Here at Above the Law, we sometimes feel like meteorologists, if only because we often cover the legal world’s sh*t storms. Speaking of which, this morning we saw an interesting lawsuit pattern coming through on the Doppler radar all the way from California. It looks like we could be facing some gale force bitchiness, because Gloria Allred is at the eye of the storm.
It seems that her latest client, a weatherman, has been prevented from predicting precipitation and making it rain. He believes that a record heatwave over his competitions’ Grand Tetons is the cause of his unemployment. In simpler terms, Allred’s client is suing because he is not an “attractive young female”….
* Building bridges instead of burning them: a new Republican strategy that just might work. Thanks to this Senate deal, 14 federal judicial nominees will get confirmation votes before summer. [Legal Times]
* According to this survey, Biglaw firm leaders are wearing rose-colored glasses when it comes to the economy and current business conditions. That said, where are the spring bonuses? [Am Law Daily]
* A jury found Virginia Tech negligent in its handling of the school’s 2007 massacre. The administration will probably appeal, but it’d be nicer if they just appeased the victims’ families. [Wall Street Journal]
* Want a tenure-track teaching position? Just sue. Nicholas Spaeth’s age discrimination suit against Georgetown Law will proceed, much to the school’s chagrin. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* Kim Kardashian + boobs + lawsuit = water cooler fodder for lawyers. [New York Post]
* Lawyers at this Biglaw firm may learn a thing or two about respecting their elders later this week. Kelley Drye is close to settling an age discrimination suit filed by Eugene D’Ablemont, one of its many de-equitized partners. [Wall Street Journal]
* Well, this could definitely be one of the reasons why Cravath hasn’t given out any spring bonuses to associates yet this year. They probably had to spend all of their money to clean up their allegedly fly-infested cafeteria. [Am Law Daily]
* Women in Virginia will now be able to politely decline their pre-abortion transvaginal ultrasounds in favor of abdominal ones. Oh, how nice! Look at that, girls, we totally won the war on women. [CBS News]
* Things Dharun Ravi texted to Tyler Clementi on the night the latter committed suicide? “I’ve known you were gay and I have no problem with it.” Of course you knew, you watched his sexual encounters via webcam. [CNN]
When I was a kid, my father leaned across the dinner table and whispered to me, “Never ask a woman’s age or weight.” He then stole a glance at my mother, who was busy shoveling mashed potatoes into her maw, and sighed. I could never tell whether my dad was trying to offer the wisdom of the ages or making a statement about the tyranny of manners, the clichés they birth, and the way in which politeness can imprison a good man in a loveless relationship that inevitably leads to you watching your 400-pound wife shovel potatoes back like she was auditioning for The Biggest Loser.
And so it was that the Internet Movie Database, aka IMDb, found itself under attack for revealing an actress’s age and “real Asian name.” Kash detailed the charges last October. A few weeks ago, we noted that the woman would have to put up (her name) or shut up (legally speaking).
Well, I don’t want to waste any more of your precious time. The grand reveal is finally here.
After the jump, pictures of an attractive Asian woman….
* Rajabba is appealing his insider trading convictions and prison sentence, but someone needs to suffer for this outrage. Where are Solo and the Wookiee when you need them? [Bloomberg]
* PETA is suing SeaWorld on Thirteenth Amendment grounds for enslaving killer whales. Oh, so the only marine animals you’ll help have to be black and white? Racists. [Washington Post]
* When you sue for age discrimination, you probably shouldn’t discriminate against your judge, no matter what his age. At least this violinist can play his own sad song. [New York Daily News]
It’s said that it’s rude to ask a woman her age. In fact, it’s only rude to ask women 30 and over about their digits. It’s far worse, however, to ask a woman with decades under her belt for her age and then to publish it for the world to see. An actress in Texas says it wasn’t just rude but financially costly for her when the movie database IMDB publicized her nearly over-the-hill age in 2008. Cue, Robert Murtaugh.
The Hollywood Reporter has a copy of the actress’s complaint against Amazon.com, which owns the Internet Movie Database, in which she alleges that everyone’s favorite website for figuring out who-that-guy-in-that-one-movie-was-and-what-was-that-other-movie-he-was-in-with-that-girl screwed her over after she signed up for a Pro IMDb account. After entering credit card information and personal details, including her birthdate, to start the account, her age all of a sudden appeared on her public profile page, “revealing to the public that Plaintiff is many years older than she looks,” according to her humble complaint.
