Aww… it’s like a Biglaw version of a sports movie. Firm makes a lawyer softball team. Firm dissolves in an embarrassing mess. Softball team plays on, overcoming hardships to win.
Apparently, that storyline is really happening for the Dewey & LeBoeuf softball team. The scrappy outfit made up of former Dewey lawyers who have been scattered to the wind went 10 – 1 in the Lawyers Coed Softball League.
How did they do it? Do they have a lot of ringers and/or the highest percentage of UVA Law graduates? Maybe they’re just really pissed off that their firm went under?
* Are you ready for some concussions?! [The Nation]
* Sorry, wrong song. How about: I’ve been waiting all day for student athlete’s rights, but Stanford’s getting tough like a prime-time fight. California wants to protect injured scholars in cleats. But Stanford doesn’t care for former athletes. (Go ahead, read the article, listen to the song chorus again, then come back here and tell me my fake lyrics were awesome. I’ll wait.) [Legal Blitz]
* Amanda Bynes, charged with hit-and-run. A former child star running afoul of the law, what were the odds? What. Were. The. Odds. [Associated Press]
* Stuff falls from the sky and kills a lawyer. That’s not the start of a joke, it really freaking happened. [The London Evening Standard]
* Note the URL on Niki Black’s response to Brian Tannebaum’s article yesterday, then remember to keep your hands and feet inside the car at all times. [Sui Generis]
* Dealbreaker headline of the day: Bank Of America Makes Policy On Flashing Your Bare Ass At The Office Clear. [Dealbreaker]
* Conservatives in California are against deregulation. The party of Reagan is truly dead. [Slate]
Ed. note: This new column is about sports and the law. You can read the introductory installment here.
It wasn’t until law school that I realized adult life was one long series of birthday dinners. There was one every week it seemed. And at one birthday dinner in particular, I gave a speech that would haunt me for the rest of my law school career. Like an STD.
It was somebody’s birthday and we were eating Mexican food. And I was stationed at one end of the extra-long tables near a few friends and acquaintances. Several beers into the meal, I loudly steered the conversation towards a discussion of herpes. I’m not really sure why I did this. I think I had read something on the intertubes that day. At any rate, I told my end of the table that herpes was way more commonplace than they thought, and that the effect of the disease was far less dire than they thought. That, sure, some cases were worse than others, but that the puritanical myth-makers in our culture had convinced us that it was worse than death. Which it wasn’t. I was in high dudgeon, my friends. The floor was mine, and I was taking no prisoners in my attack on what I had deemed a cultural sex libel. “I’m telling you, ladies and germs. Herpes is NOT THAT BIG A DEAL!”
Not a single girl present at that dinner ever came close to having sex with me. On a related note, Kris Humphries was sued for allegedly giving a girl the herp.
Ed. note: This new column is about sports and the law. You can read the introductory installment here.
I was an altar boy for several years as a kid. The priest, who smelled of cigarettes, would whisper “book” when he wanted the book, and over time I became a pro at rocking the bells. Seriously good at shaking those bastards.
Let’s talk sports?
On Wednesday, Dr. Graham Spanier and his attorneys went on the offensive. Spanier, you may recall, is the former Penn State president who was fired in the midst of the Sandusky scandal last November. Joe Paterno died, two former colleagues await trial, and the 64-year-old Spanier simply got a pink slip. You would think that since he escaped the far harsher sentence of his compatriots, he would be grateful. Perhaps he would tend to a garden during this, his senescence, and dream about the days when a child rapist didn’t have free reign over the Penn State campus. If gardening isn’t his thing, maybe drinking is. I know it helps me to forget.
But alas, Spanier is in no mood to forget. On Wednesday, Spanier sought out every audiovisual recording device he could find in order to plead his case to the world. Y’see, everyone’s got it absolutely wrong about Graham Spanier.
