Once again, we’re wading into the shallow waters of celebrity careers gone awry. Sometimes actors of the B-list variety just want to do something more with their lives — aside from nurse a stint in acting that’s on its last legs. And, just like everyone else who’s unsure of what that “something more” really is, law school beckons with its promises of fame and fortune.
Jerry O’Connell did it most recently, and many others took the plunge before him (apparently careers in the law work well for the child stars of yesteryear). But who’s the latest victim of the celebrity law school trap?
It’s someone who doesn’t want to wait for her life to be over before accomplishing something with it….
Yes, we know: no one cares about the Kardashians — any of them (except for when they’re spreading their legs on sex tapes). But we’ve got to start caring when we find out that this reality TV character isn’t attending the law school that he claimed he would be.
Let’s take a look at what Kardashian’s purported law school had to say about this hot mess….
Here at Above the Law, we’ve written several times about “celebrity” law students. From Lindsay Lohan’s former Mean Girls colleague to a beauty queen from Texas, we’ve seen just about every species of luminary law student. But we’ve not yet had the pleasure of dealing with law students from the most “famous” family of all — the Kardashians.
That’s right, a member of the Kardashian klan is planning to attend law school this fall. Before this family made its claim to reality TV fame for having a slutty celebutante daughter, the late Robert Kardashian was actually famous for being a lawyer. He was a member of O.J. Simpson’s murder defense team, alongside Johnnie Cochran, F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz, Barry Scheck, and Robert Shapiro, in what was once referred to as the “trial of the century.”
But which of Kardashian’s children will be the one to start learning the law? If it’s Khloe, we fear that we’ll have to start writing about stolen lunches again. Perhaps it will be Kourtney, who will fight to institute law school day care centers. Or maybe it’s the sexiest one of them all, Kim, whose 72-day sham marriage may have inspired her to practice family law.
Let’s find out which Kardashian sibling will be attending law school this fall, and where….
Please note the multiple UPDATES added after the jump. The school in question denies that a Kardashian is coming its way….
When it comes to the protagonists of 2011′s biggest legal stories, our readers want to know: Where are they now? Last week, for example, we brought you an update on Casey Anthony, which generated keen interest (and traffic).
Johnathan Perkins was the then-3L at UVA Law who confessed to fabricating a tale of racial harassment by university police. As a result of his dishonesty, did he have to go before UVA’s famously strict Honor Committee? Did he end up getting his law degree? There was some ambiguity over whether he would graduate.
We have an update, based on a statement from the dean of the law school….
* What kind of a lawyer can’t spot a Nigerian scammer before being bilked out of millions? If you fell for that, please hit me up. I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. [Washington Post]
* The Game may face charges over an alleged tweet that prevented police from responding to five emergency calls in two hours. Only five? I guess that’s what happens when you’re straight outta Compton, where snitches get stitches. [CNN]
* With Senator Kevin de León hoping to regulate the use of fitted and flat hotel sheets, one thing’s for sure. California isn’t becoming a nanny state. It’s becoming a maid state. [Los Angeles Times]
* You know Chris Stewart has had one too many concussions when he’s still talking about finishing law school after his NFL career is over. [Wall Street Journal]
* I might be a bad little Jew for saying this, but matzoh isn’t worth $9.9B. It’s like eating cardboard. If you want special prison food, at least sue for something that tastes good. [New York Daily News]
Today we bring you a new installment in our popular series on celebrity summer associates. The stories in this series have been positive and uplifting — but we should note that we welcome tales of summer associate scandal as well.
With the summer winding down, it’s safe to share salacious tales of SA misbehavior. Please submit them by email, to tips@abovethelaw.com (subject line: “Summer Associate Story”), or by text message. As you know, we keep our tipsters anonymous.
Now, on to today’s celebrity summer associate.
Last week, in a piece for the New York Times’s Room for Debate project, I argued for reforming legal education by bringing back apprentices in law. But I was not optimistic about that change happening anytime soon.
Well, it seems that my call for apprentices has been heard. A former star of Donald Trump’s popular reality television show, The Apprentice, is now “apprenticing” at a major law firm, as a summer associate.
Who is this ex-Apprentice, and where is this person working?
When a law student is described as a “rock star,” this usually means she has a high-ranking position on law review and is going to clerk for the D.C. Circuit. The closest most lawyers get to rock stardom is playing Rock Band (a favorite pastime of Elie and Kash; I can’t quite get the hang of it).
Well, what if we told you that a real international pop star is in law school now? And that she’s currently summering at a well-regarded boutique law firm in Chicago?
Recruiting athletes isn’t just for sports coaches. Many law firm hiring partners like to acquire athletes as well. The thinking is that successful athletes possess many of the traits sought in talented attorneys.
Athletes are disciplined, hardworking, and mentally tough. They are focused and strategic thinkers. If they play a team sport, then they probably excel at teamwork too.
So it shouldn’t come as a shock that Williams & Connolly, a firm full of fearsome litigators who love to win, has a great athlete among its 2011 summer associate class. This individual, who has traveled around the world playing his sport, is our latest celebrity summer associate. (We’ve previously profiled actor Wai Choy, a former co-star of Lindsay Lohan, and Phil Alito, son of Sam.)
Who is this star athlete turned Williams & Connolly summer associate, and what sport does he play?
Foreign LLM students are often like Rodney Dangerfield: they don’t get no respect. American-born JD candidates make fun of LLMs: their awkwardness, their accents, their ignorance of U.S. customs, and their repeated references to life and law in their home countries (“Back on Mypos, we don’t have contributory negligence….”).
Well, next time you want to make fun of an LLM student, check yourself. That LLM student might be the future president of his country — like Mikheil Saakashvili, the Georgian president who earned an LLM at Columbia Law School.
Or, better yet, that LLM student might be the most beautiful woman out of 600,000,000. The nation of India has a population of around 1.2 billion — and a former LLM student at NYU Law School was just crowned Miss India, making her that country’s #1 specimen of womanhood. Eat your heart out, Reema Bajaj.
The new Miss India’s name is Vasuki Sunkavalli. Let’s check her out, shall we?
Now that she has been acquitted of murder and manslaughter charges arising out of the death of her daughter, Caylee Anthony, where will Casey Anthony go next? Given her notoriety, it’s a tough question.
One possible answer: law school. As Ann Finnell, one of Casey Anthony’s lawyers, told People magazine, “She’s been exposed to the criminal justice system, and I think that might be a pursuit of hers.”
So should Casey Anthony go to law school? Many observers, including some of my colleagues here at Above the Law, say that going to law school isn’t a good idea for most people.
But Casey Anthony is no ordinary law student. She is an extraordinary young woman and who has had some extraordinary experiences. Conventional wisdom does not apply to her.
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.
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?
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