You know how we know it’s law school finals time? Because we keep receiving crazy pictures taken in law school libraries in our inbox.
This time, we’ve got to ask: just how low are law school admissions standards these days? Maybe this law school took the lawyer dog meme a bit too seriously and thought that all dogs go to law school, as opposed to heaven, like in that 80s cartoon movie. Just imagine how much “fun” it would be to watch a gunner dog barking at the professor in class.
* Better late than never: congratulations to everyone who passed the New Jersey bar exam. You’re just in time to get in on some Sandy class-action litigation. [New Jersey Board of Bar Examiners]
* Congratulations to all honorees from the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association conference in D.C. last weekend — including, but not limited to, the Best Lawyers Under 40. [NAPABA]
* And congrats to Professor Sherrilyn Ifill, incoming president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. [Concurring Opinions]
* Does every bra made in America have Gloria Allred’s phone number sewn into it? [WSJ Law Blog]
* Who is “Portfolio Manager A” in the latest major insider-trading scandal? [Dealbreaker]
* You don’t need to be a dog lover to find these allegations abhorrent. [Alabama Live]
* Want to avoid dating Democrats (or Republicans)? There’s an app — okay, twowebsites — for that. [Jezebel]
* After the jump, Jeffrey Toobin and Alan Dershowitz discuss Obamacare….
Today at least, Gregory Garre is dog’s best friend in the Supreme Court.
The Court heard two cases involving when dogs can use their noses to help fight the war on drugs. Garre argued both – back to back – for the State of Florida. Fresh on the heels of his representation of Texas in the recent affirmative action case, it was an impressive morning.
The first case presented the question of whether a dog – here, named Frankie – brought to the front door of a house, can sniff at the front of the house for drugs.
Garre came out of the box asserting that there is no legitimate expectation of privacy in contraband. That didn’t go so well….
If you could end a legal dispute by including a picture of a puppy in an email, would you do it? If the other party promised to do what you want if you send him a picture of a puppy, wouldn’t you at least try? What’s the downside? Everybody loves puppies (except Mitt Romney). I don’t want to sound like Winston Zeddemore, but if someone asks you for a puppy picture, you say yes.
A lawyer for Lockheed Martin evidently doesn’t share my desire to get along with others. When confronted with a domain registration dispute, a private citizen agreed to transfer a domain to Lockheed, so long as the company’s lawyer included a picture of a puppy in one of his emails.
The lawyer didn’t respond appropriately, and now there’s a whole Gizmodo post on the dust-up. Pictures of pets 1, stuffy lawyers 0….
The last winner of our esteemed Comment of the Week contest was rewarded for bringing some Oscar-winning gravitas to an already serious issue. Namely, the oft-crushing weight of student loans.
There’s always time for serious business, but sometimes we appreciate astute observations of minute, easily-overlooked details. (As Mitch Hedberg would have said, “What the f**k is a sesame?”) And our newest Commenter of the Week winner uncovered a similarly amusing logic problem in a former Sidley Austin associate’s book about his adopted K9….
* This is why you shouldn’t feed your illegal pet monkey Frosted Flakes — or own an illegal pet monkey, I guess. [Chicago Tribune]
* In other incredible pet law news, a Rhode Island woman is not pleased that her neighbor’s cockatoo has been calling her a “f**king whore.” Awk! Polly want a restraining order? [Legal Blog Watch]
* This is a pretty good round-up of the summer’s most whacked-out legal stories. Think naked people covered in Crisco, kids destroying thousands of dollars in MacBooks — by peeing on them — and a nasty death-by-sex situation. [Legally Weird]
* Making people log in to unsubscribe from junk email isn’t only annoying as sh*t, it’s also probably illegal (as it freaking should be). [Ars Technica]
* A “Man-gina” lawsuit from Texas. I don’t need to say any more. [Houston Press]
* This dude says smoking pot made him a better dad. I somehow doubt this is part of Elie Mystal’s preparation regimen for the stork’s impending arrival. [New York Times]
* Congratulations to everyone who just passed the MPRE — you can learn your score on the MPRE website. [MPRE]
We talk a lot around these parts about the versatility (or lack thereof) of a law degree. Does a J.D. help you grab non-law related jobs? Maybe, maybe not.
But for certain brave — or maybe just kooky — individuals, there are jobs for which a J.D. is really neither here nor there. Think truck driver, sommelier, or a guy who lives in the woods and extracts venom from poisonous rattlesnakes for a living. You might have to sacrifice the corner office, but you make up for it with the thrill of dangerous living. The pay ain’t so bad either…
Clerking for a federal judge is supposed to be a prestigious way to spend your first year after you graduate from law school. Clerking for a state judge is not quite as prestigious, but a job’s a job, and in this economy, beggars can’t exactly be choosers.
But why go through the trouble of getting all of those recommendation letters when you can just house sit for a judge instead?
I’m not going to pretend to care about Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. And here’s why: I don’t care about vampires, werewolves, trolls, magical rings, wands, space, fantasy or anything that encourages nerds of the world to be even more annoying. I am tired of walking by hoards of absolute losers waiting in costume at 4 p.m. for a midnight showing of a 3D movie about sexy blue people that live in a fake jungle on a different planet. I will not read a 700-page book about wizards and gargoyles. And since I do not wear Pink University sweatpants, listen to “OneDirection” or hang out at Cinnabon at the mall, there is absolutely no reason for me to see, or care, about Twilight.
But I do care about Twilight dogs. Obviously we all do.
You’ve no doubt heard that shifty minx “KStew” cheated on “RPat,” her boyfriend of three years, with Rupert Sanders, her creepy married director from Snow White and the Hunstman. This turn of events of was absolutely shocking because it destroyed eveybody’s faith in true love and also Kristin and Rob were supposed to maintain their sham relationship until their Twilight promotional duties are over for the third and mercifully final installment, to be released this November.
But when life veers off-script, true actors improvise and deliver the satisfying alternate storyline…
Last week, we told you that not much seemed to happen during the administration of the New York bar exam. In truth, in New York (and New Jersey), shenanigans usually don’t start until after the state boards of law examiners get their hands on the exams.
Still, things did seem quiet in the tri-state area this bar season. They were more dead than the proverbial curious cat.
But if we move upstate to Albany, there was an actual dead cat. Or perhaps we should say “horrifically murdered” cat? Try not to eat lunch (or take a bar exam) directly after reading this story…
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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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
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You know how we know it’s law school finals time? Because we keep receiving crazy pictures taken in law school libraries in our inbox. 
