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.
* Meanwhile, Lilo isn’t accepting her plea deal. No ma’am. Not for all the Texas booger sugar in the world. Well, maybe for all the Texas booger sugar. But that wasn’t really offered. [New York Post]
* The Wisconsin Senate passed sweeping curbs on collective bargaining yesterday. The protesters are still howling, but I wonder how loud they’ll be when Pinkertons shove batons in their faces. That’s not actually happening. I just have a fairly violent and anachronistic imagination. [Reuters]
* House Republicans have gone meta in promising a defense of the Defense of Marriage Act. [Los Angeles Times]
* State Senator Carl Kruger, of Brooklyn, will turn himself in on corruption charges today. Big up to Crooklyn. [New York Times]
* Coach Sweater Vest’s hilarious understanding of attorney-client privilege is hilarious. [The Lantern]
* Profits per partner at Kirkland & Ellis topped $3 million in 2010, and the firm boosted its revenue even though it shed some lawyers. I Can Has Spring Bonus? [Am Law Daily]
Being a federal prosecutor is a great legal job, but it has its downsides. One of them, at least for me, was the anonymity. In your work as an assistant U.S. attorney, it’s not about you; it’s about the merits of the cases, and seeing that justice is done. That’s public-spirited and all, but it’s not very fabulous (at least not to a shameless attention-seeker like myself).
Given the relative anonymity of being an AUSA, it’s not normal for the New York Post to cover the hiring of any single one. But Tali Farhadian, who’s joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York (Brooklyn), isn’t your normal AUSA.
How many federal prosecutors are as brilliant, as beautiful, and as filthy rich as Farhadian? And how many are as controversial?
Let’s learn why this lush Persian beauty is so celebrated in some quarters, and so loathed in others. And see some photos, too…
How hungry was the first guy who figured out this thing was food?
* I suppose stealing lobsters from Africa for export back to the U.S. is better than the alternative. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Adderall ring busted in Brooklyn! Don’t worry guys, looks like med students and doctors were the main miscreants (but a Tennessee lawyer is suspected of being a supplier). [Gothamist]
* Blind law students can get tech help when taking the bar exam. The thought of Lady Justice actually having anything to do with the bar exam is very exciting. [How Appealing]
* The myths about having a country law practice. Apparently your clients pay you in legal tender now, instead of offering you produce and daughters for competent representation. [Lawyerist]
* A Round Tuit makes his return after a month off. There are a lot of DUI stories, which gives me an idea of what he’s been doing during his break. [Infamy or Praise]
* David Kelley and Robert Morvillo, former adversaries from the Martha Stewart case, meet again — this time to serve together on an NYPD commission. [NYC.gov]
The library at Brooklyn Law School is fast becoming the most sexual law library in America. Last week, the class of 2010 dedicated a plaque inside the library warning students, “It’s supposed to be hard.” This week, we’ve learned that the law library also plays host to some hard bodies.
Apparently, Brooklyn Law allowed models from Diesel Jeans to use its law library for a photoshoot. The jeans didn’t stay on for long. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the law library for the 67th best law school in America….
WARNING: The pictures after the jump should be safe for work — there’s no nudity — but they are mildly risqué. Read on at your own risk.
It’s a bad news day in Brooklyn. This morning, the class of 2010 made Brooklyn Law look foolish. Now we’ve received reports that the Brooklyn DA’s Office has laid off 13 attorneys and two staffers in the past week.
It’s big news, especially for law students and private practice attorneys who think that working for the government gives you unchallenged job security. Government lawyers might be somewhat buffered from the tyranny of the legal market economy, but they can still be shown the door.
And word coming out of Charles Hynes’s office is that these 15 people were let go for poor performance…
This is a urinal. And It seems far too many of you don't know how or when to use it.
Welcome to Above the Law’s remedial skills class for current and aspiring attorneys. Here, we will trying to help people who were so busy studying in law school or servicing clients that they missed some crucial life lessons along the way.
Today we’ve got a special lesson for all of you who were raised in a barn or otherwise don’t understand how to use a bathroom.
We have two case studies, one from the Bronx and the other from the University of Arizona Law School. The cases show us lawyers who either don’t know how to recognize or how to utilize a public bathroom. It’s a dirty business teaching lawyers how to pee properly, but somebody has to step in when the parents (and common sense) fail.
Our first case comes from Bronx, New York, home to countless attorneys — including some who apparently don’t know what a bathroom looks like…
The Democratic primary for the new New York Attorney General is on Tuesday. Earlier this week, I broke down the candidates and liveblogged the debate between the five Democratics that want to follow in the footsteps of Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo.
I wasn’t particularly impressed with the frontrunner, Nassau County DA Kathleen Rice. But I’ve got nothing on retired Brooklyn criminal judge, Amy Herz Juviler. Judge Juviler is definitely not going to vote for Rice. And she doesn’t want her friends to vote for her either. Freed from the bench, she’s been emailing her friends encouraging them to avoid Rice like the plague.
In the email, Judge Juviler gets right to the point:
Friends —
In considering who to vote for in the Democratic Primary, eliminate from your consideration Kathleen Rice.
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.
Last Friday, we named Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney Ama Dwimoh our Lawyer of the Day. As a prosecutor, Dwimoh goes after child abusers. And yet, according to the New York Daily News — irony alert! — she herself abuses the kiddies, i.e., legal interns in her office.
One reader with firsthand knowledge protested this portrayal of the Brooklyn DA’s office and its treatment of interns:
I’m [a law student] intern at the KCDAO [Kings County District Attorney's Office], and from everything I’ve heard from all of my intern colleagues, the senior ADA’s have been nothing less than amazing — they find us work to do, always treat us with respect, always make us feel appreciated, and the office is gloriously drama-free.
This tipster has a theory about what’s going on here….
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Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
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. 
