Mike Lickver
We’ve written before about Mike Lickver, the Toronto-based Bennett Jones associate who made magic with Law School Husslin’ 3. This autotuned masterpiece (two words that shouldn’t go together at all) featured Lickver celebrating his new career Miami-style: on speedboats, with sports cars, and swimsuit models.
But that video doesn’t hold a candle to Lickver’s latest installment, revealing the ultimate fate of Lickver’s eponymous hero, now working as an associate at a major law firm…
I gotta go to torts! *Drops mic*
The editor of Atlanta Progressive News, Matthew Cardinale, is a fixture at Atlanta City Council hearings, where he’s known to bust into self-composed raps to express his policy preferences. It’s about time someone made public access coverage of city council meetings watchable, without being the dumbest person in the world. Thankfully this is preserved for posterity on YouTube.
According to Cardinale, he “received a hand-written note from someone in [a law school] admissions [department] saying they enjoyed my City Council rap… they said the whole committee watched it.” I like to think admissions also sent him a note asking, “If you had one shot, or one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted in one moment, would you capture it or just let it slip?” But I’m sure they didn’t.
Video of the rap in question and more details about the law school that handed out a scholarship for rap….
Continue reading “Win a Rap Slam, Earn a Full Ride to Law School”
‘If you really wanna party with me…’
Most professional conferences for lawyers are painfully boring. You register, engage in awkward small talk with other attendees, and the time spent listening to the speakers’ presentations is often interrupted by incessant watch-checking to see if time is, in fact, going in slow motion. We’re willing to bet that most lawyers would rather subject themselves to the evils of document review than continue to suffer through another monotonous, days-long conference.
But what if in exchange for all of that never-ending boredom, the conference host was gracious enough to provide all of the lawyers present with the concert experience of their lives?
That’s a respite from torture that everyone would be willing to pay for….
Continue reading “Busta Rhymes Comes Out of Hiding to Rap for Lawyers”
What I find controversial is the Third Circuit’s adoption of Judge [Stanley] Chesler’s conclusion that there is one rule of law applicable to inner-city phrases and street language, and a different rule for language and phrases used by white people in the suburbs.
– Phil Chronakis, a lawyer who represented Shadrach Winstead at the trial court level in his copyright infringement case against rapper 50 Cent. The Third Circuit recently upheld the dismissal of Winstead’s complaint.
‘If they take my stapler then I’ll set the building on fire…’
* “It’s very hard to copyright a story about an individual growing up in the ghetto and getting involved in crime.” Go Third Circuit, it’s your birthday, we gon’ affirm that like it’s your birthday. [New Jersey Law Journal (reg. req.)]
* I believe you have my stapler? A former Fried Frank staffer has been accused of stealing more than $376K worth of copy machine ink from the firm and selling it on the black market for office supplies. [Am Law Daily]
* Governor Andrew Cuomo nominated Jenny Rivera, a CUNY School of Law professor, to fill a vacant New York Court of Appeals seat. If confirmed, she’ll be the second Hispanic to sit on the court. [New York Law Journal]
* This’ll please the gun nuts: Governor Cuomo’s gun-control bill was passed by the legislature and signed into law, officially making New York the state with the toughest gun restrictions in the nation. [New York Times]
* And this right here is the lawsuit equivalent of half-court heave. A lawyer is suing the San Antonio Spurs because the team’s coach sent all of its best players home to rest without the fans’ prior knowledge. [ESPN]
It’s the last day of December, so it’s a good time to look back on the year that was. We’ll do what we’ve done for the past three years (wrap-up posts from 2009, 2010, and 2011 can be found here, here, and here) and identify the ten biggest stories of the past year as decided by you, our readers. With the help of Google Analytics, we’ve compiled a list of our top ten posts for 2012, based on traffic (as represented by pageviews).
By the way, for the third year in a row, the most popular category page on Above the Law was Law Schools. People have now been intensely focused on the declining value proposition of going to law school for as long as it takes to earn a Juris Doctor degree. Isn’t it time that we graduate from the current educational model?
The second and third most-popular categories on ATL in 2012 were Biglaw and Bonuses. Although this year brought us the largest law firm failure ever, nearly all other firms indiscriminately doled out offers to summer associates, and bonus season looked better for the first time in years. While the legal profession is still in transition, things are certainly looking up, and through the highs and the lows, we’ve been there to cover it all.
So what were the ten most popular individual posts at Above the Law in 2012? Let’s find out….
Continue reading “Above the Law’s Top Ten Most Popular Posts of 2012″
He’s on a motherf**king boat.
It’s beginning to feel like a large chunk of the lawyer world, in an alternate universe, would be professional musicians. In addition to our annual Law Revue contest, we’re hearing day after day about lawyers with secret musical talent (or, uh, passion).
Today, we heard about a young Canadian lawyer who’s been hustlin’ for some time now. He landed a sweet gig at a Bay Street firm. To celebrate, he released a swanky new hip hop video featuring Lamborghinis, luxury boats, beautiful women, and some dope lawyerly rhymes.
Not too bad. Not too bad at all….
Continue reading “Every Day This Lawyer’s Hustlin’ — And Rapping, Too”
Mahbod Moghadam of Rap Genius
F. Scott Fitzgerald once opined that there were “no second acts in American lives.” Similarly, Biz Markie once opined “’cause we all pick our boogers sometime every day.” If you’re already lost, allow me to explain. This is the story of a former Biglaw attorney and his second act. He and his friends started a website devoted to rap lyrics. The website annotates rap lyrics, and it’s this system of annotation that the founders of the website hope will take over the web (including legal research). The website was recently funded by venture capitalists, and the resulting hype has ping-ponged across the web at a pace so rapid that you’d be excused if you made like Steinski and wondered, “What does it all mean?” (affiliate link).
The interviews that have fed the myriad profiles of the site’s founders have been nothing short of entertaining. Just last week, Gawker was prompted to write a guide to the site, rapgenius.com, which managed to sound both condescending and wildly equivocating and which did nothing but illuminate the author’s squeamishness. This promises to not be like that. I don’t know if Rap Genius is going to be Wikipedia or Pets.com.
What I do know is that a Biglaw dropout just ganked $15 million from Marc Andreessen and wants to edge out Westlaw and Lexis (good luck with that).
Keep reading to find out where he went to law school and what firm he worked at. And if you want to see his shirtless YouTube diss track (no homo)….
Depositions usually aren’t very exciting, but every now and then, you get a gem that’s worthy of public fanfare from the legal world. Take, for example, a deposition that we came across last year, in which a lawyer asked the deponent whether his “jurisprudential hymen [was] being ruptured.”
Today, we’ve got some deposition fun for you with the assistance of rap artist Lil Wayne, and it turns out that he’s just as entertaining in a legal setting as he is on stage — and by “entertaining,” we mean he acted like a complete tool. He’s currently suing Quincy Jones III over a documentary about his life, claiming that he was portrayed in a “scandalous” manner.
Let’s check out the clips from his leaked deposition….
Continue reading “Lil Wayne Is Quite Possibly the Best Deponent of All Time”
Last year, we published a music video from a group of recent American University – Washington College of Law graduates rapping about when happens when — god forbid — you fail the MPRE. Well, the guys are at it again with a new, incredibly “informative” song about the patent system in America.
They’ve stepped up the production value, they have a celebrity cameo from the Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and it all fits nicely into a rap song, you guessed it, about patenting sex. So yeah, click through for some serious flow….
Continue reading “These Lawyers ‘Patented Sex’ and It’s Pretty Damn Funny”
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.
Also, we have the two below in-house openings:
Keep reading »
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.
Keep reading »
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