Aaron Biber was a principal specializing in business law at the Minnesota law firm of Gray Plant Mooty — until yesterday. As mentioned in yesterday’s Non-Sequiturs, he’s been charged with molesting a 15-year-old boy.
His photo appears at right. We’ll let you be the judge.
Biber is treasurer of the Minnesota State Bar Association, and a former president of the Hennepin County Bar Association. He’s being held at the Hennepin County jail. Freeman’s office expects to ask for $1 million bail at his arraignment, scheduled for Tuesday.
South Lake Minnetonka police arrested Biber on Friday at the Eden Prairie Mall, where he had allegedly arranged to meet the boy. Authorities say Biber had previously had sex with the boy in October at Biber’s Shorewood home.
Gray Plant Mooty has put Biber “on leave” and taken down his bio. This Minnesota firm can teach Biglaw a thing or two — they’ve even eliminated the cached version.
UPDATE: Actually, you can find a cached version of his 2007 bio here (gavel bang: commenter). We’ve pasted a portion of it after the jump.
More yucky allegations, and the reaction from his colleagues, after the jump.
Today the winners of Lawyer of the Day honors are obvious. Congratulations to Arthur Cutillo, Michael Kimelman, and Jason Goldbfarb, three attorneys who stand accused of involvement in the infamous Galleon Group insider trading scheme.
Both Cutillo and Kimelman have distinguished pedigrees, with ties to two top firms. Cutillo (left), a holder of an M.S. in chemical engineering as well as a J.D. (both from Villanova), was an associate at the white-shoe firm of Ropes & Gray. Kimelman (right), a partner at Incremental Capital LLC, once worked as an associate at super-prestigious Sullivan & Cromwell.
Check out Cutillo’s firm bio and Kimelman’s LinkedIn profile over here.
The third charged lawyer, Jason Goldfarb, apparently worked as a personal injury lawyer in Brooklyn. He allegedly served as a conduit of information between Cutillo and Zvi Goffer — the former Galleon employee apparently referred to as “Octopussy” at the SEC, because “he had his arms in so many insider” trading schemes.
As we’ve noted in Morning Docket for the past twodays, lawyer Scott Rothstein is in all kinds of trouble in Florida. From what we understand, it’s Marc Dreier redux, the sunshine state version.
We’re still trying to wrap our heads around the story, but as the Bard would say, the sh** hath hitteth the fan this week.
The WSJ Law Blog is similarly perplexed by the scandal (See What’s Going on at Rothstein Rosenfeldt? Part I and Part II).
Scott Rothstein, a founding partner of Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler, has been out of the country for the last few days, making this all even more confusing. He just flew back into Miami an hour ago and police have surrounded his firm. We give you context after the jump.
Ed. note: We gave this a shout-out last week in non-sequiturs (second item), but it’s egregious enough to merit more discussion.
Biglaw attorneys frequently complain about how hard it is to date given the amount of hours they devote to work. Attorneys at a small immigration firm in Chicago may have encountered a similar dilemma.
Perhaps inspired by Maggie Gyllenhaal’s cinematic portrayal of a sex-enjoying legal secretary, Samir Zia Chowhan of Chowhan Law allegedly advertised on Craigslist, in the “Adult Gigs” section, for a secretary with benefits. From Legal Profession Blog:
Loop law firm looking to hire am [sic] energetic woman for their open secretary/legal assistant position. Duties will include general secretarial work, some paralegal work and additional duties for two lawyers in the firm. No experience required, training will be provided. Generous annual salary and benefits will be provided, including medical, dental, life, disability, 401(k) etc. If interested, please send current resume and a few pictures along with a description of your physical features, including measurements. We look forward to meeting you.
Many of you will recall that Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan waged a war against Craigslist’s “Erotic Services” section earlier this year, claiming that there was rampant prostitution there. By her doing, the section was taken down and replaced by this “Adult Gigs” section, which is supposedly more closely monitored for illegal activity. But in our surfing of the section, we saw quite a few ads like Chowhan’s, including ones like this: “I’m seeking a young lady who would like to have some fun with me, possibly on a regular basis, in exchange for some help with bills or whatever.”
At least Chowhan was a little more discreet in his May 2009 ad. But when one woman responded, he made it clear why he had listed the job in the Adult Gigs section.
Deidre Dare is a senior lawyer in Allen & Overy’s Russia office. Like many an expat, she’s been maintaining a website, presumably to keep folks back home up to date on her life and to share the splendor of living abroad with random strangers on the Internet.
Allen & Overy was not too pleased to discover the novel. Per the Daily Mail:
Miss Dare, who is thought to earn £150,000 a year at the firm’s Russian office, is calling her steamy online novel, Expat: A Weekly Serialized Novel About Living in Moscow.
It describes the sordid lifestyle pursued by staff at a British-led professional firm in the capital.
Miss Dare’s promiscuous heroine describes herself as a ‘part drug addict, part alcoholic’ who regularly turns up for work hours late and hungover.
She and her colleagues are constantly seeking new sexual conquests, attend obscene sex shows involving donkeys and dwarves, blow fortunes at expensive restaurants and gossip about where they are planning to get drunk next.
Sounds like working abroad is like being a summer associate all year long. An erotic excerpt for the grammarians among you, after the jump.
Attorney Kevin Napper got busted in a Tampa prostitution sting. It wasn’t a Spitzer-esque high-end call girl thing. Instead Napper tried to solicit a $40 blow job (from an undercover police officer) in a local red-light district. Classy.
