I work as a lawyer so I can afford Gold Label so I can forget that I work as a lawyer.
– Facebook status update of a person who graduated from a top 10 law school and now works at a large law firm.
Alcohol
Robert Ringley
Throughout our coverage of Robert Ringley, the Ave Maria School of Law student accused of attempted murder and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, many have offered up their comments about the alleged occurrence, and thoughts about law school in general. This comment was perhaps the most fitting of them all:
Law school is a mental illness factory. If you go in healthy, you’ll come out bitter, angry, and depressed. If you go in unhealthy… well, you risk coming out a murderer.
Yesterday, some described Ringley as easygoing, funny, and carefree. But were those traits just used as a cover-up to mask Ringley’s darker side? We’ve got some additional insights on the alleged perpetrator’s state of mind, plus news on his status at Ave Maria Law….
Continue reading “Will Robert Ringley Be Returning to Ave Maria School of Law?”
Robert Ringley
Earlier this week, we brought you news about Robert Christopher Ringley, the second-year student at Ave Maria School of Law who stands accused of shooting at and threatening to kill two of his classmates — Christopher Graves and Samantha Morris — during an alleged drunken bender.
In case you missed our coverage, Ringley has been charged with attempted murder and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Prior to his arrest, Ringley allegedly shared his feelings with Morris, his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend, while pacing back and forth with a gun:
“Just tell me you love me. I love you. I can kill myself. I can kill you. It’s simple.”
Creepy and melodramatic. Not a good way to keep a failing relationship intact, bro. So, who is the man who stole Ave Maria’s long-worn shroud of infamy from Andrew Shirvell, former Michigan assistant attorney general and outspoken opponent of homosexuality?
A former classmate has stepped forward to give us all the details….
Continue reading “Who is Robert Ringley? An Ave Maria Law Classmate Tells All”
Robert Ringley
Law school, copious amounts of alcohol, and unrequited love are the ingredients necessary for a very dangerous cocktail, the effects of which can lead to much more than just a bad hangover.
Just ask Robert Christopher Ringley, a man whom we believe to be a second-year student at the Ave Maria School of Law.
Early Friday morning, Robert Ringley was charged with attempted murder and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after allegedly threatening to kill and shooting at two of his Ave Maria Law classmates.
What caused Ringley’s alleged of acts violence, and what’s love got to do with it? Let’s take a closer look at some of the allegations….
Continue reading “Ave Maria School of Law Student Accused of Attempted Murder”
- Asians, Crime, Drinking, Guns / Firearms, Jury Duty, Law Schools, Litigators, Plaintiffs Firms, Temple Law School, Trials, Violence
DiDonato v. Ung: The Temple Law Shooter Gets Hit — With a Civil Suit
By David Lat
Gerald Ung (left) and Edward DiDonato Jr. (right)
This shouldn’t come as a shock; we predicted it last February, when the criminal case ended in acquittal. But Eddie DiDonato Jr., a former lacrosse star at Villanova and the son of a prominent partner at the Fox Rothschild law firm, has filed a civil lawsuit against Gerald Ung, the Temple Law School student who shot DiDonato in January 2010 in the Old City section of Philadelphia.
Gerald Ung isn’t the only defendant. DiDonato is suing a half dozen other parties, relying on various theories of liability. Let’s think of this as a Torts final exam: Who else might DiDonato be suing besides Ung? What causes of action can you see?
Let’s take a closer look at the lawsuit, filed on behalf of DiDonato by one of Pennsylvania’s leading personal injury lawyers….
Continue reading “DiDonato v. Ung: The Temple Law Shooter Gets Hit — With a Civil Suit”
The blogosphere has been buzzing since we first wrote about Ice Miller attorney Courtney King’s alleged criminal activity. In case you missed our coverage, King was arrested after allegedly uttering, to the police, the words first made famous by rapper Eight Set: “Google me” (sans the “bitch”).
King, whom we recognized with Lawyer of the Day honors, was charged with alcohol intoxication, assault, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and terroristic threatening. She allegedly stated the following to the police, immediately prior to her arrest:
“You are going to… die. I’m a lawyer. You can Google me. You are dead. I work at a law firm in Indianapolis.”
People have quibbled over King’s attractiveness, but more importantly, they’ve speculated as to whether there was, in fact, any actual violence on King’s part leading up to her arrest. Was King overcharged? Was race a factor in her arrest? Is she on “possible probation” with the firm, or was she fired? All of this, and more, after the jump….
