Law Schools

Non-Sequiturs: 04.01.13

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* It’s amazing that sports betting is not legal in New Jersey. What possible moral wackadoodle says that it’s okay to have something like the Jersey Shore (the place, not just the TV show), but you can’t take Michigan to out-shoot the Syracuse zone and then break Louisville’s legs. [Legal Blitz]

* Cloud tools for lawyers. Or as partners understand them: “Newfangled virtual file cabinets.” [Smart File Blog]

* Pro se prisoner wins! He probably wouldn’t have had he consulted a lawyer. [Simple Justice]

* Actually, congratulations to Christopher J. Paolella, who argued before the Court on behalf of Kim Millbrook — and scored a 9-0 victory. [Reich & Paolella]

* Apparently “we gotta fix that” is Obama-speak for “Let’s form a commission to study how Republicans are disenfranchising voters instead of actually stopping them.” [NPR via Election Law Blog]

* Goodbye and good luck to Bruce Carton of Legal Blog Watch. [Legal Blog Watch]

* I thought this was a law already on the books in Mississippi. [The Onion]

* Instead of Angie’s List ranking law schools, I’d like to see U.S. News ranking plumbers. Undoubtedly, they’d use size of exposed butt crack as a key factor. [TaxProf Blog]

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Administration FREAKS OUT Students With Reports Of Possible Death Threat Before Realizing It Was Just Homework

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Yay, nobody has to die.

We live in a horrible time where mass shootings are a thing. Law enforcement can’t do what it needs to in order to protect us from nutbags with guns because our post-revolutionary founding fathers didn’t fully anticipate that hundreds of years later uncompromising people would declare a sacred right in Uzi ownership. And so we all have to live in fear of getting our heads blown off while lawmakers talk about regulating video games.

In this age, we have to take any threat or perceived threat of mass violence very seriously. Especially if that threat appears to be targeted at a school campus. A note was found on a law school campus that totally freaked out the school’s administration.

It turned out to be nothing. Funny even. But man, in these times, even after finding the truth, the most I can do is muster nervous laughter….

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Entry-Level Job Market Is Still Terrible, But The Class Of 2012 Really Should Have Seen That Coming

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As we mentioned in Morning Docket, new employment numbers just came out, and it’s an old story of a soft job market.

Only 56 percent of the class of 2012 secured full-time, long-term legal employment within nine months of graduation. In this economy, that passes as good news because that figure is up one percent from last year. It’s kind like telling a terminally ill patient that his parking tickets got dismissed.

Law School Transparency reports that when you exclude school-funded jobs, the employment number falls to 55 percent. And there is more bad news when you dive deeper into the statistics.

But this is the class of 2012, the first class that really should have known that this was going to happen….

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Morning Docket: 04.01.13

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* Can you DIG it?! Well, SCOTUS can’t, at least when it comes to the Prop 8 case, but perhaps that’s what the conservative justices planned all along. You can probably expect a judicial punt on this one. [New York Times]

* The case for cameras at the high court became even more compelling last week, because people just now realized that having to “spend money to see a public institution do public business is offensive.” Damn straight. [National Law Journal]

* Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s new book, Out of Order (affiliate link), didn’t exactly get a glowing review from the NYT’s Supreme Court correspondent, Adam Liptak. It’s a “gift shop bauble”? Ouch. [New York Times]

* Oh, Lanny Breuer, you tried to be all coy by saying you were interviewing elsewhere, but we knew you’d return to Covington. That “vice-chairman” title is a pretty sweet new perk, too. [Legal Times]

* DLA Piper’s bills may “know no limits,” but in-house counsel claim that while the firm’s emails were “flippant,” they won’t have an impact their already meticulous billing review. [New York Law Journal]

* The true love’s kiss of litigation: Bingham McCutchen’s Sleeping Beauty may have found her prince in Judge Vincent O’Neill Jr., because he ruled that the firm won’t be able to compel arbitration. [Recorder]

* It’s really not a good time to be a prosecutor in Texas. Two months after the murder of ADA Mark Hasse, DA Mike McLelland and his wife were gunned down in their home. RIP. [Dallas Morning News]

* Good news, everyone! The class of 2012 — the largest on record, according to the ABA — was only slightly more unemployed than its predecessors. Cherish the little things, people. [National Law Journal]

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Non-Sequiturs: 03.29.13

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My personal favorite: Peepemptory Challenges.

* To those of you who celebrate it, Happy Easter! Welcome the holiday by voting in the ABA Journal’s fifth annual “Peeps in Law” contest. [ABA Journal]

* If law firm brackets aren’t your thing, check out Professor Kyle Graham’s brackets for (1) law school classes and (2) law blogs. I’m thankful for ATL’s #1 seed but terrified by who we’re up against (because they’ve ripped me a new one before). [noncuratlex]

* Sorry, Judge Steiner, you wuz robbed; you should have been our Judge of the Day. It’s tough to top “allegations of a sexual quid pro quo with a female lawyer and the eye-opening confiscation of carpet from [chambers] for forensic analysis.” [OC Weekly]

William Shatner

* “William Shatner’s Seductive Powers Don’t Create a Fiduciary Duty.” Robyn Hagan Cain explains why. [U.S. Second Circuit / FindLaw]

* Citi settles securities cases for $730 million. Matt Levine is not impressed. [Dealbreaker]

* And Ted Frank is incensed by Bernstein Litowitz’s nine-figure fee request. [Point of Law]

* If you’re already depressed by public ignorance about the Supreme Court, don’t look at the responses to question 9 of this opinion poll. [Penn Schoen Berland]

* Steven Harper — author of a new (and very good) book about the legal profession, The Lawyer Bubble (affiliate link) — offers thoughts on the billable hour in the wake of the DLA Piper overbilling allegations. [New York Times]

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Morning Docket: 03.29.13

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A ‘beauty culturist’ at work.

