law Journal]
* New York State Senator Hiram Monserrate’s girlfriend backed up the story that her face was gashed on accident. I’m not sure if she did that before or after she broke down crying, but it was certainly after she contradicted her earlier testimony to a grand jury. [New York Daily News]
Ed. note: Welcome to the latest installment of “Notes from the Breadline,” a column by a laid-off lawyer in New York. Prior columns are collected here. You can reach Roxana St. Thomas by email (at roxanastthomas@gmail.com), follow her on Twitter, or find her on Facebook.
As many of you know, waiting is an integral part of life in the breadline. You send out résumés, and you wait. You make follow-up calls to prospective employers — and wait. You hear that the nation’s economic climate is improving, so (although you see no factual indicia that this is actually the case) you dust off your interview suits, submit applications … and wait. You vaguely remember what momentum feels like, and what it feels like to have a life that moves forward. You think about getting up and walking away, about leaving frustration and disappointment behind you. But instead, because you have no choice, you wait.
This interminable waiting, of anticipating an event that never materializes, can become so familiar that, after a while, it barely registers. It also becomes progressively harder to identify what, precisely, you are waiting for. Movement is suspended; growth is deferred. The only way to stave off inertia is by clinging to hope, no matter how vague or ephemeral it seems.
On that bright note, we bring you Notes from the Breadline Community Theater. Because adult professional life probably doesn’t leave you nearly enough time to reflect on life’s baffling futility through absurdist theater, our feature presentation is — you guessed it! — an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” Since you all did so well on your Homework Assignments from the Breadline, you can go ahead and cheat on this one. The SparkNotes summary is here, and you can refresh your recollection of the text, in all its glory, here and here.
Now, dear readers, without further delay (hush! The house lights are going down!), we bring you “Waiting for Bono.”
Allen Feingold, a former Pennsylvania attorney, really loved practicing law. Even after being suspended and eventually disbarred, he continued to service clients — and went to extraordinary measures to do so.
From Gina Passarella of the Legal Intelligencer:
[Feingold] created letterhead in the name of attorney Jeffry Stephen Pearson, another attorney who apparently handled some of Feingold’s files once Feingold was suspended. Feingold would use that letterhead, unbeknown to Pearson, to file pleadings and legal correspondence to lawyers, clients and judges, according to the complaint. Once Pearson learned of this, he changed his password for electronic filings with the court, but Feingold learned of the new password and continued making filings under Pearson’s name, the ODC alleged in the complaint.
To put a stop to his misconduct, a judge ordered the Office of Disciplinary Counsel to lock Feingold out of his offices.
Pretty bad — but it gets worse….
Continue reading “(Former) Lawyer of the Day: Allen Feingold”
* Marcia Clark (!) has involved herself in the Roman Polanski case. Someday, this is going to make a great movie. [WSJ Law Blog]
* The trustees of Michael Jackson’s estate are suing the Heal the World foundation. [Popsquire]
* Maybe SCOTUS Justices are just a little camera shy? [Lowering the Bar]
* I have no idea what a “lifehack” is. Frankly, it sounds like something Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity could help with. Nonetheless, this is some solid advice for getting through law school. [Online College Tips]
* Texticular homicide. [True/Slant]
* Does the “Above the Law effect” explain increased bitching about the legal employment market? Could be. Could just be that the legal employment market is gawd-awful. [Concurring Opinions]
-
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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.
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