The weather is finally heating up here in New York City, so this seems like a good time to remind everybody of their rights to unburden themselves of oppressive upper body clothing.
It’s cool, it’s for charity.
It’s legal, and if the cops hassle you about it, you might be able to really cash in…
God, I love living in New York. Other cities think they’re “diverse.” Other cities think they have “racial tolerance.” Other cities don’t have diddle squat on NYC. I once saw a Puerto Rican call a ginger a “dumb sounding mic” and a black woman fired back with, “Why don’t you shut up before we all start thinking of names for you!” (Note: that woman was a little crazy; she left the subway banging some dude with her purse because he “bumped” her.) I once saw a meek-looking woman in a skirt suit ask a guy to blow his cigar smoke somewhere else, and the smoker said, “F*** you,” and the woman wheeled around, motioned to her crotch, and said, “Oh, better men have tried,” in an accent that suddenly sounded like she just rolled off a dock in Brooklyn.
In New York City, the majority race is “New Yorkers.” Sure, black New Yorkers have a harder time getting a cab, white New Yorkers have a harder time going to the movies without audience participation, but in so many ways the experience of living in NYC defines us more than our races, colors, and creeds.
So, it makes perfect sense to me there is a move to allow New York City residents to vote together, regardless of what country they come from or whether they are U.S. citizens. We don’t care about U.S. citizenship, we care about New York citizenship. To quote The Paper (the most underrated movie of my lifetime: “I don’t f***ing live in the f***ing world! I live in f***ing New York City! So go f**k yourself!”
Continue reading “New York City Loves Voting So Much It Might Let Foreigners Do It”
1010 Fifth Avenue is just steps away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (visible in the background).
Biglaw isn’t the only source of big bucks. In fact, some of the wealthiest lawyers in America are plaintiffs’ lawyers who work on their own or in small law firms.
But you don’t need to be a plaintiff-side lawyer from Texas to strike it rich. A partner at an elite litigation boutique in New York just bought an apartment once owned by a famous business mogul.
Let’s see what $12.5 million buys in the Big Apple these days….
Continue reading “Lawyerly Lairs: A Small-Firm Lawyer’s Big-Ticket Apartment”
As all sentient beings are aware, we have a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad legal job market. According to NALP data, the industry is down 50,000 jobs since 2008 and there is no reason to believe they will ever reappear. If you ignore school-funded positions (5% of the total number of jobs), this market is worse than its previous low point of 1993-1994. In light of these grim economic realities, we feel that potential law students should prioritize their future job prospects over other factors in deciding whether to attend law school. To put it mildly, inputs- (LSATs, GPAs, per capita spending, etc.) and reputational survey-based law school rankings schemes have proved unsatisfactory. Hence our release last week of the ATL Top 50 Law Schools, which is based on nothing but outcomes.
(Although he probably disapproves of all rankings, it must be said that the legal world owes a great debt to Kyle McEntee and his colleagues at Law School Transparency. LST has forced us all to look at the publicly available employment data, submitted by the schools to the ABA, in a more meaningful way. Like all good ideas, it seems obvious in retrospect.)
We received a ton of feedback and comments regarding our rankings and our methodology, much of it thoughtful and substantive. (Our very own Elie Mystal weighed in with this takedown the day after we published.) Quite a few recurrent criticisms emerged from the comments. Of course there’s no perfect dataset or methodology. At best, rankings are a useful simulacrum and just one of many tools available to 0Ls for researching and comparing schools.
What follows are the most common criticisms of the ATL Top 50 Law Firms rankings….
Continue reading “The ATL Top 50 Law Schools: A Roundup of Criticism”
Just outside the window: marble statues of Roman goddesses.
Once upon a time, there lived a beautiful Swedish woman. She came to the United States and studied at an elite college and top law school. After graduation, she went to work at Davis Polk — which is where all the beautiful people work.
While at Davis Polk, this blonde beauty met her Prince Charming — an older, extremely successful M&A partner. They got married at a Caribbean resort, and their wedding made the pages of the New York Times (of course). A few years later, she left the firm to become the general counsel to a global investment bank. Unlike many other power couples, they remain married to this day.
Fairy tales can come true. Let’s learn about a remarkable couple, then ogle their castle in the clouds….
