The year is quickly drawing to a close, but we have unfinished business to conduct here at Above the Law. We still have to crown our Lawyer of the Year for 2011.
Thank you to everyone who responded to our call for nominations. We’ve narrowed down the nominees to a field of twelve (although you’ll see only eleven options in the poll because one is a joint nomination). As in past years, the contenders run the gamut from distinguished to despicable.
In our November edition of the Lawyer of the Month competition, we brought you three male candidates who just didn’t give a damn. We offered our readers an anti-military law professor, but he wasn’t able to rock the vote. Next up, we had a family law judge who beat his daughter on camera, but even this villainous act wasn’t enough to take the win.
At the end of the day, the man who didn’t want the title won it in a landslide victory, with 65 percent of the vote….
November is typically a month where people give thanks for all of the good things in their lives. The vast majority of the scandalous lawyers featured in these pages seem to have forgotten about that small fact. They just don’t give a damn.
Family ties? Meh. The troops? Screw ‘em. Honorific ATL titles? Totally lame.
Who are these thankless men? Let’s check out the candidate pool for November’s Lawyer of the Month competition….
A mere 11 votes separated the winner and the runner-up. Given the closeness of the vote, maybe Laura Flippin should have focused more on voter turnout, to boost the tallies of her rivals.
It seems that Ira Schacter did just that. Check this out….
It’s time to announce the winner of October’s Lawyer of the Month competition. Our readers had a motley crew of female lawyers behaving badly to choose from, and one male attorney who probably would have loved to keep company with them all.
But which kind of lawyer do our readers like the best? Drunk, naked, rich, or slutty ones? In this polling cycle, we learned that money can buy just about anything, except enough votes to win an ATL contest….
It seems like lawyers got a little wild last month, especially the ladies. In fact, our candidate pool for October’s Lawyer of the Month contest was mostly dominated by women. Score one for women’s equality in the legal profession, even if we’re out there embarrassing ourselves.
Only one of our candidates is a man, but given his choice in women, he’d probably love to be surrounded by all of these hot messes.
Last month, we offered you the sex, violence, and stupidity edition of the competition. We suppose you can call this one Lawyer of the Month: Drunk, Slutty, and Naked. Let’s check out our nominees for the month of October….
* Ira Schacter’s lawyer on his client’s propensity to give out rings worth more than $200K: “He’s just a generous guy.” No, he’s just a Biglaw partner. [The Careerist]
* From Russia Israel with Love: Emory Law student Ilan Grapel has been released from Egypt and will be arriving back in the U.S. today. Welcome home! [New York Times]
* A guy was convicted of selling black market kidneys? I thought that only happened in urban legends, but apparently it happens in good old Jersey. [Bloomberg]
* Next time you want to hold porn auditions at your house, make sure you have the girls sign all of the necessary release forms before you drug and assault them. [Miami Herald]
* How dare you prevent Vince Young from making it rain and then sue him over it! When a man asks you to give him $8,000 in one dollar bills at a strip club, you do it. [New York Post]
Some people just can’t stay out of our pages. Back in 2008, we wrote about Ira J. Schacter, a prominent corporate partner and major rainmaker at Cadwalader. Schacter earned Lawyer of the Day honors after he was accused of beating his wife. (He claimed he acted in self-defense and was ultimately cleared of the charges.)
Well, today Ira Schacter is back in the news. He’s accused of refusing to pay for his teen daughter’s $12,000 hearing aids, while dropping $215,000 on a diamond engagement ring for his Playboy-bunny fiancée. If true, that’s pretty shoddy behavior — the very embodiment of cheapness, from a big-time Biglaw partner who can easily afford twelve grand.
But I know what you’re all wondering right now: “How hot is that Playboy-model fiancée?”
When a Biglaw partner is accused of domestic violence, we can’t help but honor him as ATL’s Lawyer of the Day. But we must note that this article from the New York Daily News drips with lawyer hatred, in describing a case where the attorney was not convicted.
They didn’t even spell Cadwalader partner Ira Schacter’s name correctly. We’ve put the perceived lawyer hatin’ in bold:
A high-powered Manhattan lawyer was cleared of wife-beating charges Tuesday — even though cops said his estranged wife was hurt in a scuffle last fall at the couple’s East Side townhouse.
Ira Schachter, a partner at the white-shoe firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft, was freed despite dramatic photos that appear to show him causing a commotion outside the pricey brownstone on E. 78th St.
Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Larry Stephen also scrapped an order of protection against Ira Schachter, 48, after prosecutors said they couldn’t prove the case against him….
Ira Schachter walked out of court surrounded by an entourage of powerful lawyers, including divorce lawyer Raoul Felder and Ira Sorkin, former head of enforcement at the federal Securities and Exchange Commission.
Not to say that beating your wife is okay. His wife claims he choked her, and police photos showed bruises on her head and neck. Schacter claimed it was self-defense after his wife bit his finger “to the bone.”
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.
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.
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The year is quickly drawing to a close, but we have unfinished business to conduct here at Above the Law. We still have to crown our Lawyer of the Year for 2011.
