Recent Headlines from Above the Law

  • Morning Docket: 03.08.19
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 03.08.19

    * Paul Manafort got 4 years out of a possible 24. A lot of breathless ranting will come out of this but the reality is 4 years is a significant amount of time to be incarcerated and the guidelines are crazy. Don’t be mad that Manafort got too little, be mad that the system generally (and Judge Ellis in particular) unquestioningly applies the guidelines to give far too much to poor and minority defendants. [CNN]

    * Frankly, the charges that should earn Manafort heavy jail time are the charges of lying to the Mueller probe because that’s where there’s a significant interest in setting punitive disincentives. And Judge Jackson may have a very different view on how “otherwise blameless” Manafort’s been. [Daily Beast]

    * While we’re on these never-ending Trump orbit stories, Michael Cohen is suing Trump for legal fees since, he points out, all his problems stem from work he did in the official course of his duties. [New York Law Journal]

    * Wearing a disguise to court is totally normal lawyer behavior. [New York Times]

    * Orrick joins the $1B revenue club. [The Recorder]

    * Remember the drunken airline rant lady? She’s facing jail time. [Legal Cheek]

    * George Mason receives largest gift in school history, but it’ll never match the gift they gave prospective students the ATL community when they descriptively renamed their law school ASS Law. [Inside Higher Ed]

  • Morning Docket: 10.03.16
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 10.03.16

    * The New York Times has obtained Donald Trump’s tax records from 1995, revealing a nearly $916 million loss that would have enabled him to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period. Marc Kasowitz, name partner of Kasowitz Benson, represents Trump, and has threatened the paper with “prompt initiation of appropriate legal action” for its publication of his client’s tax records. [New York Times]

    * George Mason University will host a grand opening ceremony this week for the twice renamed Antonin Scalia School of Law Antonin Scalia Law School — a ceremony that five SCOTUS justices will reportedly attend — and some students and faculty are planning to protest the Koch brothers’ funding of scholarships by wearing red tape over their mouths to symbolize their voices being taken from them. [Big Law Business]

    * Katherine Magbanua, the woman who is suspected of connecting Florida State University law professor Dan Markel’s alleged killers, Sigfredo Garcia and Luis Rivera, with the family of Markel’s ex-wife, Wendi Adelson, has been arrested on murder charges. According to police, she has “received numerous benefits from the Adelsons since Markel’s murder.” We’ll have more on this later today. [Tallahassee Democrat]

    * According to Judge Beth Bloom of the Southern District of Florida, Orlando-based firm Butler & Hosch violated the WARN Act when it closed suddenly in May 2015 and conducted mass layoffs of more than 700 employees without giving them 60 days of advance notice. The firm, which is bankruptcy, could be on the hook for millions of dollars in damages. We may have more on this later today. [Orlando Sentinel]

    * Following the embarrassment that was former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner’s light sentence in the sexual assault of an unconscious woman at his school, California Gov. Jerry Brown has broadened the state’s legal definition of rape to include penetration with a foreign object, mandate prison time if the victim was unconscious at the time of the assault, and forbid judges from granting probation or parole in such cases. [Reuters]

    * “Frankly, USD has been a bit behind in that, in part, up until 2014, we had no problem with the bar exam. When you’re hitting in the high 80s or 90s, you don’t worry about much.” Unofficial results from the South Dakota bar exam are out, and after years of declines in passage rates for graduates of South Dakota Law, administrators are ready to take action now that only about 50 percent of graduates passed the test. [Argus Leader]

    * “I was empty and then this woman walked into my life. I didn’t think it would happen again and it did. She is it.” LGBT rights pioneer Edie Windsor, the plaintiff whose Supreme Court case rendered DOMA unconstitutional in 2013 and laid the groundwork for the high court to declare that marriage equality was a fundamental right just two years later, remarried in New York last week. Our very best wishes! [New York Times]

  • Morning Docket: 05.17.16
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 05.17.16

    * Tiger-blooded warlock Charlie Sheen sued by American Express over $287,879 in debt. #Winning. [Courthouse News Service]

    * It’s really happening, folks! Get ready for ASSLaw. [Washington Post]