Surely Napper could have afforded higher-end services. He rolled up to the undercover officer rocking a gold Mercedes E500.
Still, Napper did manage to buy himself a motherload of hypocrisy for his forty bucks. Napper is married to Hillsborough County Circuit Judge Katherine Gail Essrig. She must be so proud.
Maybe Napper’s wife could have seen this coming. Napper received his J.D. from the University of North Dakota. But in a deliciously cheap twist of fate, he received his B.A. from Moorhead State.
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.”
The Empire State is sending all sorts of craziness our way lately. From the New York — no, not the Washington — Post:
A female federal prosecutor was viciously attacked by a hulking, razor-wielding drug dealer in a Brooklyn courtroom yesterday – and was saved when the thug’s 72-year-old lawyer and others tackled him.
“He was going to slash her throat,” said defense lawyer Harry Batchelder, who, along with a court reporter and two marshals, slammed Victor Wright, 27 [or 37?], to the ground and grabbed an inch-long razor blade from him.
Criminal defense lawyers are badass — even the septuagenarians. And don’t forget the court reporter:
“Why don’t you try me instead of her?” stenographer Ron Tolkin shouted at the cowardly criminal as he leaped on Wright, before the group fell to the ground in a heap.
Both the elderly lawyer and Tolkin, 60, are former military men who served in Vietnam.
Block immediately left the bench after the melee started, and more marshals rushed into the courtroom and helped subdue Wright, court officials said.
That’s too bad. This story would have been perfect with the addition of a black-robed avenger, whacking the criminal into submission with a gavel.
P.S. Despite our admiration for federal judges qua judges, if we needed to be defended against a knife-wielding lunatic, we’d go with a state court judge any day of the week. E.g., Judge Ira Robinson.
Former DLA Piper associate Charlene Morisseau isn’t just our Lawyer of the Day. This high-powered litigatrix — a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and a former editor of the Harvard Law Review — should be hailed as a heroine by Biglaw associates everywhere.
A Manhattan federal judge has thrown out a race discrimination suit brought against DLA Piper by a former associate who claimed the firm’s New York office was a hostile work environment.
Charlene Morisseau, a 2001 graduate of Harvard Law School, where she was a law review editor, joined DLA Piper as a litigation associate in April 2003 but was asked to leave less than a year later. In a lawsuit filed last year, Ms. Morisseau, who is black, claimed her firing was retaliation for complaints she had made about discriminatory treatment.
She requested almost $250 million in damages from the firm and the 11 partners she individually named in the suit.
Now, we’re all in favor of giving associates more money. But $250 million may be a bit much, even for a Harvard Law grad. It’s about 90 percent of DLA Piper’s total firm profits for 2006 ($280 million).
But it looks like Morisseau won’t be seeing a dime:
Southern District Judge Lewis Kaplan granted summary judgment to the firm Monday, finding that DLA Piper had put forth a “legitimate, non-discriminatory reason for plaintiff’s termination.”
“Here, the uncontradicted evidence demonstrates that plaintiff did not perform in a manner satisfactory to Piper notwithstanding her academic credentials,” the judge wrote. “She was a confrontational, stubborn, and insubordinate employee in an environment in which professional personal relations, flexibility and a willingness to accept supervision were essential.”
Now we’ve reached the good part. Here’s why Charlene Morisseau should be every associate’s idol:
[I]n court filings, DLA Piper denied treating Ms. Morisseau differently and said the firm had taken action because the ex-associate had exhibited a pattern of unacceptable behavior, including yelling at partners and throwing one out of her office.
The firm said Ms. Morisseau ordered former partner Marilla Ochis to “back up” out of her office after Ms. Ochis had come to discuss an e-mail exchange Ms. Morisseau had apparently taken offense to.
Have you ever fantasized about telling off your partner oppressors? Well, Charlene Morisseau has lived your dream — and then some.
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.
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
The proper hair styling product might just be the only thing standing between you and your dream job. And the best way to find what works for you is to try the best stuff on the market. Join Birchbox Man for $20 a month and you’ll get customized shipments of the best grooming and lifestyle gear on the market every month—everything from haircare and shaving supplies to style accessories and tech gadgets.
As the leading discovery commerce platform, Birchbox is redefining the retail process by offering consumers a unique and personalized way to discover, learn about, and shop the best grooming and lifestyle products out there. It’s a full 360-degree process: try, learn, buy. Once you sign up and fill out your profile, head over to Birchbox Man’s online magazine to find article and video tutorials on how to get the most out your monthly box products. Pick up full-size versions of anything you like in the Birchbox Shop and earn points for every purchase.
The traditional job application and interview process can be impersonal, and applicants often struggle to present themselves as more than just the sum of their GPAs, alma maters, and previous work history. ATL has partnered with ViewYou to help job seekers overcome this challenge. ViewYou NOW Profiles offer a unique way for job seekers to make a personal, memorable connection with prospective employers: introduction videos. These videos allow job candidates to display their personalities, interpersonal skills, and professional interests, creating an eDossier to brand themselves to potential employers all over the world. Check it out today!
Aaron Biber was a principal specializing in business law at the Minnesota law firm of Gray Plant Mooty — until yesterday. As mentioned in yesterday’s Non-Sequiturs, he’s been charged with molesting a 15-year-old boy.
