Thank you, Above the Law readers. The results are in for January’s Lawyer of the Month, and I can happily report that I do not write for an audience comprised solely of heartless, cynical d-bags.
Seriously, I’m going to be able to talk to my mother about what I do for a living for a whole week.
In a month that had some worthwhile competitors, one lawyer stood out above the rest…
Continue reading “January Lawyer of the Month Restores Faith in Humanity”
As many of you know, one of our running features here at Above the Law is Lawyer of the Day. We don’t literally name one every day, but we like to keep you informed of the famous and infamous lawyers of the world. At the end of the year, we give you guys an opportunity to vote for a Lawyer of the Year.
Apparently you guys like to vote on lawyers, so why limit the experience to once a year? Above the Law has decided to let you crown a lawyer every month. We’ll pick the nominees (going forward, feel free to submit nominees to us at tips@abovethelaw.com, and you’ll vote for the most deserving. There are no specific criteria — just vote for the lawyer or lawyers you think most deserve the title.
Let’s get to this month’s nominees…
Gone baby gone.
It’s been pretty slow here at the Above the Law circumcision law desk. So slow, in fact, that Lat has considered putting me on another assignment: “There’s just not enough news surrounding the intersection of foreskin and the legal community. While I appreciate your enthusiasm for the amusing dong beat…I don’t know if the financials can possibly justify keeping you on.”
Every time he starts in on this speech, I have to break out a photo of 16 vaguely ethnic kids that I claim to take care of. This happens at least twice a week.
So you can imagine how excited I was to find this fascinating tale that might shock and amaze you. It’s the story of a full-time lawyer and part-time exhibitionist named….
Thomas Walkley
There’s a history of lawyers pulling down their pants to make a point. Some of you may recall former Covington & Burling partner David Remes, who dropped trou in Yemen a few years back. Remes, who was representing several detainees at Guantanamo Bay, explained that he stripped down to emphasize the humiliation inflicted upon detainees by inappropriate body searches.
Now another attorney is claiming that he exposed himself for educational reasons. Ohio lawyer Thomas Walkley, 52, was charged with exposing himself to two troubled teens on Friday. (They were troubled before they saw Walkley’s junk.)
Walkley, who founded and runs a coffeeshop for at-risk youth, claims that pants-dropping is part of his “mentorship” program. We wonder if they’ll try this in Oregon.
Unlike Remes, Walkley didn’t keep his underwear on. He removed his pants and his boxer shorts, letting it all hang out before two teenage boys….
Continue reading “Lawyer of the Day: A Peeping Trou-Dropping Tom”
There’s nothing quite like a good old-fashioned Christmas meltdown — and apparently there was an epic one at San Francisco International Airport on Christmas Eve.
Angela West, a Harvard Law School graduate and former Los Angeles prosecutor, allegedly went to town on a Peet’s Coffee kiosk. With a three-foot metal pole.
Tsk tsk, Ms. West. At HLS you’re expected to smash things with a finely crafted cane or perhaps a tasteful umbrella. A metal pole is unbecoming of your pedigree…
Continue reading “Lawyer of the Day: Ex-Prosecutor Maybe Had A Little Too Much Peet’s Coffee”
For deputy prosecutor Kirmille Welbon, it's all about the shoes.
What the hell is going on with female lawyers in Indiana? Last month, a lawyer there was accused of going on a rampage, in which she allegedly attacked a boyfriend she suspected of cheating and then assaulted a corrections officer. Today we’ve got another attorney — a deputy prosecutor, no less — accused of violence. She allegedly attacked the wife of a man she was sleeping with.
That’s right, the “other woman” apparently attacked the wife. You can’t attack the spouse if you are the other woman. Doesn’t anybody respect the rules? When did Indiana turn into Vietnam?