    * Morgan Lewis knows how to play both sides — the firm is handling Donald Trump’s tax returns and accompanying controversy while simultaneously vetting Hillary Clinton’s possible running mates. [Law.com]

    * Law school announces a technological innovation concentration… because programming the next LawyerBot is probably the only hope these students have for jobs in 10 years. [Northwestern Pritzker School of Law]

    * Cuneo Gilbert attorneys said that they felt threatened when former colleague Preetpal Grewal emailed another former colleague stating she wanted “to kill” them in connection with her national origin discrimination suit. Someone’s overreacting here. [Law360]

    * The SEC targets a patent troll and a former Fulbright & Jaworski and Bracewell associate in an unrelated securities fraud case. [The Am Law Daily]

    * Neil Sedaka may have thought “Breakin’ Up Is Hard To Do” but for law firms, mergers are the tough part. [National Law Journal]

    * The justice gap for poor civil litigants keeps on growing. [The Nation]

  • Morning Docket: 05.06.16
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 05.06.16

    * “I find it highly amusing and somewhat heartening to know that Donald Trump is indirectly subsidizing the defense of undocumented immigrants.” Jones Day may be representing presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, but the firm is also fighting for the rights of more than 100,000 undocumented refugees, all of whom Trump would likely want to see deported if he were to be elected as president in November. [Yahoo!]

    * Believe it or not, but Donald Trump’s political career in the Republican Party closely tracks that of a Biglaw legend of the bar. In 1940, Wendell Willkie of Willkie Farr & Gallagher fame was an outsider presidential candidate with absolutely no public service experience to his name — just like Trump. Willkie later went on to lose the election, and only time will tell if Trump will suffer a similar fate in Election 2016. [Big Law Business]

    * Professors at George Mason University have demanded that the law school’s renaming to honor the late Antonin Scalia be delayed until school leaders answer their questions about the funding of scholarship monies being tied to the ongoing service of the current dean, but according to law school senior associate dean David Rehr, “[e]ven with this action, we are moving forward … and expect a favorable resolution.” [Washington Post]

    * After receiving the largest gift in its history, Pace Law has been renamed in honor of an environmentalist, and will now be known as the Pace University Elisabeth Haub School of Law. The donors do not want the amount of their gift to be disclosed, but Pace says it’s comparable to the $30 million and $25 million gifts George Mason and Villanova respectively received for their recent name changes. Congratulations! [WSJ Law Blog]

    * The trial between Sumner Redstone and Manuela Herzer over the media mogul’s mental competence is slated to begin today and will last for a week. With lurid allegations about the 92-year-old’s supposed sexual proclivities, his penchant for eating steak through a feeding tube, as well as his incontinence, this is sure to be an incredibly salacious matter that will play out in the public eye. [DealBook / New York Times]

  • Morning Docket: 05.03.16
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 05.03.16

    * As Judge Shira Scheindlin leaves the federal bench to join Stroock concentrating on public interest work as of counsel, Law360 spoke with Judge Scheindlin about the move. [Law360]

    * George Mason’s president responds to rumblings that the law school is too dependent on private donors who cajoled the school into its ASSLaw moniker. [Washington Post]

    * A full rundown of all the twists and turns in the ongoing legal battle between Boies Schiller partner Nicholas Gravante Jr. and his mother. [The Am Law Daily]

    * These are the questions clients are about to ask you about cybersecurity. Can you answer them? [PC World]

    * The McDivitt Law Firm is offering free cab rides home on Cinco de Mayo for lucky drunks in Colorado Springs and Pueblo. So toast the defeat of the hated French all you want Colorado residents! [KKTV]

    * The U.S. Trade Representative has some choice words for countries that don’t respect IP laws, like China, India, and Switzerland. Wait, what? Switzerland? [Corporate Counsel]

    * Kentucky judge blocks the city of Louisville from removing a Confederate monument because, you know, “the South will rise again” and the city doesn’t want egg on its face when that happens. [Fox News]

    * The complicated case of religious tax exemption for a coffee shop… on grounds owned by a religious order. [The Atlantic]

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