Students at Hofstra Law noticed a curious sign posted in a stairwell door the other day. Apparently, Hofstra’s maintenance staff is well-versed in combating the forces of the netherworld and closed the stairwell after noting a spike in their PKE meters.
I guess it makes some sense. Hofstra is only about 20 minutes from Amityville, which is best known as the city that inspired a terrible Ryan Reynolds film, and evil like that is hard to keep down for long.
And a little further away there’s a house that is haunted “as a matter of law,” so New York knows what it’s talking about when it comes to hauntings.
Check below the fold for the Hofstra Law ghost warning sign in all its glory….
These days, it seems like every media outlet that has any remote connection to the law is making an effort to dispel the allure of the esteemed U.S. News law school rankings. U.S. News encourages law school administrators to attempt to game the rankings, they say. The U.S. News rankings are too focused on the test scores of incoming students, they say. And while we agree that some of the U.S. News methodology could be changed for the better, others have only offered up absurdities in their alternative ranking systems.
National Jurist recently came out with its own set of rankings which measure much lauded criteria like the number of Super Lawyers each law school produces, and the quality of each law school’s faculty, as measured by the oft revered website, RateMyProfessors.com. And as with the glorious Cooley rankings, any traction that the new National Jurist rankings might have received went totally out the window when the powers that be at the magazine decided to rank Alabama higher than both Harvard and Yale. Come on, everyone knows that the only place ‘Bama should be ranked ahead of Harvard is on a football field!
As far as we’re concerned, this serves only as an exercise in how not to make a new rankings system….
* Aside from writing powerful opinions that will last the ages, being a mentor “is the most valuable thing” this Supreme Court justice can do. Sonia Sotomayor: motivational speaker? [New York Times]
* Aww, poor Biglaw partners. You want bigger cuts of your firm’s profits, but according to the latest Peer Monitor report, expectations like that are incredibly “unrealistic.” [WSJ Law Blog (sub. req.)]
* This actually isn’t something women like to shop for: the $200 million class action suit over the Greenberg Traurig “boys club” is currently being held up in two federal courts by arbitration and forum shopping issues. [Am Law Daily]
* With news that the legal industry is shedding jobs faster than the ABA can accredit more unnecessary law schools, career services officers must be hanging their heads in shame. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* Dear law schools, your crappy business model is making us take a look at all crappy higher education business models, and we don’t like what we’re seeing here. Pls hndle thx. XOXO, Moody’s. [Washington Post]
* This is justice, Texas style: District Attorney Mike McLelland says the reward fund for tips in the brutal slaying of ADA Mark Hasse will grow to an “astronomical amount” until the killers are found. [Dallas Morning News]
* This lawyer allegedly had a fling with his sister-in-law out of the goodness of his heart, and in return, she accused him of sexual assault. Now he’s suing her for $7 million. You can’t make this sh*t up. [New York Post]
* In trying to get $700 in tickets dismissed, this lawyer says the U.S. Postal Service is immune from state and local traffic regulations. Other USPS immunities include not losing my mail on a regular basis. [USA Today]
The Challenger looked pretty good when it launched.
Houston, we have a problem.
We’ve mentioned the new proposed law school in the Daytona Beach area before, but I don’t think we’ve devoted a whole post to this project. Florida already has 12 freaking law schools. Twelve. Can we really pretend that one more is going to significantly change the comically (or tragically) over-saturated legal market in one of the states hardest hit by the housing market collapse?
Plus, it’s Florida… since when do people down there listen to reason? They can’t run an election. They’re unleashing their rednecks to battle their snake problem. I just don’t think anybody cares if they further damage their legal economy or take advantage of additional dumbasses who don’t know any better.
I really wasn’t going to write another full thing about it. And then, this morning, I learned that they intend to call the thing “Florida Space Coast School of Law.”
It’s been almost a year since we’ve mentioned the name Gregory Berry here at Above the Law, but it wasn’t easy to forget him, what with his “superior legal mind” and all. In case you’ve somehow forgotten about him, Berry was a former first-year associate at Kasowitz Benson who decided to sue the firm in a pro se suit for more than $77 million after working there for less than a year. In his monstrous 50-page complaint, he asserted 14 causes of action, including wrongful termination, fraud, and breach of contract.
