This Thanksgiving, I was thankful for a healthy baby. Watching the Cowboys get blown out with your son is a whole other level of awesome that I can’t begin to adequately describe.
Trust me, my little guy will not grow up to like the Cowboys, he won’t end up being a Republican, and there’s no way in hell he’s going to law school. As soon as I got back to work, I remembered to be thankful (again) that I graduated from law school long before the economic meltdown and the era of high tuition with low job prospects.
Other people aren’t as lucky. Over the holiday, a presumably unemployed, 2012 law graduate sent a scathing letter to the dean and the faculty of the law school he graduated from. He’s angry. Based on the letter, he also might be a little loopy, possibly from hunger, but he’s certainly very, very angry….
Yesterday, a former Cravath associate had his law license suspended for three years by a New York court. For several years now, the young former associate has been dealing with some serious legal troubles.
Michael Zulandt was a Cravath associate in New York (we mentioned the story earlier today in Morning Docket). In 2008, he pleaded guilty to third-degree misdemeanor assault charges stemming from a domestic violence incident with an ex-girlfriend. The incident sounds like it was a pretty serious fight.
Keep reading to learn more about our (suspended) Lawyer of the Day’s crime and punishment….
This is the worst piece of whoring journalism I have read in a long time. How long are you going to suck [U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara]’s teat? All to hurt a decent, honest witness, [whom assistant U.S. attorney Reed] Brodsky could not lay a glove on. It did not work. The jury was not impressed by the worst cross examination ever delivered. So in the style of Preet, try to smear him by working the sycophants in the back of the Courtroom. He learned from Schumer in the Senate… Preet is scared sh[**]less he is going to lose this case so he feeds his whores at the WSJ. What a disgrace for an otherwise great paper.
When times are tough, the tough get… whiny? A law student at Emory is frustrated by the lack of jobs being offered up by Career Services and circulated an email airing his or her discontent. Addressed to “My Fellow Emory Law Students,” it lambasts the employees charged with helping Emory grads land jobs.
It’s available in full after the jump, but here’s an excerpt:
This has gotten absolutely ridiculous. When we first entered Emory Law School, jobs were plentiful and career services could sit around and do nothing. Things are much different now. In 2008, the market collapse stunned the legal job market. Those $160,000+ jobs went from plentiful to a rare commodity, yet our tuition continues to rise and our loans accrue.
What has career services done? Nothing. Remember this item on Abovethelaw from exactly a year ago? Apparently, they’ve been a little too calm in this storm. Nevertheless, they still operate under their prior m.o. (sit in the office, do nothing but play solitaire, and expect jobs to walk into their office). Whenever students complain about the lack of OCI jobs (that will be discussed in another paragraph below), their response always references the down economy. When we ask for advice, we are told “Network.” Upon further inquiry about networking tips, we are told, “Talk to people.” They haven’t even attempted the extremes at Duke or SMU Law; options exist, but they don’t want to do the work.
Have Duke’s Bridge to Practice and SMU’s Test Drive set a new bar? Is it a fair expectation that part of your law school tuition go towards paying someone to hire you?
We reached out to Emory’s career services office for their response to the criticism. Assistant Dean of Career Services Janet Hutchinson took a break from solitaire to get back to us…
Here at Above the Law, we like to provide a service to our readers. Sometimes things happen at a law firm that you just can’t talk about to your colleagues. But you can always tell us.
Last week, we corresponded with a frustrated attorney. Despite the fact that he’s quite senior and has changed firms looking for a better situation, he’s still dealing with the kind of casual disrespect most associates all across the land must suffer:
I sit here today at my new law firm, still disgruntled, I find myself writing a fictitious response to a real email sent to me on Monday by my boss. I actually sent the fictitious email to my brother, for pleasure reading, and not to my boss of course. I thought I would share it with you.
The very real email he received from the partner in question seems innocuous enough:
From: [Redacted]
Sent: Monday
To: [Redacted]
Subject:
Please let me know if you are licensed in Kansas. I have some work that needs to be done over there.
It’s a harmless enough request, until you learn a little bit more of the backstory that this associate just wishes he could explain to the partner…
Richard Zachary is a solo practitioner in Chicago who has mixed it up with Biglaw many times in his career… and has come away unimpressed.
In a recent filing in Cook County Court, he vented about the shortcomings of the big firm lawyers he’s come up against. He’s currently representing an individual suing a corporation represented by Schiff Hardin. He describes an attorney there as follows:
Some paper-shuffling third-rater trying to camouflage his own culpability with defamatory rhetoric [who made me] realize that there are depths of chicanery to which some legal professionals will not hesitate to descend.
Richard Zachary is both irate and poetic, a wonderful combination.
The motion captures the frustration that solos experience in their clashes with Biglaw. More incensed turns of phrase, after the jump.
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.
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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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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This Thanksgiving, I was thankful for a healthy baby. Watching the Cowboys get blown out with your son is a whole other level of awesome that I can’t begin to adequately describe. 
