We know how you love blind items. And we know how you enjoy potty humor. So let’s mash up these two categories, to generate a Biglaw bathroom blind item.
If you dislike frivolous fare or if you have delicate sensibilities, please stop reading here. Otherwise, you may proceed….
Hands off the dancers, sir.
Our latest Biglaw blind item concerns the sighting of a partner at a strip club.
Right now you’re probably thinking: yawn. A law firm partner at a strip club? As they say, it happens every day (or night — and often gets billed to “business development”).
But there are a few more details that make this item noteworthy….
Continue reading “Biglaw Blind Item: A Partner Walks Into a Strip Club….”
Our latest blind item has to do with the extracurricular activities of a prominent law professor….
'But I'm too pretty to go to jail.'
* The AT&T/T-Mobile antitrust suit is so big that not even Big Government law can handle it. The DOJ is bringing in even bigger guns with a partner from Biglaw firm Munger Tolles. [Bloomberg]
* Obama has nominated former Kozinski clerk, Paul Watford, to the Ninth Circuit. Way to go, because he’s kind of cute. Isn’t that what everyone looks for in a federal judge? [San Francisco Chronicle]
* Is Paul Ceglia’s Facebook lawsuit completely doomed? His own lawyer, Jeffrey Lake, wants to defriend him. This will be the fourth firm to dump Ceglia as a client. [Wall Street Journal]
* Blind item: which Hollywood actress is suing IMDb for $1M for revealing her true age? And we say “true age” because everyone knows that Botox knocks a few years off your face. [Reuters]
* Lindsay Lohan is due in court today for a progress report hearing, and prosecutors want to throw her in jail. Hope she’s been brushing up on her acting skills. [New York Daily News]
* Cry me a river? A Florida lawyer will be arguing before the state Supreme Court this winter over his First Amendment right to blast Justin Timberlake from his car stereo. [NBC Miami]
In an event I did a few years ago at the University of Chicago with Judge Richard Posner (check out the podcast here), Judge Posner tossed out a delicious little blind item. He mentioned a federal judge in Chicago who would fire law clerks for what she viewed as a very grave offense: splitting infinitives in written work product.
But is splitting infinitives really such a crime?
Continue reading “Grammer Pole of the Weak: Split Infinitives”
Now that Labor Day is behind us, fall is fast approaching. You can tell by the chill in the evening air.
Or is that just the cold offers we’re feeling? Last month, we asked you for stories about firms giving out cold offers to summer associates. As we explained, a “cold offer” or “fake offer” is, in the words of NALP, an employment offer made “with the understanding that the offer will not be accepted.”
This “offer,” made with a wink and a nudge, allows the employing law firm to report (and boast about) a 100 percent offer rate, when in reality it isn’t welcoming back 100 percent of its summer associates. It also has an advantage for the recipient: when she goes through 3L recruiting, she can truthfully say, “Yes, I received an offer from the firm where I summered.”
We recently heard a story about a pretty cold offer (not from summer 2011, but from not too long ago summer 2010). This summer associate, who wasn’t the most popular person in her class, received a full-time employment offer “contingent upon obtaining a federal clerkship.” Given how hard it is to land a federal judicial clerkship, that’s a pretty cold offer — especially considering that the student in question, now graduated, didn’t go to a law school known for cranking out lots of clerks.
But wait, it gets better….
With the news of 100 percent offer rates trickling in slowly but surely from many Biglaw firms, we thought that students from top-tier law schools were looking good in terms of their job prospects. Sure, summer classes were smaller this year — but offer rates at or near 100 percent are still nothing to scoff at.
Recall the dark days of summer 2009, when no-offers and cold offers were doled out in abundance. When it comes to the legal job market, maybe it does get better (as long as we don’t sink into a double-dip recession).
Could the legal economy be returning to normal? Could the dark days of indentured servitude for recent law school graduates be coming to an end?
Not so fast….
Continue reading “Top-Tier Law School Blind Item: An Associate Position, At No Cost to You!”
Do you know why people go to law school? For most people, it’s not because they “love the law” or because they want to be part of the system of justice. It’s because they want to make money. Lots and lots of dirty, sexy money.
Granted, there are easier ways to make money in this world. You could work on your jumpshot. You could do… whatever it is they do in business school, between pub crawls masquerading as “networking events.” You could choose your parents wisely.
But still, if everything works out — and I mean everything — you might make an obscene amount of money in Biglaw. So much money that you can send around messages like this to your fellow attorneys….
Continue reading “Biglaw Blind Item: In Biglaw You Deal With Big Money”
We’ve already shown you what it looks like when an associate gets laid off from a law firm. It’s not pretty.
What does it look like when a law firm fires — or tries to fire — a partner?
Well, that is even uglier….
Continue reading “Biglaw Blind Item: What Does It Look Like When A Partner Gets Fired?”
A prominent partner left his white-shoe law firm some time ago, purportedly for falsifying expenses. A juicy detail that is less widely known: some of the fake expenses were for what might be described as improper forms of entertainment.
(This blind item — relating to someone who left his firm prior to 2010 — has nothing to do with Ted Freedman, the former Kirkland & Ellis senior partner whose recent departure we covered last month. Please note the update we’ve appended near the end of our earlier post, quoting a source stating that Freedman simply retired.)
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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.
Also, we have the two below in-house openings:
Keep reading »
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?
Keep reading »
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