Continue reading “Lawyerly Lairs: Partners Part With Pricey Penthouse”
SLU Law’s recent deanship drama?
* The Department of Justice announced federal charges against suspected Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev yesterday, leaving the decision of whether the death penalty will be sought in Eric Holder’s hands. [National Law Journal]
* Andrew Ceresney, most recently of Debevoise, was appointed to run the SEC’s enforcement bureau alongside George Canellos, an agency veteran. Maybe they’ll both be able to boost morale. [DealBook / New York Times]
* “[T]he best way to find Albany on a map is to look for the intersection of greed and ambition.” Preet Bharara is mad as hell about corruption, and he’s not going to take it anymore. [New York Law Journal]
* If Anthony Weiner decides to join the New York City mayoral race, partners from Am Law 200 firms will be responsible for his second coming thanks to their pre-wiener scandal funding. [Am Law Daily]
* “It’s done. Turn the page. The distraction is over.” The new dean of St. Louis University’s law school would like to move forward from the “slow-motion train wreck” of years past. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch]
The facade of 1067 Fifth Avenue (via Bridge and Tunnel Club).
Each week, the Big Ticket column in the New York Times real estate section records the most expensive housing deal of the prior week. The most recent column focused on a $16.25 million condo on the 42nd floor of the Trump International Hotel and Tower — a two-bedroom apartment, so that works out to a little more than $8 million per bedroom. Welcome to the world of high-end Manhattan real estate.
The second-place sale, clocking in at $8.325 million, took place across town on the Upper East Side. The apartment in question, once inhabited by a notable New York lawyer, will now welcome a high-ranking partner at a top international law firm.
Oh, and he clerked for the Supreme Court, too. Some people truly do lead charmed lives. And wait until you see the pictures of his new residence….
Continue reading “Lawyerly Lairs: An $8 Million, Full-Floor Flat”
My first crush was a girl in this class whose name was Theresa. She’s the one standing to the right of Mrs. Goins. She’s good-looking; I always had good taste.
– Justice Antonin Scalia, sharing memories of his grade school days in a New York Magazine feature called Childhood in New York.
Judge Frederic Block (E.D.N.Y.)
It’s hard out here for authors of judicial memoirs who are not named Sonia Sotomayor. Just ask Judge Frederic Block (E.D.N.Y.), a federal trial judge in Brooklyn since 1994 and the author of an appealing new book, Disrobed: An Inside Look at the Life and Work of a Federal Trial Judge (affiliate link). In Disrobed, Judge Block describes his surprising rise from small-town Long Island lawyer to Article III aristocracy, where he has presided over cases involving the Crown Heights riots, Kitty Genovese, mob boss Peter Gotti, and other headline-making subjects.
The book has received several favorable notices. Writing in the New York Times, Sam Roberts described Disrobed as an “engaging” book that provides “a rare look behind decision-making on the federal bench.” Over at Simple Justice, Scott Greenfield called the memoir a “well-written,” “easy and quick read,” by a “quite well-regarded” judge. I’ve read the book myself, and I concur with Roberts and Greenfield.
But even though the book has sold well, exceeding the expectations of its publisher, Thomson Reuters, Disrobed hasn’t attained the bestselling status of Justice Sotomayor’s My Beloved World (affiliate link). And this makes Judge Block a little sad, as he confessed to me when I recently visited him in chambers.
Especially because Judge Block came painfully close to what would have been a big, big break….
Continue reading “An Afternoon With Judge Frederic Block, Author of ‘Disrobed’”
I guess soda pushers will have to go back to slinging rocks.
In case you haven’t been following along with developments inside Mike Bloomberg’s militarized nanny state, last year our elected tyrant outlawed the sale of soda in sizes over 16 ounces at movie theaters and other public places. The mayor felt that nobody needed more than 16 ounces of soda in one sitting, notwithstanding the fact that nobody asked him what my mother thinks.
The law sparked a lawsuit, and today a judge overturned Mayor Bloomberg’s ban.
Bloomberg was not immediately available for comment, most likely because his lawyers were busy drawing up documents to move forward with Bloomberg’s new purchase of the “New York Supreme Court”….
Continue reading “Judge Overturns NYC Soda Ban; NOW WE JUST NEED SOME POP ROCKS!”
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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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 »
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