This week, Legal Eagle Wedding Watch salutes… a divorce lawyer. This one dutifully dissolved her client’s marriage, seeing him through a contentious custody battle. But then she went the extra mile and set him up with his next wife. Attention, divorce bar: We smell a new business model.
But let’s not let talk of divorce spoil our ooh-ing and ahh-ing over some tender new lawyer marriages. Here are this week’s finalists:
The lawsuit captioned Dreier LLP v. Judith Regan was filed back in March 2008, months before Ponzi schemer Marc Dreier’s eponymous law firm went bust. But it’s back in the headlines as of today, thanks to some juicy documents unearthed by the New York Times.
The documents in question — affidavits that were supposed to be kept under seal, but inadvertently kept in the public case file (until their recent removal) — implicate a number of famous figures. The boldface names include controversial publisher Judith Regan, Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, former New York City mayor (and presidential candidate) Rudy Giuliani, former New York City police commissioner (and current prison inmate) Bernard Kerik, and, of course, the now-defunct Dreier law firm….
In the blogosphere the people are divided into two seperate yet equally important groups: the producers who research new content, and the commentators who analyze and talk about it. This is a story of what happens when it all comes together.
[ding ding]
DET. GREEN: We’ve got a man here, a single man, who has endeavored to watch every single episode of the now canceled Law & Order. He’s taking copious notes about conviction rates, plea bargains, and other outcomes, on a season-by-season basis.
Now this other guy is crunching all of that data, cross-referencing it against real New York City crime rates, and making some intelligent conclusions based on the comparisons. It all comes together at Overthinking It. It’s pretty sick stuff.
DET. BRISCOE: I liked TV better when only boobs watched it…
Ed. note: This post is by “Juggalo Law,” one of the two writers under consideration to join Morning Dockette as a Morning Docket writer. As always, we welcome your thoughts in the comments.
You might remember that a month ago, Caroline Giuliani was busted for stealing $100 worth of cosmetics from a Sephora store on the Upper East Side. Well, yesterday the swift hammer of justice came down upon young Miss Giuliani’s perfectly made-up head. And I think it’s fair to say that any young woman seeking to figure out her daddy issues by thieving beauty supplies will think long and hard before she goes on a crime spree:
The daughter of prosecutor and former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani will have a shoplifting charge dismissed and her case closed and sealed if she completes a day of community service at the city’s sanitation department and doesn’t get arrested again in the next six months.
You read that right. A day. Just enough time to think long and hard about what she has… day’s over! Smell ya later, Sanitation Department! Seems like that gross of “Free Caroline” T-shirts wasn’t the good investment I thought it would be.
So what drove Caroline, a Harvard student, to commit such a frivolous crime?
The public career of Rudolph Giuliani is likely at an end. The New York Times reports that Giuliani will not be running for the U.S. Senate:
Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has decided not to run for the Senate seat held by Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Republicans briefed on his decision said Monday evening. …
Mr. Giuliani, whose decision to forgo a race for governor was reported a month ago, plans to endorse Rick Lazio for governor of New York on Tuesday afternoon at a news conference in Manhattan, the Republicans said. Mr. Giuliani’s intentions were reported by The Daily News on its Web site Monday evening.
But don’t cry for the former mayor. Giuliani leaves public service for a lucrative life he’s made for himself.
On Wednesday, Duke responded to Andrew Giuliani’s lawsuit. Duke claims that they were well within their rights to kick Giuliani off the school’s golf team.
Duke alleges that Giuliani threw an apple in another teammate’s face, injured a teammate, and was verbally abusive to one of the coaches.
Sounds about right.
You can’t believe everything you read in our comment threads, but one commenter on our initial post seems to have known exactly what Giuliani-time meant for Duke golfers:
Apparently, Giuliani threw an apple at another kid’s face who was also on the Duke golf team. The apple caused some damage to the kid’s face. O.D. [Vincent III, the coach of the golf team] is a class guy and has always been fair to everyone on the team. As evidenced by the fact that Giuliani is not back on the team, his ex-teammates don’t really like him at all. Not to mention the fact that he’s not good enough to be on the starting five. From an inside source, Giuliani was a “virus” on the team.
Official announcements haven’t been made yet, but they’re imminent. Two prominent attorneys are about to drop out of the presidential race: former U.S. Attorney and Associate Attorney General Rudy Giuliani, and super-successful trial lawyer John Edwards.
Random factoid: Giuliani and Edwards both attended top law schools, NYU and UNC – Chapel Hill, respectively. These schools are respectively ranked #4 and #36 by U.S. News. [FN1]
But the remaining candidates who happen to be lawyers went to Harvard (Barack Obama and Mitt Romney) and Yale (Hillary Clinton). These two schools, national institutions for many years, are ranked #2 and #1, respectively.
Loyola 2L claims to be “retired” from the blogosphere. But if here were still around, he might wonder aloud: Are American voters “tier-ist”?
P.S. And who cares about these stupid rankings anyway? A number of top law schools may beoverrated.
[FN1] And the law school rankings didn’t exist back when Edwards and Giuliani attended. Update: First, it appears that some of you have misread this post. We doubt that many voters know or care about where a candidate went to law school. We just (1) pointed out a “random factoid,” and (2) suggested that people who are obsessed with law school rankings, like Loyola 2L, might try to read something into this.
Second, from an observant tipster:
“It might be worth noting that according to the exit polls the most influential lawyer yesterday was none of the ones you mentioned.”
“Rather it was T3 graduate Gov. Charlie Crist (Cumberland Law), whose endorsement seemed to boost McCain past Romney while at the same time destroying any hope Rudy had since Rudy had been courting Crist for weeks.”
* “T.Owes.” [ESPN]
* Rebates to $500? [CNN]
* AG Mukasey won’t label waterboarding. [MSNBC]
* Sen. McCain wins Florida, Rudy to bow out. [New York Times; Washington Post]
* Federal inquiry into stolen artifacts expands. [New York Times]
* Margaret Truman, only child of President Truman and author of mysteries set at the Supreme Court and the FBI, RIP. [AP]
On July 25, Bracewell & Giuliani joined the growing pack of Texas-based firms raising first- and second-year associate raises.
Houston-based Bracewell — with 391 lawyers in the United States, 306 of those in Texas — will raise first-year associate salaries to $160,000 and second-year associate salaries to $170,000 effective Aug. 1, says Melanie Hillis, a firm spokeswoman. Hillis says the firm, which is offering raises to first- and second-year associates in all seven of its U.S. offices, is still evaluating how to structure raises for third- through eighth-year associates.
Read the full article for an insanely detailed summary of the Texas pay raise action, which treats the subject like a high school history lesson: “On July 18, Houston-based Andrews Kurth…. On July 21, partners in Susman Godfrey….” (And who killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand?)
Speaking of Giuliani, we’re obsessed with the Obama Girl vs. Giuliani Girl music video. We admire and respect Rudy Giuliani, but even we had to laugh at this lyric: “Giuliani girl stop your fussin’ / At least Obama didn’t marry his cousin.”
(Also, the pillow fight at the end is AWESOME. And we love Kucinich Girl.) Bracewell & Giuliani First- and Second-Years Seeing Green [Texas Lawyer] Debate ’08: Obama Girl vs Giuliani Girl [YouTube via BarelyPolitical.com]
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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: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
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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This week, Legal Eagle Wedding Watch salutes… a divorce lawyer. This one dutifully dissolved her client’s marriage, seeing him through a contentious custody battle. But then she went the extra mile and set him up with his next wife. Attention, divorce bar: We smell a new business model.
