Tomorrow is going to be the most boring day in the recent history of the Internet. For 24 hours — on January 18 — several high-profile websites will go dark, to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act.
No one will be able to research potentially fake facts about their favorite celebrities, discover the newest nerdy memes, or upload photos to social media sites.
It’s true, the frightfully unpopular bill is losing legislative steam, but the Internet’s collective rage is still hot, hot, hot.
* Being 15 minutes early to crucial meetings is not all that it’s cracked up to be. [The Ying-a-Ling]
* Law school fiction: possible comic gold, possible Shakespearean tragedy. Check out excerpts from Cameron Stracher’s work in progress. [The Socratic Method]
* The key for women getting ahead in 2012: working for companies that don’t discriminate against women. I mean, it’s underwhelming advice, but voting with their feet is a big thing women can do to improve gender equality in the legal marketplace. [The Glass Hammer]
* It’s a point worth emphasizing: working a full-time job while in law school and doing well at said law school are basically incompatible goals. At least in this day and age. Maybe law school was easier for the Boomers because there was less competition (from, I don’t know, women and minorities). [Constitutional Daily]
* Note that this decision in support of federalism, the subject of a new article by Professor Ilya Somin, came from a unanimous Supreme Court. It’d be nice if Republicans could remember that this election season, instead of calling every progressive a devotee of centralized authority. [The Volokh Conspiracy]
* Is anybody still using Google Plus? Any lawyers? Bueller? Frye? [Legal Blog Watch]
One of my favorite Mitch Hedberg jokes goes something like, “I love the FedEx driver, because he’s a drug dealer and he don’t even know it.”
Well, it turns out you might be able to say the same thing about Google AdWords. A new BBC report reveals the sketchier side of Google’s flagship, profit-making endeavor.
Keep reading to learn about the formerly Don’t-Be-Evil corporation’s inadvertent involvement in selling weed, scalping tickets to major sporting events, and providing youngsters with fake IDs.…
I had never heard of Max Mosley until yesterday, when I read he was suing Google in Europe to block all search results regarding his alleged participation in some sort of Nazi sex orgy.
Sorry to disappoint the snake-oil salesmen, but in this small post I will buck the trend, and debunk the fallacy of non-practicing lawyers who write books about social media for lawyers. Here, today my friends, I will tell you everything you need to know about the complicated and scary topic of: how to talk to people on the internet like a normal person.
Facebook
If you think Facebook is code for “high school,” you’re correct. But if you live in the same town you went to high school, why not connect with your loser friends who have some mid-level job? They need lawyers. Yes, as part of reconnecting with your past you’ll experience the joy of seeing that girl you wanted to date has moved to some small crap town and married Jim, who’s prematurely bald but “an awesome husband,” but so what?
Do not post every single picture you take of your kids, dogs, in-laws with your kids, kids with your dogs, the 189 pictures of your vacation, or “fake” complain about the first class service on some airline. You’re practicing law, not creating a family scrapbook.
Do not have a Facebook fan page for your law firm. No one should ever be a fan of a law firm. You are not a “rock star” and even if you were, rock stars do not ask people to be their fans. It just happens with good music. Asking people to be your “fan” may also violate your state bar ethics rules, if that kind of nuisance interests you — you know, ethics rules….
As we mentioned in yesterday’s Non-Sequiturs, congressional hearings for the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act began yesterday. People are really not happy about the bill.
Google’s CEO called SOPA, as the bill is known for short, “draconian.”
Time’s Techland blog ran the headline this morning, “SOPA Won’t Stop Online Piracy, Would Censor Everyone Else.”
What is going on here, and why is everyone freaking out? Let’s find out….
Yesterday we brought you the story of a 2L at Cardozo Law School who has taken out Google ads promoting himself, in an attempt to find a summer associate job. Here’s what his ad looks like (as displayed to an Above the Law reader who alerted us to his campaign):
We reached out to Eric Einisman to ask him: What was he thinking?
A reader alerted us to the following Google ad, which showed up in a Gmail sidebar next to a law-related email chain:
Whoa! Is this for real? Is a second-year student at Cardozo Law School actually advertising himself via text ads on Google, promoting himself as “[a] great choice for Summer Associate”?
Are Cardozo law students truly this desperate? Is this why the career services dean quit to teach yoga? Should Cardozo focus less on teaching students how to walk and more on teaching them how to conduct job searches?
Or is this too harsh an assessment? Let’s learn more about the 2L behind this unusual ad.
As I’ve mentioned before, there are all sorts of restrictions on what lawyers can do to advertise to the general public. Law schools have no such concerns. They can say pretty much whatever they want, wherever they want — and when they get sued for their alleged misrepresentations, they can just kick blame to the American Bar Association.
Maybe law schools have this whole game rigged, and there’s nothing we can really do about it.
Except laugh. For instance, it’s pretty funny how Thomas M. Cooley Law School will pop up on your Google Earth search results for things that are definitely not Cooley Law School….
We’ve been talking a lot recently about the secretly authorized stuff our government does to us — like killing us, or molesting us at airports.
Here’s another one for the list: digging through our emails or Twitter feeds or cell phone data, without probable cause, our permission, or our knowledge. This isn’t necessarily shocking in and of itself; back in April, Kashmir Hill wrote about how often the government requests information about private individuals from tech companies.
What’s shocking is the ease with which the government gets that information and the secrecy with which it does so. Somehow it’s all based on a law that is older than the Internet. The policy recently came to light when authorities ordered a small Internet provider, as well as Twitter and Google, to turn over information about Jacob Appelbaum, an American who volunteers with WikiLeaks.
How does the U.S. government circumvent basic probable cause and search warrant requirements when it wants electronic information? Let’s see….
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.
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