Continue reading “Google Me, B***h: The Real Deal on Courtney King’s Arrest”
Here at Above the Law, we know a thing or two about how lawyers should deal with the police. Incidentally, we also know how lawyers should not deal with law enforcement officers. And if you truly value your job as an attorney, it’s best not to mouth off to the cops, or to threaten them in any way, shape, or form.
But Courtney King, a rather attractive attorney with Ice Miller, apparently didn’t get the memo. Last week, after allegedly downing a few too many shots of liquid courage, King got into a stand off with police that may have iced her nascent legal career….
Continue reading “Lawyer of the Day: Alleged Death Threats Put Attorney on Ice”
The Occupy movement has reached the legal profession, with an unemployed law graduate launching a campaign to occupy the Inns of Court (London’s legal quarter).
“Through no fault of our own, a generation of [law school] graduates find ourselves with no jobs — or no jobs as lawyers anyway,” wrote the graduate under the alias “OccupyTheInns” on Legal Cheek, a blog I edit. “The lucky ones are paralegals. The unlucky ones work in bars (not the Bar)… It is for these reasons that I propose peaceful direct action. It is time to occupy the Inns of Court.”
Responses to the plan have mostly been negative, but the broad sentiment of discontent has struck a chord. Catrin Griffiths, editor of The Lawyer magazine, summed up the mood: “I don’t buy much of [OccupyTheInns'] argument, which smacks too much of entitlement, but it signifies something bigger, related to the growing crisis of a million young people unemployed in the U.K.”
However, even with our spiralling unemployment rates, and love of protesting, I’d be surprised if an occupation of legal London took off. While many U.K. law school graduates are jobless and indebted, most still have a decent shot of making it into the profession. As such, they have too much to lose by winding up the establishment.
Maybe OccupyTheInns should instead re-direct their energies to recruiting the potentially far more vulnerable, high-earning, senior lawyers who look set to lose their jobs over the next few months?
Continue reading “Letter from London: Jobless Lawyer Starts Occupy Movement”
If we try hard enough, I bet we can blame the entire collapse of the American economy on some Lehman Brothers dudes who had too much Four Loko.
We’ve been following the successful crusade to get the original Four Loko banned because of its “dangerous” combination of caffeine and alcohol. Outlawing one specific mixture of alcohol and caffeine in a society where both alcohol and caffeine are abundant has always seemed stupid to me. It’s blaming a drink manufacturer for other people’s lack of personal responsibility. Four Loko, when enjoyed responsibly, was no more dangerous than any other alcoholic drink. When it was enjoyed by idiots, stupid things happened. Banning Four Loko just encourages blaming others for your own stupid and drunken behavior.
We recently saw what has to be the height of this Four Loko lunacy. A college student was shot to death last year, and now his family is suing the makers of Four Loko….
Continue reading “Parents Try To Blame Four Loko For Son Getting Shot”
- Biglaw, Blackberry-Crackberry, DLA Piper, Election 2012, Food, Insider Trading, iPhone, Law Schools, Money, Morning Docket, Nauseating Things, Politics, Rape, Sentencing Law, Wall Street, White-Collar Crime
Morning Docket: 10.14.11
By Staci ZaretskyGive me a break. I 'raised' 23 foster kids.
* Members of the Occupy Wall Street brigade were allowed to continue to be dirty hippies living in a park without toilets this morning. So fresh and so clean! OMG, yippee! [Wall Street Journal]
* French prosecutors have dropped another yet another rape charge lodged against Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Seriously? It looks like nothing sticks to this man except money. [CNN]
* Recognizing that it’s really hard to get someone to pick up a partner from the drunk tank when there’s a Blackberry outage, DLA Piper is thinking about switching to iPhones. [Reuters]
* RajRaj was literally the biggest target in the Galleon case, but one of his buddies was sentenced, too. On Wednesday, Michael Kimelman got 2.5 years at the luxurious Club Fed. [Daily Record]
* It took Michele Bachmann seven years to graduate from law school (whereas most graduate in three). She can get things done, but apparently only on her own time. [New York Times]
* Food fight! Things are getting really dirty in this Food Network lawsuit. Guy Fieri not only likes to cook with alcohol, but he allegedly speaks like an angry drunk behind the scenes. [City Pages]
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Virtual Canary in the Digital Mine #3: Total Pre-Cull (Part 1 of 3), Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Predictive Coding
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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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