Having spam emails sent out under your name can happen to anyone. As we’ve previously reported, it has happened to a leading law firm. And to a prominent professor, at a top law school. This led us to wonder: Is “phishing” running rampant throughout the legal community?
Quite possibly. Even being married to justice of the United States Supreme Court will not protect you from the spammers.
It seems that a Supreme spouse may have fallen victim to unsavory characters from the online world….
Everyone has been mistreated — by bureaucratic institutions, unhelpful sales people, or phone systems that make you press ten buttons only to be left on hold for half an hour.
Given how awful the “usual” service is, it’s really not that hard to impress people with the quality of service that you provide. But, remarkably, lawyers (and others) screw this up all the time.
Suppose (to recount an incident I heard about recently) you’re asked to handle a trivial legal issue at a time when you’re swamped with other stuff. You are able to help; you are simply unable to help today. Consider two ways of handling this: First, silently ignore the issue for several days until you have time, and then deal with it. Second, tell the client that you’re currently swamped, but that you’ve received the request and your best guess is that you’ll handle the matter, say, early next week. If you’ve misunderstood, and this is an emergency, the client should let you know, so you can move this task up in the queue.
This should be an easy choice, shouldn’t it?
Grind up some brilliant legal theories, spice liberally with Bluebook-compliant citations, and voilà — law review articles!
Have you ever wondered how the law review sausage factory works? Perhaps you’re a law professor or practitioner who regularly submits pieces to law journals for possible publication. If you are, and if you’d like to know more about how the process works — or, more to the point, what law review editors say about you behind your back — you’ve come to the right place.
Thanks to the wonders of technology, collaborating with far-flung colleagues has never been easier. Here at Above the Law, for example, your four full-time editors — myself, Elie, Staci, and Chris — keep in touch throughout the day using Gchat.
But what if, due to inadequate security, your organization’s internal deliberations were accessible to the public? And, in some cases, even crawled by search engines?
What if you were, say, law students at a highly ranked law school, where you served as editors of a high-profile law review? And what if your, er, candid and colorful comments about the articles pending before you were to become publicly available?
What then? Let’s find out….
Hey girl, did you like being a Biglaw associate? I know you did. But now it's time to make sweet love to a new career.
We’re taking a break from covering the “nothing to see here” capital call from Greenberg Traurig to cover people fleeing Greenberg Traurig.
I’m just kidding. We’ve got a fun departure memo from an associate who happens to be from Greenberg, but I don’t think this woman’s departure has anything to do with the firm’s financial health. Instead, she’s just pursuing new opportunities.
And it looks like she’ll be leaving with fond memories of her time at Greenberg. We know that from her choice of ’90s R&B bands that she used to herald her leaving….
Continue reading “Departure Memo of the Day: Boyz To Traurig”
As baseball fans are well-aware, the San Diego Padres don’t have a very good record. At 15 games below .500 this year, they’re the second-worst team in the National League West, the fourth-worst team in the National League, and the fifth-worst team in all of MLB right now. The Padres have only won the National League Pennant twice, but lost in the World Series both times. They’re the only team in MLB to never record a no-hitter. To be frank, the Padres suck.
Why anyone would want to apply for a job working with the Padres is simply beyond me. Why that same person, a law student at the time, would apply for a job with the Padres at least 30 times puts her in wackadoodle territory. But who am I to judge?
Anyway, eventually people get sick of receiving rejection letter after rejection letter after rejection letter — or in most cases, no rejection letter at all. These days, people don’t even have the courtesy to tell you to go f**k yourself. I’m sure recent law school graduates can commiserate.
But after applying and being summarily rejected for an extremely low-rent job with the Padres, this former law student had absolutely had it. She was mad as hell, and she wasn’t going to take it anymore. The result? Possibly the best email ever sent from a repeatedly rejected job seeker….
Continue reading “Law School Dropout Extends the Padres a Counteroffer to ‘Suck [Her] Dick’”
The case had been tried (to a judge, in a country outside the United States) in 2008.
The potential exposure was, let’s say, material.
One can’t exactly wait with bated breath for four years, but one can be keenly interested in a judge’s decision.
