Jesse Strauss
I think everyone is cheering for us, but not necessarily betting on us.
– Jesse Strauss, one of the lawyers behind the class action law school lawsuits, commenting in an interview with New York Magazine on whether he believes fellow lawyers support the cause.
Paul Bergrin
* New York magazine is on a roll: first the buzz-generating Paper Tigers piece, then the big Anna Nicole Smith story, and now this great profile of Paul Bergrin, “The Baddest Lawyer in the History of Jersey.” [New York Magazine]
* When Elie read Megan McArdle’s response to his debt story, he screamed, “I said I PAID my federal loans!” I told him the screen couldn’t hear him but he kept right on screaming. [The Atlantic]
* A few highlights from the Sarah Palin email dump. [Wonkette]
* A lap dance might get a rise out of a recipient, but it doesn’t rise to the level of art, according to a New York state appellate court. [Albany Times-Union]
* The new home of Paul Clement — Bancroft PLLC, founded by Viet Dinh — has become D.C.’s “it” firm with respect to conservative causes. Where does it get its name? [Bloomberg BusinessWeek]
* Speaking of the former Solicitor General, here’s his substantive defense of the Defense of Marriage Act (via Chris Geidner). Check it out — there’s a link to his brief — and see what you think. [Poliglot / Metro Weekly]
* Speaking of gay marriage, here’s an interesting legal issue, involving foster care and adoption, same-sex couples, and religious freedom. [Peoria Journal Star]
* An update on Aaron Biber, prominent law firm partner turned convicted pedophile. [Minnesota Lawyer]
Anna Nicole Smith (via Getty Images).
During her short lifetime, Anna Nicole Smith managed to sell sex, jeans, weight-loss pills and, with her reality show, a sense of superiority to millions of Americans who could take some solace in the fact that they were not that messed up. She was voluptuous, then she was just plain fat, then she was voluptuous again and, all the while, she slurred her words and giggled through a series of unfortunate events that were all surely her own doing, right? She asked for all of this, right? The deaths and bankruptcies, rises and falls. She had it coming and when her life became entangled in a series of lawsuits, well… that was the natural outgrowth of a life lived so stupidly.
And then she died. Because, of course she did. And the lawsuits refuse to die. Because, of course they do. As noted last fall on this website, the Supreme Court took up one last (?) appeal in the case involving Anna Nicole Smith and sex and money. Except, the Court employs euphemisms like jurisdiction and congressional intent and non-Article III bankruptcy judges, because heaven forfend or something.
As her case flops and wheezes its way to the finish line, now is the perfect time for a look back at Anna Nicole’s life….
Continue reading “The Peculiarly American Anna Nicole Smith”
Here is a short Intelligencer item we just wrote for New York Magazine, about the two years that Mikheil Saakashvili, president of Georgia, spent in New York. It begins:
Fifteen years before his country was invaded — or, perhaps, reinvaded — by Russia, Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili was learning about the American system of law and living on the Upper West Side. He arrived here in 1993, spent a year at Columbia earning a master’s in law, and then worked one year as an associate at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler before returning to the newly independent former Soviet republic.
How is Saakashvili remembered by the professors and partners who knew him back then? Find out by reading the rest of the piece, available here.
Tbilisi on the Hudson: What Georgia’s president learned as a New York lawyer. [New York Magazine]
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:
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