Olswang

This law firm is ditching its suits and ties for t-shirts and sneakers.

* Rhonda Crawford, the Illinois law clerk who allegedly posed as a judge and was running unopposed for her own judgeship, was indicted for her judicial impersonation. Crawford does not intend to drop out of the race for a seat on the bench, despite the state bar ethics commission seeking to suspend her license to practice. [Chicago Tribune]

* London firms CMS and Olswang are merging with international firm Nabarro for a three-way combination that’s set to close in May 2017 and operate under the name CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang, but rumor has it an American firm wants to get in on the action. Will Hunton & Williams join in for four-way fun? [The Lawyer]

* “[M]aybe Republicans can stop with the 60-something repeal votes they’ve taken … and just work with the next president to smooth out the kinks.” President Obama hopes that maybe when his second term in the White House is over, his signature healthcare law can be fixed. He doesn’t even care if they change its name to “Reagancare.” [Reuters]

* “The panic is starting to set in. Those who have a lot of interests at stake need to do work now.” Lawyers across the pond are poised for a profitable 2017 thanks to people scrambling for legal advice following Brexit, but those billables won’t last forever; after all, lawyers aren’t “immune to a broader economic slowdown.” [Big Law Business]

* More law schools are partially or completely covering bar exam preparation costs for their students, but with pass rates plummeting across the nation, you must be curious if this trend has had any positive effect. It worked for Loyola New Orleans and Southern University, whose pass rates for first-timers increased quite a bit. [ABA Journal]

* As we previously mentioned, London-based firms CMS and Olswang and international firm Nabarro were considering entering into a merger. Partners at all three firms have officially voted in favor of the merger, which will close in May 2017. The new firm will operate under the CMS name. We’ll have more on this later. [Legal Week]

* “The infringement has been affirmed, now it’s whether this huge judgment should be affirmed.” In the Supreme Court’s first design patent case in more than 120 years, Samsung will face off against Apple today, where the smartphone companies will duke it out over how much Samsung should have had to pay for copying the iPhone. [Reuters]

* “Justice [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg no longer needs to worry about whether she seems threatening to the Court. She is the Court.” A new linguistics research study tells us what we can learn from Justice Ginsburg’s accent as a lawyer versus her accent as a Supreme Court justice, and how all lawyers make accommodations in their speech. [TIME]

* By edict of a federal court — and over Governor Rick Scott’s objections — Florida’s voter registration deadline has been extended to 5 p.m. Wednesday thanks to Hurricane Matthew’s interference with last-minute sign-ups. Florida’s Democratic Party alleged many voters would be “severely burdened” by the hurricane’s effects. [CNN]

* Sorry, social justice warriors: Harvard Law 1Ls wanted to feed the university’s striking dining services workers at their sections’ social committee events, but Dean Marcia Sells shut down their plans, saying it “does not seem to make sense for us to encourage … students to bring in food to feed workers who are on strike.” [The Concourse / Deadspin]

* According to a labor relations suit filed in 2012, Donald Trump allegedly wanted to fire female employees of Trump National Golf Club in California, who he didn’t think were pretty enough. The suit was settled without any admission of wrongdoing. [Los Angeles Times]

* Biglaw mega-merger alert: Word on the street is that London-based firms CMS and Olswang will join with international firm Nabarro for a three-way merger that would create a combined entity with more than 3,000 lawyers. If the merger were to go through, the firm would have more than $1.5 billion in revenue. [LegalWeek]

* According to the results of this survey, corporate counsel don’t think too highly of millennials when it comes to loyalty. Almost 70 percent of baby boomers and Gen Xers thought millennial lawyers in their legal departments would leave in less than five years, potentially causing “major problem[s]” in terms of turnover rates. [WSJ Law Blog]

* How many women serve as lead counsel in New York state and federal courts and in mediation and arbitration? That’s what a new study being conducted by the New York State Bar Association’s Commercial and Federal Litigation Section hopes to find out, because “[o]nce you have a diagnosis, you can get to a solution.” [New York Law Journal]

* “Something is going wrong at this bank, and you are the head of it. You should be fired.” Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf may be forfeiting $41 million in pay, but lawmakers were still pretty darn upset with him when he testified before the House Financial Services Committee at a hearing yesterday. [DealBook / New York Times]

* Phil C. Neal, former dean of University of Chicago Law School, RIP. [UChicago News]

* The “Federal Criminal Discovery Blue Book” — which is exactly what it sounds like, a trial manual by federal prosecutors for federal prosecutors — is protected from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act as attorney work product. [Wall Street Journal]

* Donald Trump Jr. seems to have “borrowed” lines from his convention speech from his own speech writer. And the defense of Melania Trump’s plagiarism at Monday night’s RNC keeps getting more and more outlandish. Now it involves My Little Pony. [CNN]

* Former Cardinals director of baseball development Christopher Correa is going to jail for hacking into emails of the Houston Astros, and now Major League Baseball is looking into the scandal. [Law360]

* The Department of Justice really, really wants the Supreme Court to rehear the immigration case of U.S. v. Texas, which ended in an unsatisfying tie — preferably once they get, you know, the traditional nine justices. [National Law Journal]

* And you thought your job was stressful — imagine if you were running your global firm’s Turkey office. [American Lawyer]

* Potential merger in the air: CMS Cameron McKenna is eyeing Olswang. [The Lawyer]

“Privacy is for paedos,” announced tabloid journalist Paul McMullan, formerly of Rupert Murdoch’s now defunct British tabloid News of the World, while speaking last week at an enquiry set up in response to this summer’s phone hacking scandal. Firmly unapologetic for having harassed celebrities via an impressive range of mediums, McMullan continued: “Fundamentally, no one […]

Last week it emerged that a British teenager had been jailed for two months for taking a photo on his cellphone from the public gallery of a courtroom. Now, I know in the U.S. you’d probably just have executed the kid, but to us effete Europeans it seems a little harsh to dish out prison […]