So one can be slightly disappointed when the “re” line of an email from outside counsel reads (in its entirety): “Statement of Decision in BigCo v. YourCo.”
Did we win? No news yet.
Surely the news is just a click away.
But one could be a tad frustrated to read the contents of the email message that followed . . .
The title of today’s column comes from an e-mail I recently saw. The e-mail read, in its entirety: “Thanks for providing a copy of the statute. Do you have any advice?”
That cracked me up. (I crack up easily.) Doesn’t this e-mail exemplify a recurring problem among lawyers asked for advice? Someone asks a question; the lawyer locates the relevant statute; and the lawyer then sends along the text of the statute as though that answers the question. The lawyer may have provided information, but he almost surely did not actually help the client (which was probably the goal).
I’m not sure whether it’s laziness, cowardice, or incompetence, but something causes many lawyers routinely to transmit information without supplying legal advice.
Here’s another example (which also cracks me up):
Continue reading “Inside Straight: Thanks For The Statute; Do You Have Any Advice?”
Brett McGurk
Let me begin by making one thing clear: I support the nomination of Brett H. McGurk to serve as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Republic of Iraq. He is eminently qualified for this post, in light of his extensive experience, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, dealing with the complex and sensitive issues that exist between the United States and Iraq.
Brett McGurk’s brilliance lies beyond dispute — he’s a member of the Elect, after all — and the same is true of his heroism and commitment to public service. In the late 1990s, while he was a summer associate at Cravath, he and a fellow summer rescued two drowning women during a beach outing gone awry. After graduating from Columbia Law School, he devoted his legal career to government service — clerking for Judge Dennis Jacobs (2d Cir.) and the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, working as a legal advisor to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, serving on the National Security Council, and counseling two past ambassadors to Iraq, Ryan Crocker and Christopher Hill. McGurk possesses vast expertise about Iraq, acquired through the many years he has spent advancing U.S. interests in the region — at considerable personal risk to himself.
If you are a high-minded individual, you can stop reading here. If you are less high-minded, keep reading to learn about the sexy email messages that Brett McGurk allegedly exchanged with a prominent (and attractive) journalist….
Please note the UPDATES added at the end of this post.
Continue reading “An Ambassadorial Nominee and Ex-SCOTUS Clerk’s Racy Emails”
We’ve written time and again about the dangers of using the reply-all email function, but it seems that those in Biglaw just can’t take the hint. It’s how allegedly lecherous Quinn Emanuel partners get outed. It’s how apparently discontent MoFo partners share their feelings about the firm. It’s how Skadden partners make their evaluations of associates less than confidential.
And now, it’s how senior associates at Clifford Chance implore their colleagues to stop furiously masturbating to them….
It has been quite a while since we have covered a grand mal discovery screw-up here at Above the Law. For a while, we almost started to believe the legal industry as a whole had finally caught up to technology — or at least had figured out how to keep major mistakes under the radar.
Well, our dry spell has ended. As we mentioned yesterday in Non-Sequiturs, the California office of a Biglaw firm handling some high-profile litigation for Goldman Sachs accidentally released an unredacted version of some files that the firm and its clients have spent years trying to keep secret.
Oopsies…
Keep reading to learn more about the case and see which firm reportedly disseminated evidence of the bank’s “naked” short selling…
A college graduate without student loan debt is akin to reading a kind quote about Kim Kardashian in a tabloid—it’s rare.
In the past eight years, student loan debt has nearly tripled to a whopping $1.1 trillion, and in the past 10 years, the percentage of 25-year-olds with such debt has risen from 25% to 43%
It’s gotten so bad, in fact, that New York Fed economists warned last month that the burden of student debt could stilt consumer spending by twentysomethings, as well as further hamper the recovery of the housing market and economy.
To get a better idea of what massive student loan debt (we’re talking over $100,000 massive) looks like, we talked to an attorney who graduated with a large student loan debt. We also consulted LearnVest Planning Services CFP® Katie Brewer to see just how their repayment plans stack up.
S. Fischer, 36, Attorney
Graduated: 2001
How Much I Borrowed: $100,000
What I Still Owe: $45,000
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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 »
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