Another summer, another reason to never go to Brooklyn.
Yes, my friends, the bedbugs are back in the King’s County District Attorney’s Office. Last summer, bedbugs invaded the KCDA’s office — and emails started flying around from concerned employees on the verge of having anxiety attacks.
You’d think that given all the coverage and stress, the city would have spent the winter figuring out some way of protecting public employees that have to work in Brooklyn.
If Mr. Met owned the Mets would things really be any worse?
* Is anybody really surprised that the Wilpons are having trouble finding people to buy a minority stake in the Mets? It’s an awful franchise that is poorly run that plays home games in Queens — why would you want a minority stake in that? Why… why didn’t God make me a Yankee fan? [Dealbreaker]
* How much of a beating do you have to take while being raped before Republican men will let you have control over your own body? [Gawker]
* Dear federal government, we New Yorkers could really use any ideas you have about dealing with bed bugs. [NY1]
Mark Antony
* February is Black History Month and National Condom Month. Great, two things brothers don’t like, snow and condoms. [Ross's Law Marketing Blog]
* Dude, if pimps can’t get advice from authorized counsel, they’re just going to go to the strip clubs. [Instapundit]
* Egyptian politics hasn’t been this interesting since Mark Antony got his ass kicked. [Huffington Post]
* Is a prospective employer making you take a personality test as part of the job application process? Vivia Chen has some tips for “passing.” [The Careerist]
Yesterday we received this horrified email from a law student at Seton Hall: “Have recently been informed that NYLS has bedbugs. EWWW!”
When you’re the object of scorn emanating from Newark, you know you’ve got problems. [FN1]
But the news appears to be true. Yesterday the New York Law School community was notified of a possible bedbug issue, by email (reprinted after the jump).
The good news: it doesn’t seem like a major infestation (at least not yet). According to the NYLS memo, “A single bed bug was recently spotted in the entry area of the C building.”
What brought this lonely little bedbug to NYLS? Here are some theories….
The lawyers have your back, you cute little bed bug sniffing dog.
Now this is what I’m talking about. These bedbugs think they’re so powerful. They think they’ve got us by the balls. They think they can just come into this city and take things over.
Well, in the words of Dr. Peter Venkman, “Nobody steps on [rich tourists sleeping at the Waldorf] in my town!” Light ‘em up, boys. It’s time these critters learned how we do things downtown.
And for this problem we’re going to unleash one of our most powerful weapons: an ARMY of landlord-tenant lawyers, who are ridiculously skillful. These guys are not to be messed with. Have you ever tried to evict someone in New York City? I bet it didn’t work out for you. Landlord-tenant lawyers in this city are what trained pit bulls want to be when they grow up.
The lawyers will stop these damned bedbugs. They’ll make it so damn expensive for landlords who don’t correct the problem that your super will personally eat all of the critters in the building if that’s the only way to make them go away….
Snoopy works from home instead of going to the MetLife Building.
This morning we reported on bedbugs at Winston & Strawn’s New York office. Alas, the problem might be much larger than we initially anticipated.
That’s because Winston & Strawn is located in the iconic MetLife building, at 200 Park Avenue in Manhattan. After this morning’s post went up, a spokesperson from Winston told us that all inquires about the bed bugs were being referred to the building’s landlord, real estate giant Tishman Speyer.
Are bedbugs crawling around the whole MetLife building? We don’t know yet; Tishman Speyer hasn’t returned our phone calls.
But if bed bugs are a threat to all the tenants of the MetLife building, there are three other law firms that could be getting very itchy…
Here in New York, we’re not worried about hurricanes, we’re not worried about terrorists, we’re not worried about whether or not Derek Jeter “cheated” to get on base. We are worried about one thing: bedbugs.
Bed bugs are everywhere. Lat has this theory that we’ve reached bedbug epidemic stage and that everybody eventually will have them at same point. I’m retraining my Lhasa Apso to be a bed bug sniffing dog in hopes of making a little extra money. The threat of coming into contact with somebody who has been in contact with somebody who knows somebody who had bed bugs is real.
So you can imagine the horror felt by associates in the New York office of Winston & Strawn, when they received an early morning, pre-recorded phone message from the firm…
I recently wondered, on Twitter, whether it’s only a matter of time before everyone in Manhattan has bed bugs. Bedbugs are like death and taxes: they will get you eventually, and the only question is when.
For lawyers and staff in the legendary Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, the answer may be: soon. An employee in the office informs us that a bedbug-sniffing canine was brought into the 80 Centre Street building this afternoon — and that the dog alerted to the presence of bedbugs in multiple locations. Furthermore, rumor has it that (1) the powers-that-be in the office have known about bedbugs at 80 Centre Street for at least a week, and (2) the main building, at One Hogan Place, has had bedbugs for even longer.
(Right now Robert Morgenthau is probably thinking to himself, “Thank God I left that dump for Wachtell.” Morgenthau’s sucessor as DA, Cyrus Vance Jr., is probably scratching himself.)
“Several offices apparently came back positive for bed bugs,” said our source. “But, bizarrely, they are only going to fumigate those specific offices — not the entire building, like they should.”
A couple of weeks ago, we reported on a bit of a bedbug breakout in the Brooklyn D.A.’s office. We thought it was kind of funny, but people who work in that office are not laughing. Instead, emails have been flying around the office — and one message in particular is both informative and hysterical. It’s just hard to decide if it’s hysterical (haha) or hysterical (dogs and cats living together).
The emails are coming from someone who calls himself or herself “Not Taking Bed Bugs” (“NTBB”). This individual is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. NTBB is trying to incite some collective action from the employees in the Kings County District Attorney’s Office:
Please photograph every bed bug bite you get. Keep records of where in the office you were when you noticed it. Always inform [Lady Scapegoat] via email – exactly how many bites. She needs your help. She needs to know. They need a “paper trail” to document the progress.
Keep your own record of bed bug sighting and always inform [Lady Scapegoat] via email immediately exactly where and when. She needs your help. She needs to know. They need a “paper trail” to document the progress.
IF YOU ARE ANXIOUS FROM BED BUGS, PLEASE CALL IN SICK. ANXIETY IS A DISEASE WITH A MEDICAL DIAGNOSIS.
Over the weekend, we linked to the Gothamist story about the bed bug problem plaguing the Kings County D.A.’s office. The bed bug epidemic is sweeping New York. Yes, California, have your laughs. Just know that in New York we slough off bed begs; in California, the Earth itself will scratch you off into the ocean.
Still, your Manhattan-based Above the Law editorial team is well-protected from the brunt of this plague, as the New York Daily News reports:
Ten percent of respondents in Queens, Staten Island and Brooklyn reported bedbugs at work, as did 8% of Bronx residents, but just 3% of Manhattanites were afflicted.
And I bet those 3% of Manhattanites are the ones who fall for the occasional “come to my [party / wedding / wake] in Brooklyn, it’s not that far” email. Idiots. If God wanted us to cross rivers and risk the savages of the outer boroughs, he would have provided more helicopter pads.
Oh we kid, Kings County, ’cause living in Brooklyn is like living in Manhattan, only not nearly as cool. And because when the Kings County D.A.’s Office has a bed bug problem, they send out some hilarious emails.
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.
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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Another summer, another reason to never go to Brooklyn. 