And things didn’t even get out of hand until the other woman asked the wife to return a pair of Air Jordans, which just makes Indiana look like it’s operating 20 years behind the times…
Continue reading “Lawyer of the Day: Deputy Prosecutor / Other Woman Allegedly Beats Up Wife”
1974: It was a very good year?
1974 was a good year. The IRA bombed the Tower of London, President Nixon was forced to resign in scandal, gasoline shortages led to long lines at the pump, a smallpox epidemic ripped through India, and famine savaged the continent of Africa. So yeah… great year, history!
But in the midst of all this human suffering, there were lulz to be had. All it took was a litigious Cleveland Browns fan and an attorney with balls big enough to set the Cuyahoga on fire (awesome metaphor!).
After the jump, a letter from the fan, Dale Cox, followed by the rejoinder from ATL’s Lawyer of the Year for 1974, one James N. Bailey…
They take hockey pretty seriously up north.
Is there anything more pathetic than a “sports dad”? You know, one of those middle-aged losers who takes his kid’s athletic competitions way too seriously because he wants little Junior to “be a winner” — a title the father undoubtedly never achieved in his own life? I hate these punks, and if I ever have children I’m going to really enjoy heckling the sports dads who heckle children (then getting the living crap beat out of me, and suing their pants off for assault).
In my limited experience with the sports dad, I’ve generally assumed that higher education is a great tonic to this phenomenon. I think that if you’ve actually accomplished things in your life (or if you at least have the intellectual curiosity to read about people who have accomplished things in their lives), you come to understand that a kiddie sporting event isn’t something to get all worked up about.
So when I read this latest story about a dad menacing a pee-wee hockey team, I was dismayed to learn that the culprit is a lawyer. A tipster sent in the story with the subject line “more proof that lawyers are a**holes,” but I had thought that lawyers only behaved badly around childhood sports when some kid takes a puck to the face and the lawyer/parent tries to sue the entire league into the ground.
I didn’t know that lawyers would use their powers to humiliate and embarrass little girls who weren’t playing all that well…
Continue reading “Lawyer of the Day: Dad Badgers Little Girl into Quitting Hockey Team”
Smokers are not crazy. I know it seems like we’re crazy. I know what non-smokers think: “Why would you put something in your body that you know will give you cancer?” It’s not like the explanation is particularly complicated: 1) it’s a narcotic and people get addicted, and 2) some people aren’t terribly worried about dying.
Is that really so hard to understand? Not everybody wants to live “healthily.” Not everybody is desperate to live to 100. And some are prone to get addicted to drugs. That’s not crazy.
But don’t try telling that to the New York police. They arrested a man and threw him in a psychiatric ward for smoking on his window ledge. They claim they were worried that he was going to jump from the window ledge he was smoking on. The window was two stories off the ground.
Now the NYPD is getting sued, because this smoker is also a lawyer…
Continue reading “Lawyer of the Day: What Are You Going To Do, Arrest Me for Smoking?”
Do not mess with this woman.
In general people are not as outraged about domestic violence when the perpetrator is a woman. For whatever reason, people tend to think that male victims of domestic violence “had it coming” in some way. You can make a hit Broadway musical centered around women who kill their husbands — but I’m going to guess that the Wife Beater Waltz wouldn’t do as well as the Cell Block Tango.
So when a woman does decide to beat her boyfriend, it’s kind of nice when she also exhibits additional crazy and violent behavior. At least then, people are less likely to blame the victim.
But maybe Indiana lawyer Olubunmi Okanlami can argue that all of her alleged victims had it coming. Who knows what her boyfriend did or did not do, but Okanlami is an attorney. Maybe when she was arrested for battery she knew enough about the penal system to think that fighting her way out would be more effective than trying to put together a reasonable defense? Some lawyers use the strategy of putting two different legal arguments in their briefs, Okanlami allegedly tried to use two different undergarments to sharpen her attack [UPDATE on her law school after the jump]….
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.
Also, we have the two below in-house openings:
Keep reading »
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?
Keep reading »
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