Steve Jobs passed away yesterday. And millions of people across the planet learned of the news on devices he invented.
You’ve probably already heard the details. The 56-year-old chairman and co-founder of Apple had been fighting pancreatic cancer since 2004. He ran one of the most successful companies in the world, a company he founded in a suburban garage. He invented the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad; at one point he owned Pixar; and he personally had more than 300 patents to his name, according to The Atlantic.
I am having a hard time thinking of any other human in recent memory who has so widely, tangibly, and positively changed the face of the world.
As Alexis Madrigal wrote, it’s strange to mourn the head of an international corporation as we would a beloved actor, musician, or head of state. But we can’t help it….
* $400 per wasted hour? That’s not what you’re paying your lawyer. That’s what he’s paying in sanctions for futzing around during depositions. [Daily Business Review]
* Texas Roadhouse: old farts need not apply. Apparently qualifications for working at a chain restaurant now include being young, hot, and chipper. [Los Angeles Times]
* Friendly’s used to be the place where ice cream made the meal, but now it’s the place where ice cream makes you bankrupt. That’s just sad. [Bloomberg]
* Memo to file: the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, not yours. A former model is seeking parole after she chopped up, cooked, and ate her husband. [Daily Mail]
By the time we get to the iPhone7, buying one will automatically apply you to law school.
We’ve talked about the drop in law school applications. Generally, this is a good thing. Less pressure on law school tuition is a good thing for students, and it’s not like schools can’t fill out their classes.
Well, most schools. Some schools — especially schools that are not highly regarded — are feeling the sting of fewer people eager to go to law school.
And so we have the latest innovation in law school fleecing technology. Now you can apply to a law school on your iPhone. Because this is really the kind of decision you want to make as quickly as possible….
Last week, I thought my life had ended. No, it was not the announcement that All My Children is ending this week. That tragedy I learned to live with once I found out that online episodes will start airing this winter. It was because my iPhone broke, or at least I thought it had.
I panicked. I, like those fax machine loving small-firm attorneys, am not tech savvy. So, I went straight to the Apple website and set up an appointment at the Genius Bar. As I was waiting for my appointment, I emailed a friend to ask her if she had any idea on how to fix my phone. She responded, “Did you Google it?” No, I had not. And, within thirty seconds of web-searching, I had found the solution to my problem.
I realized from our email exchange that there are two types of people in this world: people who are helpless, and those who help themselves. Since learning that I had yet another issue to work on, I set out to find a small-firm lawyer who practices self-help.
Meet Jessica Fairchild of Fairchild Law Offices, LLC. Fairchild, a University of Chicago graduate and former Sidley Austin attorney, started her own firm in May 2010. Fairchild’s path to solo success was the result of this lady making things happen. While I would unlikely be able to follow suit unless there is a way to use the Genius Bar to find small firm success (niche alert!), you can try for yourself by following these steps….
* The Tiger Mom should send the senators to bed without dinner until they vote on the stalled Seventh Circuit nomination of Professor Victoria Nourse. [National Law Journal]
* Was there a Brady violation at the Casey Anthony trial? The state says no, arguing that defense lawyer Jose Baez received the potentially exculpatory information. [Legal Ethics Forum]
* Where’s the beef in this lawsuit? Unfortunately, inside the supposedly vegetarian samosas. [Porzio Appellate Law Blog]
* What is the difference between marketing and sales, and why does it matter to law firms? [Ross's Law Marketing Blog]
* Wait, having your boss walk in screaming “Penis, Penis, Penis” doesn’t happen in every place of business? [Jezebel]
* Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s case has been adjourned until August. [Thomson Reuters]
* Yeah, well I told the phone what to do, so maybe I’m the “smart” one, and the phone has just gotten better at listening to me. [iPhone J.D.]
* One of TaxProf Blog’s readers offered to donate a kidney to Adjunct Law Prof’s daughter. Would that have been considered as income? Here at Above the Law, we just want your eyes. [TaxProf Blog]
* When life gives you lemons, you probably shouldn’t do what this 79-year-old child toucher allegedly did, which was basically the equivalent of making lemonAIDS under Megan’s Law. [Deadspin]
* It’s 7/11, so there are free slurpees at 7-11. In solidarity, Above the Law declares that this is one day where Kirkland & Ellis associates can slurp their firm without being made fun of. [Slurpee]
Law firm marketing and technology don’t always go well together. When firms try to go high-tech, the results are often mortifyingly cheesy.
To avoid humiliation, many law firms — often culturally conservative, risk-averse institutions — play it safe. But caution can also result in some of the worst law-firm websites, ones that get compared to “a seventh-grade history project” or “[s]imply a brochure placed online.”
You may want to download a class action tracking app to your iPhone
It’s always sad when two people give you the same present for Christmas — especially if it’s not a present you want. That’s the situation Apple is in this holiday season, hit with two lawsuits in federal court last week, both seeking class action certification, for helping advertisers create profiles of iPhone and iPad users.
Lalo v. Apple, first reported by Businessweek, and Freeman v. Apple, first reported by Wired, were both filed on Thursday, Dec. 23, in the Northern District of California. The first was filed by Kamber Law, the team behind the $2.4 million Quantcast “zombie cookie” settlement, and the second by three law firms, including the one that recently sued YouPorn over its “history sniffing.”
Both lawsuits are essentially copy-and-paste jobs of a recent Wall Street Journal article about how smartphones spy on their users. The WSJ report detailed how apps on iPhones and Android phones gather personal information, including location, gender, age, contacts, and a phone’s unique identifier, and then pass that information along to advertisers. The suits focus on Apple’s disclosing iPhone and iPad users’ Unique Device ID (UDID) — basically a mobile device’s social security number, which, when disclosed, can be used to profile a Machead.
Re-gifting alert: since this occurs on the Android as well, Google may want to look out for a belated class action present. “We usually take the most meritorious action first and then work our way down,” says Majed Nachawati, one of the class action attorneys in the Freeman complaint. “Google is on the radar, but we haven’t taken any action against them yet.”
Marriage: an institution so sacred that two gay guys could ruin it with their love and commitment. But someday soon we might be able to get out of this sacred tradition using our phones.
Already there’s a company offering some basic divorce information via iPhone apps. Robert Ambrogi’s Law Sites has the news:
If you’re married to your iPhone but not so sure about your spouse, then DivorceApps.com may have just what you need. It is developing a series of iPhone apps designed for people who are considering or in the process of divorce.
Brilliant. Just as the digital age is opening up new ways for divorce lawyers to be effective, technology might be able soon obviate the need for most divorce lawyers altogether…
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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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:
• 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.
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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Steve Jobs passed away yesterday. And millions of people across the planet learned of the news on devices he invented.