* $400 per wasted hour? That’s not what you’re paying your lawyer. That’s what he’s paying in sanctions for futzing around during depositions. [Daily Business Review]
* Texas Roadhouse: old farts need not apply. Apparently qualifications for working at a chain restaurant now include being young, hot, and chipper. [Los Angeles Times]
* Friendly’s used to be the place where ice cream made the meal, but now it’s the place where ice cream makes you bankrupt. That’s just sad. [Bloomberg]
* Memo to file: the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, not yours. A former model is seeking parole after she chopped up, cooked, and ate her husband. [Daily Mail]
* This Cooley lawsuit is a “mystery.” They don’t game the numbers, they just do what “everybody else does.” Need a rimshot? [National Law Journal]
* Yesterday team Bingham McCutchen struck out swinging, and now Frank McCourt is poised to hit it out of the park. [Boston Herald]
* Recent law grads can kiss their overtime goodbye in California. Even the unlicensed can be “learned” in this profession. [San Francisco Chronicle]
* Whitey Bulger’s girlfriend pleaded not guilty to harboring the alleged Boston gang boss. Way to stand by your man to avoid a mob hit. [CNN]
* No plum smuggling for old men. According to this age discrimination lawsuit, a Speedo is a Speedon’t for men over the age of 50. [New York Daily News]
* Think you can get away with looting during a London riot? Not when your mom’s a total narc. Not cool mom, not cool. [BBC News]
* A federal judge in Kansas has given Planned Parenthood’s Abortionplex a new lease on life. [WSJ Law Blog]
* What? A former Supreme Court clerk who got passed over for a job at a law school? Nicholas Spaeth, who’s also the former state attorney general for North Dakota, is suing the Michigan State University College of Law, for age discrimination. [The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times via SBM Blog]
* Elsewhere in criminal justice news, should prisons be run on a voucher system? Dan Markel offers some thoughts on Sasha Volokh’s interesting proposal. [PrawfsBlawg]
* An interesting profile of Alan Gura, the celebrated Second Amendment litigator, by a fellow small-firm lawyer, Nicole Black. [The Xemplar]
* Hopefully this will all become moot after a deal gets done, but remember the Fourteenth Amendment argument for Obama unilaterally raising the debt ceiling? Jeffrey Rosen thinks a lawsuit against Obama would get kicked for lack of standing — or might even prevail. [New Republic]
* But Orin Kerr believes that a recent SCOTUS case might change the analysis. [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Howrey going to pay all the creditors? A lot turns on how some contingency-fee cases turn out, according to Larry Ribstein. [Truth on the Market]
* From in-house to the big house: former general counsel Russell Mackert just got sentenced to more than 15 years in prison for his role in a fraud scheme. [Corporate Counsel]
On Tuesday, Ropes & Gray was sued in Manhattan federal court by a former partner, Patricia A. Martone. Martone’s lawsuit claims age discrimination, sex discrimination, retaliation, and interference with protected retirement benefits in violation of ERISA (the basis for federal jurisdiction in the S.D.N.Y.).
As you might expect from an ex-Ropes partner, Martone has some high-powered counsel: Anne Vladeck, one of New York’s top labor and employment lawyers, widely regarded as the queen of employment discrimination law. Vladeck famously (and successfully) represented Anucha Browne Sanders in her sexual harassment lawsuit against Isiah Thomas and the Knicks.
Patricia Martone is a veteran intellectual-property litigatrix, a specialist in patent litigation, with almost 40 years of practice under her belt. She made partner at Fish & Neave, the well-known patent law firm, in 1983, and then became a Ropes partner in 2005, when Ropes absorbed Fish. She’s now a partner at Morrison & Foerster, which she joined in October 2010.
Why did she leave Ropes? Let’s have a look at Patricia Martone, and her lawsuit….
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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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Here at Above the Law, we sometimes feel like meteorologists, if only because we often cover the legal world’s sh*t storms. Speaking of which, this morning we saw an interesting lawsuit pattern coming through on the Doppler radar all the way from California. It looks like we could be facing some gale force bitchiness, because Gloria Allred is at the eye of the storm. 