* The latest update on the law school litigation front represents good news for New York Law School. [National Law Journal]

* Should summarizing a one-day deposition transcript really cost $90,000? Even DLA Piper might blush at such a bill. [Point of Law]

* Ropes & Gray isn’t backing down in the discrimination lawsuit brought by former partner Patricia Martone. (We’ll have more on this later.) [Am Law Daily]

* No, silly polo mogul, you can’t adopt your 42-year-old girlfriend to shield your fortune from litigation. [ABA Journal]

* Replacing “barbers” with “beauty culturists”? This is Indiana and not California, right? [WSJ Law Blog]

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In Defense of Law Schools Hiring Their Own Graduates

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When wearing a tie, don’t pop the collar.

Legal education is a hot-button topic these days. Elie Mystal and I have taken our debate on the future of legal education to UNLV and Cardozo Law, in appearances co-sponsored by the Federalist Society and the American Constitution Society, and our roadshow hit Georgetown Law earlier today. (If you’d like to invite us to your school, most likely for the fall semester at this point, drop us a line.)

Despite disagreements over proposed solutions, folks generally agree on what needs to be improved. In an ideal world, law school would be less expensive, and legal jobs would be more plentiful. In an ideal world, more than 55 percent of recent law school graduates would wind up with full-time, long-term legal jobs.

But we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in the real world, which is imperfect and messy and depressing. Law schools and their graduates have to make the best of a challenging situation.

Which takes me to the practice of law schools employing their own graduates. In an ideal world, law schools wouldn’t have to resort to this. But in the real world, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, at least when it’s done right.

So pop your collars in celebration. UVA, I’m looking at you….

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Non-Sequiturs: 03.28.13

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* Real Housewives “star” Porsha Williams Stewart found out about her husband, former Pittsburgh QB Kordell Stewart, filing for divorce from the media. She shouldn’t have been surprised. Slash was always elusive. [USA Today]

* An anonymous Twitter account wreaks havoc on UK law students. One Tweet: “#LawTips: edit the Wikipedia page after copying it to avoid plagiarism.” Here’s a pro tip: if you’re copying Wikipedia for law school, you’re doing it wrong. [Legal Cheek]

* How out of control is tuition? At 26 law schools, recent graduates with $160,000 in annual income are STILL eligible for the federal IBR program intended to relieve the debt burden on impoverished students. [Constitutional Daily]

* As our own Juggalo Law pointed out, the NFL engages in some awfully shady sexual orientation profiling. [Sports Law Blog]

* You’d think the Republicans would be all for funding scientific endeavors to prove that rape victims in the animal kingdom “have ways of shutting that down.” [Jezebel]

* UNLV Law Dean Nancy Rapoport takes issue with Professor Derek Muller’s ranking of “Career Baristas” out of law school. If there was one dean who was going to know the statistical angles, it was going to be the one in Las Vegas. [UNLV Law Blog]

* Ever wanted to watch video of the folks from Lawyers, Guns & Money discussing Game of Thrones? Sure you have! And that’s why we invented jumps…

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Which Law Schools Employed the Most Grads in ‘Elite’ Jobs?

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Yesterday, we brought you some news you can use when it comes to law schools and the employment data that went into the 2014 U.S. News law school rankings. The Top 10 lists we provided you with contained some pretty vital information, including which law schools best know how to put the “bar” in “barista.” (N.B. As we noted, the sample size here was small, but still, perhaps you should’ve considered enrolling at ITT Tech.)

We thought that our readers had gotten enough of their rankings crack, but it seems like you’re addicted to it. Don’t worry, you’ll be okay, because we’re here to give you another much-needed hit.

Would you like to know which law schools are the most likely to lead to “elite” employment outcomes?

Let’s get ready to dig into the details….

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An Unofficial Orientation to Law School: Tell Us Your Stories

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Our very own Joe and Elie will be hosting an “Unofficial Orientation to Law School” on Google Hangouts, Google’s new video chat platform. This three-part series will help 0Ls navigate the application process and the first year of school and hopefully steer them towards an actual lawyer job, without the crippling debt. Confirmed guest panelists for the Hangouts include professors from Harvard and Georgetown, Biglaw hiring partners and associates, and current law students.

We are looking for help from those of you who have already cleared the major hurdles of a legal career: by getting into law school, by succeeding academically, and by landing a job.

We are looking for three categories of stories:

1.  What was your law school application strategy? Did you retake the LSAT? How did you decide where to apply? How did you choose which school to attend? Did/do you plan to transfer?

2.  What was your strategy for academic success?  Did you join a study group?  Did you buy commercial outlines or hornbooks?  Did you use a tutor or coach?

3. How did you find a job?  OCI?  Networking with student groups?  Random luck?

So this goes out to all the success stories out there in Lawland: Share your stories with us. E-mail us at tips@abovethelaw.com and include “hangout” in the subject line.

Your stories may be used in the hangouts anonymously, or with the submittor’s (is this a word) permission. The videos of the Hangouts will be available starting April 10 and this series is sponsored by our friends at Lexis, BARBRI, and Law Preview, a BARBRI company.

    

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