* So now the judge accused of watching porn from a courthouse computer admits to watching porn on a courthouse computer. Let me just get this out of the way: if I’ve used your computer, it was probably to watch porn. [Chicago Sun-Times]
* Too soon for Aurora jokes? I think it’s weird that more people believe in waiting periods for zingers than for handguns. [Tax Prof Blog]
* Lance Armstrong’s suit against the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks. How come the only athlete that seemed to get his day in court was Roger Clemens? [Bloomberg]
* Another kid is packing in his sports dreams to go to law school. Though, in fairness, one of the few things worse than the law graduate economy is probably the NHL economy. [North Dakota Inforum]
* I think Republican political candidates should know by now that they only bands they are allowed to like are country music bands. If they want to like non-country music, they should get the artist’s approval, in writing. Meanwhile, liberals are allowed like all kinds of music, even music performed by people who don’t know what they are talking about. [What About Clients?]
* Attorney and rape victim Shauna Prewitt has some facts about rape that apparently Todd Akin didn’t know. [xoJane]
Ed. note: This new column is about sports and the law. You can read the introductory installment here.
Last night, I was having trouble coming up with something to say in this space that begins the post. I think it’s called an introduction. I called up the only woman who doesn’t screen my calls and asked for her help.
Mama Juggs: Are you in trouble? Juggs: No, mom. Christ, why would you ask me that? No, I’m finding it difficult to think up a story only tenuously related to sports that I can open my column with. MJ: I don’t understand a word of what you just said. J: My column, mom. On Above The Law. You said you’ve been reading it? MJ: *silence* J: Whatever. Mom, can you think of a sports-related story that’s mildly funny and has little-to-no point? MJ: Do you remember how your father used to shoot free throws? God, you’d stand out there for hours rebounding for him. How many did he make in a row? J: Something over 100. I don’t remember. Mom, that’s not a ripping yarn, you’d have to agree. MJ: You were too young to remember this, but the way his teams ran defense at Lucky High. Oh God, it was poetry. Every motion had an order, but it was so fluid and graceful. It was intuitive, y’know? Your father was so proud of those boys. J: This isn’t going anywhere, is it? MJ: The team that took second at state was great, but it was actually the team after that that your father always claimed was the best he coached. I can still see him walking out onto the court with the boutonnière and he looked so impressive. Just striding onto that court with all the confidence in the world. I’ll have to see if I can find a picture. I know I have one around here. He looked so handsome, your dad did. J: Didn’t he get kicked out of a lot of games for arguing with refs?
Faith Hill will probably not make it to the Above the Law Fantasy Football party.
Are you ready for some football… wait, what, we’re not singing that anymore? That’s a great song. Banning that song is like something Hitler would do.
Anyway, I’m getting back into the fantasy football thing. I hosted a league for Above the Law readers a few years ago. That was hard because the economy kind of exploded that fall.
Now, I want to get back in the game. I’m going to get crushed this year — I don’t think having a newborn meshes well with running a fake football team. But I;m going to want the distraction. It’s also so much fun to watch football the year after your team wins the Superbowl. Everything is gravy; if they stink, who cares, you’re the defending champions.
Are you interested in playing with me and your other Above the Law editors? Staci is in. Danzig is in. Lat will not be participating, but we’ll keep him posted. Playing fantasy football with ATL readers is fun. There’s a lot of smack talking especially around trade time because, well, have you ever seen lawyers try to make a trade where everybody “wins”?
Here’s how it’s going to work: you’ll email me and say you want in. Elie@Abovethelaw.com. If there is enough interest, I’ll run two leagues. If there’s more than that, I’ll email all the people who don’t make the cut and they can organize on their own. Preference will be given, in order to: friends, nice commenters, first come, girls, Harvard grads, mean commenters, Yale grads. Or something like that.
Oh, and two more important things:
We’re using ESPN. It’s the worldwide leader — Yahoo and CBSsports are not.
