The year is quickly drawing to a close, but we have unfinished business to conduct here at Above the Law. Come on, people, we still have to crown our Lawyer of the Year for 2012.
Thank you to everyone who responded to our call for nominations, in the comments or via email. We’ve narrowed down the nominees to a field of nine (although you’ll see only eight options in the poll because one is a joint nomination). As in past years, the contenders run the gamut from distinguished to despicable.
* Munger Tolles & Olson recently announced a new partnership class, 75 percent of which is composed of women. Let’s hear three cheers for diversity in the practice of law! Oh, and uh… congratulations to the lone white guy, too. [The Careerist]
* Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition: in an opinion penned by Judge Richard Posner, a divided three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit struck down an Illinois law banning the concealed carrying of loaded weapons outside the home. [Bloomberg]
* Holy crap! Law students asked for change, and the Arizona Supreme court is giving them exactly what they wanted, which is impressive. 3Ls will now be able to sit for the February bar exam. [National Law Journal]
* And speaking of Arizona, the Phoenix City Council and state Board of Regents have approved ASU Law’s plans to move its campus, and the city even threw in $12M to sweeten the deal. [Phoenix Business Journal]
* Remember the defamation suit Cooley Law filed against a former student who anonymously criticized the school on his blog? His lawyer will defend his anonymity today in court. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* Nevermind the fact that he’s a “person of interest” in a homicide case, because a Guatemalan judge ordered that antivirus mogul John McAfee should be released due to his illegal detention. [Los Angeles Times]
It’s December, and you know what that means: it’s time to deck the halls with boughs of holly, and offer jobs to law students that will make them fa-la-la-la-laugh their indebted little asses off.
It’s been a while since we last wrote about the ridiculous jobs law professors try to pawn off on students, but at least this one isn’t offering up an adventures in babysitting gig. No, this time, a law professor caught a whiff of the holiday spirit, and is offering students the chance to get involved with their very own holly jolly Christmas.
Perhaps the eggnog this law prof was drinking had a little too much whiskey in it, because you’d have to be drunk to think it was a good idea to offer up a job that offers no legal experience whatsoever….
I generally try to defend Millennials in these pages. They might seem like texting-obsessed kids, but we need to cut them some slack. Because they had the American economy pulled out from under them just as they tried to start their adult lives. You just wait, when these guys are 40, they’ll be telling their kids stories of the “Great Recession” and how patience and frugality are chief virtues. They might be telling their kids those stories in Chinese, but still.
But we do have our occasional disagreements. I think the special snowflake syndrome plagues this generation; they’re so obsessed with their own social-media fueled individuality that they tend to think things like statistics don’t apply to them. Part of that is being young; part of that is being dumb.
And part of that is that Millennials, as a group, seem to need compliments in order to function like normal humans. They want you to LIKE THEIR STATUS and retweet their banter with an inane “lol.” If you don’t give them gushing praise, they take it as a criticism. And if you actually criticize them, well damn, you might as well be questioning their entire existence and telling them to kill themselves.
Yesterday, I saw something that takes “gushing praise” to a new, disgusting, saccharine level. And it’s coming from law schools….
I was not aware that see-through shirts and cleavage was the trademark of a good lawyer in New Zealand. Apparently I have a lot to learn about their judicial system.
I didn’t have to really study for football. It’s just something you know. Now, I’m starting from scratch writing briefs. I don’t know what a brief is. I’m taking a tort class. I don’t know what a tort is. In football, we have seven days to prepare. Now I have to do assignments and have them done by the next day. But I’ve learned to adapt quickly.
– Randall Gay, a retired football player formerly of the New England Patriots and the New Orleans Saints, commenting on what it’s like to make the difficult transition from playbooks to law books in his new career as a law student.
(So where is the ex-cornerback going to law school? Let’s find out!)
Greetings from San Francisco, home of the world champion Giants, surprisingly noisy trolley cars, and the faint smell of cannabis pretty much everywhere. We’re in town to attend Ark Group‘s conference on “The Brave New World of Entry-Level Recruiting,” which examines how the world of law student recruiting by firms has changed (and will continue to evolve) since the onset of the Great Recession. Moderated by Bruce MacEwen, who kicked off the proceedings by framing the day as an opportunity for “frank conversation” between schools and firms, the conference featured an absolute Murderers’ Row of industry thought leaders, including Orrick‘s Ralph Baxter, legal academia’s apostate Paul Campos, NALP’s Jim Leipold, Indiana/Maurer‘s Bill Henderson, three Biglaw hiring partners, and deans from Berkeley, Stanford, and Hastings.
Read on for some highlights and takeaways from yesterday’s conference.
It’s time to announce the winner of October’s Lawyer of the Month competition. Our four contestants ranged from the devilishly handsome to the depressingly drunk and disorderly, but somehow, for the second month in a row, our readers were able to pick a winner who was actually deserving of the Lawyer of the Month title for his truly heroic deeds.
In September, our readers selected a prosecutor who was willing to take a literal beating to help strangers in need of assistance. In October, our readers favored the courageous efforts of yet another valiant man.
Like in that Bruno Mars song, this guy would jump in front of a train for ya….
As long as it’s something I’m committed to, I think I can find a way to make it work.
– Megan Marks, Indiana Tech Law School’s first admitted student, commenting in a school-sponsored press release on what it’s like to be part of the school’s first class.
(Read on for some additional pearls of wisdom from Ms. Marks and the administration at Indiana Tech Law.)
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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The year is quickly drawing to a close, but we have unfinished business to conduct here at Above the Law. Come on, people, we still have to crown our Lawyer of the Year for 2012.