This guy thought he was God’s gift to the legal profession, but Justice Eileen Bransten of the New York Supreme Court wasn’t impressed — come on, the guy tapes his glasses together, for God’s sake. She failed to see the merit in his arguments, and dismissed his case outright, with prejudice. But Gregory Berry being the remarkable man that he is, the dismissal didn’t sit well with him, so he opted to file an appeal.
Berry was in court earlier this week for a hearing on the matter. How did he fare this time around?
Did anybody else around my age first learn about bidets from Crocodile Dundee?
The Yale Law School Wall is consistently one of the best listservs in all of law school. Only the Michigan Law listserv can compete.
Today, the Yale Wall brings us a fun story of Yalies intellectualizing the etiquette of… picking a urinal to pee in.
In fairness, urinal etiquette is an important issue. It’s just that most guys kind of figure it out on their own.
But at Yale Law, there are no stupid questions. And it’s a very liberal, gender-neutral place. We know that because not only are urinal questions being asked on the listserv, the guy asking the question is seeking advice from a girl….
It’s really hard giving up things you like — things like cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs — but when the time comes, and that time will come, you’ve got to do it, and sometimes you won’t even have choice in the matter. Perhaps you don’t have the money to finance your vices anymore. Perhaps you’ve decided you have an addiction, and it’s time to seek help. Or maybe you’re facing jail time, and a judge is offering you a way out.
But again, it’s really hard giving up things you like. Like really, really hard. So hard, that when pressed to give up, say, smoking pot, you’d ask a judge if you could have one more joint before you quit. Come on, judge, it’s just one more, what’s the big deal?
Well, contrary to popular belief, it is a big deal when you ask a judge’s permission to smoke weed when you’re in her courtroom on a drug trafficking charge….
It’s been quite some time since we’ve had the opportunity to openly mock Michigan law students. Well, actually, that’s not entirely true — after all, we did pass judgment on their so-so performance on their own state’s bar exam. But thankfully, these kids have given us another chance to chuckle at their expense.
Remember that not-so secret society they had? You know, the one that tried to prank the campus community by putting sheets with sloppy penmanship up on the roofs of the residential dorms? That was a total fake fraternity fail. But now we’ve got a “real” fraternity fail for you to feast your eyes upon.
It appears that students at Michigan Law are trying to re-live their college glory days of coolness (or pretend that those days existed in the first place) via one of their law fraternities. It’s actually kind of cute, because they think it should be like a real fraternity, complete with insane initiation rituals….
(Plus, check our our update with some relevant information from a current member.)
In the crazy world of cyberspace, personal injury lawyers are a dime a dozen. By now, we’ve gotten used to their crazy antics and low-budget commercials.
But not all personal injury firms are created equal. For the Law Firm of Gary, Williams, Lewis, and Watson, P.I., “low-budget” is a concept that just doesn’t exist. To the contrary, the firm wants to make it clear just how baller the life of a private injury attorney can be.
Dubbing himself “The Giant Killer,” the firm’s larger-than-life head partner, Willie E. Gary, never misses an opportunity to make his wealth and success known. Touting hundred-million-dollar verdicts and rubbing elbows with celebrities, Gary is on a one-man mission to prove that chasing ambulances is much easier when you’re driving a Bentley….
I realize, as a San Franciscan, my views on marijuana are somewhat out-of-the-ordinary relative to many other Americans. More specifically, San Franciscans as a group tend to forget pot is illegal at all.
But maybe we ain’t as crazy and/or progressive as we’d like to think of ourselves. Case in point: a prosecutor down south was busted this week when a joint fell out of his pocket — in court, while he was chatting with a police officer. Whoops!
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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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.
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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Students at Hofstra Law noticed a curious sign posted in a stairwell door the other day. Apparently, Hofstra’s maintenance staff is well-versed in combating the forces of the netherworld and closed the stairwell after noting a spike in their PKE meters.
