This is depressing.
Authorities suspect that a family law attorney practicing in suburban Denver was murdered, and her body was found by cleaning staff in her office building.
The police are offering a reward….
Continue reading “Lawyer Killed In Office, Found By Cleaning Crew”
In today’s age of gun violence at schools, anything and everything can be construed as a precursor to the next classroom shooting. Wearing a trench coat? You might be hiding a gun under there. Got a crazy look in your eye? You might be plotting a mass murder. Eating an ice-cream cone? Oh my God, drop the weapon!
But if you think that you can get away with eating an ice-cream cone and wearing a trench coat with a crazy look in your eye in a law school classroom, you’ve got another thing coming — especially if you allegedly proceed to flip tables, leap over desks, and run up and down the aisles like a wild man while blathering incoherently.
And, perhaps most fittingly, this happened during a torts class….
Continue reading “Man Armed With Ice-Cream Cone ‘Terrifies’ Law Students During Torts Class”
It’s not every day you encounter an alleged jewel thief. It sounds like such a classy crime — like Pierce Brosnan and George Clooney should be charismatically staking out Buckingham Palace.
It doesn’t sound like a crime a would-be law student in Texas should be charged with. In fact, it doesn’t sound like you should be going to law school after you’ve been charged with pawning stolen jewelery.
But when you are dealing with a law school whose admissions committee once accidentally released the names, grades, and LSAT scores of the entire entering class, maybe it’s not surprising that this alleged huckster slipped through the cracks….
Killing your mother is unnatural. Personally, I think trying to ascribe a “motive” or a “reason” somebody would do such a thing is a little bit futile.
But the cops are saying that a recent Villanova Law graduate, struggling as a contract attorney, shot his mother over Christmas. Then, he killed himself.
“We’ll never know his motive,” said Marion County Sheriff’s Capt. Robert Sandlin. “What is our opinion? Financial. He had a lot of student loans that were outstanding.”
The guy’s father also died under suspicious circumstances…
Continue reading “Debt Is Possible Motive In Law Graduate’s Matricide/Suicide”
Kevin Ring in happier times.
Full disclosure: Former Jack Abramoff associate Kevin Ring, whose criminal conviction was recently upheld by the D.C. Circuit, is a friend of mine. We grew up in the same town and have known one another for decades. In no way is what follows unbiased or objective in any sense. That said, I know that I’m right and the case against Kevin Ring was simply, unambiguously wrong. Not to say that there was no ambiguity as to whether he broke a law — there was a tiny bit of that. But under no sane system of justice would Kevin be going to federal prison. Though he almost certainly is, pending a request for en banc rehearing from the D.C. Circuit followed by a Hail Mary filing for a writ of certiorari.
We can all stipulate that Jack Abramoff is one of the sleaziest and most repellent characters to besmirch the legal profession in decades. (My favorite Abramoff moment: the time he tried convince his rabbi to bestow upon him a fake, back-dated “Scholar of Talmudic Studies” award, so he could get in the Cosmos Club.)
Anyway, Abramoff was Kevin’s boss for three and a half years, during the final period of which they were both partners at Greenberg Traurig. In the words of the judge at his sentencing hearing, Kevin was a “cog” in the Abramoff operation, a “second-tier level” administrator of the firm’s lobbying team. I won’t try to spin Kevin’s time as a lobbyist as some honorable endeavor. I couldn’t. Generally speaking, lobbyists are regarded by most of us as only slightly less distasteful than the politicians whose favor they are trying to curry. But that does not make them criminals….
Imagine you’re in a negotiation to buy a used car. You use the Blue Book — the Kelley Blue Book, not the legal Bluebook — to set the starting point on the price. You do your research at home based on the blue book that’s online, which says the starting point for the car you want is $10,000.
Then, when you get to the used car dealer, you find out that they have a new blue book, one that just came out that day. It says that the starting point for the car you want is really $12,000.
You’d probably be annoyed, maybe angry. The whole starting point for your conversation about the price of the car changed.
Yet, the dealer could tell you, and you could still agree with him to pay any amount you’d like for the car. The starting point doesn’t necessarily set the ending point.
This was, basically, the situation the Supreme Court was called in to referee in this morning’s oral argument in Peugh v. United States….
Continue reading “Today at the Supreme Court: Moving The Starting Point”
Justice Joan Orie Melvin
Justice Joan Orie Melvin is a member of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. As touted on the court’s website, it is “the highest court in the Commonwealth and the oldest appellate court in the nation.”
Yesterday the court acquired a more dubious distinction: it’s the latest state supreme court to see one of its members convicted of a serious felony. And yes, we mean “latest,” not “only” or “first.” Just last month, for example, former Michigan Supreme Court Justice Diane Hathaway pleaded guilty to federal bank fraud. Here in New York, Chief Judge Sol Wachtler of the Court of Appeals, our state’s highest court, served a prison sentence back in the early 1990s.
(Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Back in 2004, I opined that “state court judges are icky.” Article III all the way, baby.)
Back to Justice Orie Melvin of Pennsylvania. What could send Her Honor from the high court to the big house?
Continue reading “Judge of the Day: From the Bench to the Big House?”
The facts in today’s Supreme Court opinions read like a bloopers reel of our courts system. What do we do when judges are wrong on the law in a criminal case? What if a plaintiff decides, after losing, that he filed in a state court when the state court didn’t have jurisdiction? What if a lawyer doesn’t tell his client that by pleading guilty he’s going to be deported?
As Yakov Smirnoff would say, “What a country!”
Continue reading “Today at the Supreme Court: Mistakes Were Made”
For most, the irony of the Oscar Pistorius — the double-amputee Olympic runner nicknamed “Blade Runner” — alleged murder of his girlfriend is this now infamous Nike ad:
Yeah, it’s all fun and games until the potential of domestic violence rears its ugly head.
For lawyers, the irony is of Pistorius’s arrest is that he’s a famous client of the now-defunct Dewey & LeBoeuf. That’s a firm that knows a little something about a fall from grace. But in a world where sports icons seem to be competing to become the biggest disappointment, the story of Pistorius and his model/lawyer girlfriend seems to win the race to the bottom…
Continue reading “Dewey Know Why Blade Runner Allegedly Shot His Girlfriend?”
Another busted barrister: Archie Leach (John Cleese).
People can argue about whether or not Indians — of the South Asian variety, not the Native American variety — are or are not “Caucasian.” I take no position on that issue, having been burned before (see the comments to this post).
I will say this, though: in my opinion, South Asians share in common with East Asians the ability to pass for much younger than they really are. (It’s generally a blessing, although not always; in a discussion at the recent Penn APALSA conference, some panelists talked about how looking young can complicate dealing with clients and opposing counsel.)
So how much younger can South Asians claim to be? One India-born lawyer, who graduated from a top 14 law school, finds herself in litigation for allegedly lying about her age — amongst many, many other things.
And the whole thing smells worse than Ghazipur landfill….
Continue reading “Lawyer Busted Barrister of the Day: Liar Liar, Wig on Fire?”
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 »
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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