Too funny. So it seems that a certain unnamed (very) recent Heisman Trophy winner from a certain unnamed “college” down south of here got a gift from the Ennis P.D. while he was speeding on the 287 bypass yesterday. It appears that even though the OU defense couldn’t stop him, the City of Ennis P.D. is a different story altogether. Time to grow up/slow down young ‘un. You got your whole life/career ahead of you. Gig Em indeed.
I meant to say “allegedly” speeding, my bad.
– Judge Lee Johnson of the Ennis Municipal Court (Texas), commenting on Facebook about Johnny Manziel’s recent brush with the law on the judge’s home turf. Some legal experts believe Johnson’s behavior was unethical.
I’m trying to figure out whether Lance Armstrong is relieved that Manti Te’o upstaged him this week. On one hand, all of the mean, finger-wagging columns on Lance’s lying, like this typically flatulent effort by Rick Reilly, have been pushed to the second page of the Internet by Te’o's (I’m not entirely sure I’m using the apostrophe correctly here) fake dead girlfriend. Although the internet defies all attempts to ascribe a finite supply of oxygen to any news story, there is a finite amount of attention that can be paid. And even though every news organization has dutifully assigned a writer (or moron) to cover the Lance debacle, no one much cares about it anymore. What happens to a scandal deferred? Does it dry up, like a craisin in this pun?
I think the overshadowing of the Lance Armstrong saga probably doesn’t help Armstrong at all. The vast majority of people who will have opinions about him have already formed them and those who may be swayed by a teary confession in front of Oprah now may not even be paying attention. But that’s all public opinion, which is the least of Lance’s worries at this point. And yet, public opinion is almost exclusively Manti Te’o's (seriously, these apostrophes are bothering me) worry at this point. Almost.
* “The bottom line is … I’m the 800-pound-gorilla that you want to settle with.” By the way, if you weren’t sure, Howrey’s trustee Allan Diamond wasn’t kidding about suing the firm’s former partners. “Either we’re going to cut deals, or I’m suing you.” [Am Law Daily]
* It takes two to do the partnership tango: in the expansion of its Financial Institutions Group, Goodwin Procter picked up Brynn Peltz, an attorney with more than 20 years’ experience, and an ex-partner at Latham and Clifford Chance. [Fort Mill Times]
* Hello, predictive coding! Goodbye, jobs! Not only can computers do the work of lawyers on the cheap, but they can do it more intelligently, too. Get ready to welcome our new digital overlords. [WSJ Law Blog (sub. req.)]
* Another day, another op-ed article about the law school crisis in the pages of the New York Times. But at least this one is about something most can support: changing the third year of law school. [New York Times]
* As it turns out, with 82 applications for the program’s first five spots, there’s actually a demand for Yale Law’s Ph.D. in Law. So much for this being “[t]he worst idea in the history of legal education.” [National Law Journal]
* Linebacker Jonathan Vilma’s defamation suit against NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell in connection with Bountygate was dismissed. Wonder when Goodell will suspend Vilma for thinking he could win. [Bloomberg]
* Francis Lorson, former chief deputy clerk of the Supreme Court, RIP. [Blog of Legal Times]
* Should a widow be able to extract sperm from the body of her husband, who recently committed suicide, so she can have a child with him? Some thoughts from Professor Glenn Cohen of Harvard Law. [Bill of Health]
* Speaking of suicide, controversy over the prosecution of the late Aaron Swartz rages on. [How Appealing and Instapundit]
* Professor Ann Althouse isn’t a fan of the “if we can save one life” argument for gun control. [Althouse]
* I don’t know anything about football, but even I chuckled at this. [Life in Biglaw]
* “Almost anything associated with him is necessarily of concern.” Thanks to the D.C. Circuit, Osama bin Laden’s death photos may never see the light of day, no matter how many FOIA requests you file. Sorry, you’ll have to settle for the Oscar-nominated film Zero Dark Thirty. [McClatchy Newspapers]
* Some would argue that the opinions written by Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit are like Lex Luthor’s ring in that they keep the heirs of Superman’s co-creator at bay like kryptonite. [WSJ Law Blog (sub. req.)]
* Ay dios mio, al parecer esta es una gran noticia para la escuela! Yale Law has hired Cristina Rodríguez, an expert in immigration law, as its first Hispanic professor in a tenured position. [National Law Journal]
* Prosecutors established probable cause in the Aurora movie theater shooting case and James Holmes has been ordered to stand trial, but his lawyers aren’t ready to enter his likely NGRI plea yet. [Bloomberg]
* Everyone saw this coming, but that doesn’t mean they have to be any less disgusted by it: Jerry Sandusky filed a motion to get a new trial just three months after being sentenced for his sex abuse conviction. [CNN]
With the Notre Dame Fighting Irish’s attempt to win their first national championship in a quarter of a century, and at the same time, their attempt to end the Southeastern Conference’s years of dominance of the BCS, I am hoping that this return to glory by a once storied franchise will be accompanied by a return to glory for the storied legal profession.
