Despite his status as an Article III demigod, Chief Justice John Roberts is a man of the people. Instead of reclining on a divan while eating frozen grapes fed to him by eunuch law clerks, which is how I’d roll if I were the Chief Justice of the United States, JGR patronizes places like Cosi, Au Bon Pain, and Carmine’s.
And the chief even goes to Starbucks — where His Honor recently revealed something surprising about himself….
Continue reading “Chief Justice John Roberts: Just Like Us!”
* Man busted for drunk driving in a toy car. I hope it’s still legal for me to get wasted and operate my remote control Grave Digger, or else my Saturday night is screwed! [Legal Juice]
* This is a good question: where does the Biglaw coffee come from? I’d also ask the question, “why does it always taste like s**t?” and “how come they serve it to you in thimbles?” Bottom line, back in the day, when secretaries or interns used to make the coffee, you could get coffee just the way you like it, not some generic crap from whatever minimum wage worker handles the machine in the firm cafeteria. [Law and More]
* What nannies need to know about Workers’ Compensation. OR: What expectant fathers wish nannies didn’t know about workers’ comp. [National Nannies]
* Gene patents may truly be capitalism at its worst. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Here’s some more love for Mark Herrmann’s book. Man, I gotta get me one of those. [She Negotiates / Forbes]
* Seriously, good luck this weekend, those of you studying for the bar. [Vault Law]
Roger Clemens
Coffee is a critical tool of the American justice system.
– Daniel C. Richman, a professor at Columbia Law School, commenting on the need for jurors to have access to caffeine during trials. This topic arose after recent happenings in the Roger Clemens trial.
(What happened during Roger Clemens’s trial that would elicit such a response? Find out, after the jump.)
Law students, we know that finals time is rough, because we’ve all been there. Sometimes getting together with a study group is a great way to take the edge off (not to mention a great way to “suceed” with friends). Amid the excitement of the fall 2011 bonus season, these kids are buckling down and studying their tails off, in the hopes of some day getting a dime of what Biglaw associates are currently complaining about.
And like good little scouts, these law students are prepared. Okay, maybe some of them are a little bit too prepared. When your classmates email us to let us know that they hate studying at the law school because of you, maybe you need to give it a rest….
Continue reading “Finals Give Students the Chance to Occupy Their Law Schools”
As any law student can tell you, pulling an all-nighter sucks. Biglaw associates, however, have to pull all-nighters quite frequently — and sometimes they’ll have to get by with very little sleep, for multiple nights in a row. As one of our Above the Law editors mentioned to me, a Biglaw all-nighter “is nothing like any other kind of all-nighter [he's] ever experienced.”
So what happens when you’re on your eighth caffeinated beverage of the night and you’re still yawning? You can literally feel the small amount of blood left in your coffee stream getting ready to stage a strike if you don’t catch a few Z’s. As a young lawyer, would you even consider going to sleep? And would your firm approve?
Hell no. Don’t even think about it. You can sleep when you’re dead. But for now, you get a futuristic-looking pod to take a nap in….
There’s nothing quite like a good old-fashioned Christmas meltdown — and apparently there was an epic one at San Francisco International Airport on Christmas Eve.
Angela West, a Harvard Law School graduate and former Los Angeles prosecutor, allegedly went to town on a Peet’s Coffee kiosk. With a three-foot metal pole.
Tsk tsk, Ms. West. At HLS you’re expected to smash things with a finely crafted cane or perhaps a tasteful umbrella. A metal pole is unbecoming of your pedigree…
Continue reading “Lawyer of the Day: Ex-Prosecutor Maybe Had A Little Too Much Peet’s Coffee”
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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.
Keep reading »
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.
Keep reading »
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