It’s going to be an auction style draft. Because auction requires SKILL while snake drafts require getting lucky in the draft order. Auctions are fun, and auctions mercilessly punish people who can’t make time for the draft.
Make sure you let me know by Friday so I can spend the weekend organizing and getting out some draft times. I can’t wait for my team, Pacific Walrus, to crush you this fall.
Ed. note: This new column is about sports and the law. You can read the introductory installment here.
In June of 2005, my girlfriend asked if we could go see War of the Worlds. Tom Cruise was flying high, engrossed in a love that would last forever, and starring in a blockbuster that was getting okay reviews. While I was never a huge fan of popcorn movies, I relented. After two solid hours of explosions and other loud noises, I walked away surprisingly impressed with the effort. While the Academy may ignore this film, I thought, I had had a damned good time. The very next weekend, I visited home and caught up with my father. I told him that I thought War of the Worlds was pretty enjoyable and, since I knew he had seen it with my mother recently, I asked him if he agreed. His face puckered sourly and he muttered “No…no.” Then I launched into a litany of guesses, all wrapped in a pseudo-intellectual pose, as to why he disliked the film. Well, sure, it was a silly action movie, but you could do far worse. Spielberg may have “grown up”, but he was still a populist director at heart and quite good at directing the kind of movies that Michael Bay was consistently f**king up. And sure, it wasn’t deep and didn’t leave me with anything besides the faint memory of two enjoyable hours. But wasn’t that enough? Dad patiently sat there as his son prattled on for a bit. When I was finally winded, he said “You want to know why I hated that movie? You know that scene in the beginning where Tom Cruise is playing catch with his son?” Sure, I replied. “Well, Tom Cruise throws a baseball like a goddamned girl. He pushes the thing. PUSH. PUSH. How did you not catch that!? It’s plain as day. And I’m supposed to think he’s a hero!?”
As baseball fans are well-aware, the San Diego Padres don’t have a very good record. At 15 games below .500 this year, they’re the second-worst team in the National League West, the fourth-worst team in the National League, and the fifth-worst team in all of MLB right now. The Padres have only won the National League Pennant twice, but lost in the World Series both times. They’re the only team in MLB to never record a no-hitter. To be frank, the Padres suck.
Why anyone would want to apply for a job working with the Padres is simply beyond me. Why that same person, a law student at the time, would apply for a job with the Padres at least 30 times puts her in wackadoodle territory. But who am I to judge?
Anyway, eventually people get sick of receiving rejection letter after rejection letter after rejection letter — or in most cases, no rejection letter at all. These days, people don’t even have the courtesy to tell you to go f**k yourself. I’m sure recent law school graduates can commiserate.
But after applying and being summarily rejected for an extremely low-rent job with the Padres, this former law student had absolutely had it. She was mad as hell, and she wasn’t going to take it anymore. The result? Possibly the best email ever sent from a repeatedly rejected job seeker….
Back in 2010, we presented our readers with one of life’s great unanswered questions: is cheerleading a sport?
This important question was asked of Judge Stefan R. Underhill of Connecticut, when the women’s volleyball team of Quinnipiac University sued in an effort to stop the school from dissolving the team, alleging Title IX violations. Quinnipiac claimed that it made up the loss of the volleyball team with opportunities in other sports, including more than two dozen positions on the school’s cheerleading team.
But much to the chagrin of cheer moms everywhere (yes, that’s a thing, and soon there will even be a reality TV show about them), Judge Underhill ruled that cheerleading is an activity, and not a sport.
But did you think that cheerleaders — and their university funders — would just give up the fight? Think again, because they pledged to fight, fight, fight with all their might, all the way up to the Second Circuit.
What news does the Second Circuit have for us on this issue today?
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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Aww… it’s like a Biglaw version of a sports movie. Firm makes a lawyer softball team. Firm dissolves in an embarrassing mess. Softball team plays on, overcoming hardships to win.