When I was growing up, most thought of lawyers as highly educated, intelligent, and self-motivated (even to a fault) professionals. Many considered lawyers to be part of the upper echelon of society, and most people also believed that simply being a lawyer would result in a huge, guaranteed payday. And for most of college football history, the Fighting Irish received similarly high praise.
In recent years, however, both the legal profession and the Irish have been held up to strong criticism, and were unable to enjoy the same success people became accustomed to. Even while I was still in law school at my TTT, respected attorneys told me not to worry about the school I was attending, because by the time that I got to my second or third job, no one would care anymore. The little detail that everyone left out was just how much it would matter for that first job — because it’s rough to get to the second or third job when you can’t even find your first, no matter how hard you try.
Going along with the Fighting Irish’s return to the top, here’s a look at a few other things that were once closely associated with the legal profession that are no longer true, but would be welcomed back with open arms….
I have careers I want to do after football. Eventually, I want to go to law school. That’s kind of down the road. I don’t actually want to study law. I want to train my mind in law school because I believe that is the most disciplining and cognitive power you can have is law school. I just want to have that training under my belt.
As I write this, some dating show called Baggage is playing out on my television screen. Northwestern Law alum Jerry Springer is hemming and hawing about some floozy’s hidden past. A drug counselor named Luke wearing a suede vest just introduced himself by saying he’s an “East Coast cat,” and then some fat boy opened his pitch by mentioning that he’s a gamer. This segued into a discursive bit on Luke’s love of gangster rap. Then the fat boy talked about how many online dates he’s gone on. All these men are dressed like amateur magicians.
This is all a way of saying that there’s a lot of terrible stuff on TV these days. Which is why it’s more important than ever that our nation’s celebrities fill the entertainment void with their sex tapes. It appears that this poverty of entertainment options is exactly what Chad Johnson had in mind when portions of his sex tape appeared online this past week.
The proud tradition that began with Pamela Anderson and then begat Kim Kardashian has now given us Chad Johnson. A football player who was last seen on a reality show has now given us real sex.
Some post-Soviet states kept Lenin statues up longer than Penn State kept JoePa’s.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is about to do what the Southeastern Conference (the “SEC” that actually takes down its targets) does every week on the recruiting trail: tell the NCAA to get bent.
Yesterday, Governor Tom Corbett filed a federal antitrust suit in Harrisburg alleging that the NCAA overstepped its authority in dropping the hammer on Penn State’s football program in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse scandal.
Apparently the NCAA may not have quasi-governmental authority to take millions in direct fines from public institutions in an effort to protect its brand name.
Pennsylvanian officials are understandably miffed because Penn State is directly paying millions in fines and missing out on millions more in bowl revenue. Taxpayer dollars intended for the public education of students that had nothing to do with the scandal are being siphoned away from the state to finance programs at the sole discretion of the NCAA leadership and the majority is spent outside Pennsylvania.
The NCAA counters that the criminal activity at Penn State was enabled by a culture of winning-at-all-costs and only the NCAA can appropriately discipline the school for that mindset.
But really this lawsuit comes down to two parties, the NCAA and Corbett, making desperate PR moves to cover their own asses. Is that in poor taste? Sure. Is it in even worse taste that the NCAA and Corbett are using this tragedy for their own purposes? Well let’s look at what they’ve been up to….
Celebrity opinions are the worst. On this, I think we can all agree. Unlike our pundit class, celebrities have very few advanced degrees and are never held to account for their prognostications. When a talking head on TV or the internet or even books gets something wrong, he’s fired immediately. The marketplace of ideas demands nothing less. Someone more inclined to bad puns would say that as a marketplace, being fired for being wrong is more than laissez… fair.
And so we hate celebrities mouthing off like they are wont to do because they don’t get fired from their jobs when they’re wrong. This is especially true of the sports world, where the famous people not being fired for voicing opinions also represent our favorite teams, like the Chicago Bears. Or even our least favorite teams, like the Syracuse Orangemen.
Syracuse basketball coach Jim Boeheim spoke out about gun control this week because a bunch of children were murdered recently and a bunch of microphones were stuck in his face. The men holding the microphones said, “Hey Jim, let’s talk sports.”
Jim didn’t want to talk sports. Let’s talk sports….
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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:
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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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