For connoisseurs of salacious suits, Marchuk v. Faruqi & Faruqi is the gift that keeps on giving. First Alexandra Marchuk, a young lawyer and recent Vanderbilt Law graduate, sued the Faruqi firm, claiming that she was subjected to relentless sexual harassment during the short time that she worked there. Then the Faruqis and partner Juan Monteverde fired back, filing aggressive counterclaims against Marchuk.
Marchuk isn’t taking these claims lying down. She has amended her complaint to add new causes of action and to increase her multimillion-dollar demand….
Biglaw firms are busy — busy making money, of course — and very reputation-conscious. They don’t want to be distracted by litigation, and they don’t want their white shoes sullied by grime. They will pay good money to make headaches go away.
But suing a scrappy plaintiff-side firm is an entirely different story. They will hit back — and hard.
Last month, Alexandra Marchuk sued her former firm, Faruqi & Faruqi, making a host of salacious allegations. The most incendiary: that a partner of the firm, Juan Monteverde, forcibly had sex with her in his office after the firm holiday party.
Now the Faruqis and Monteverde are turning it around on Alexandra Marchuk. They’re suing her back, filing counterclaims and seeking an eight-figure sum….
It’s time to announce the winner of August’s Lawyer of the Month competition. Last month, we had a potpourri of lawyers and judges allegedly behaving badly for readers to choose from. In the end, one of our candidates stole the show with 41 percent of the total vote.
Let’s find out who took home the title of Lawyer of the Month — a man who coincidentally was behind one of the best lawyer sex scandals of the summer. Get ready to swallow the evidence, ladies, because what happens in Vegas usually doesn’t stay in Vegas for very long when it’s captured on a jailhouse candid camera….
August seemed like it was a relatively lazy month for lawyers. Nobody did anything too crazy — except, of course, for our Lawyer of the Month nominees. As usual, we’ve got some pretty interesting characters in our line up for the honored and revered title.
Which attorney allegedly got a blow job from a client in the county jail? Which judge allegedly drew a bull’s-eye on an attorney’s picture and displayed it in his courtroom? And which attorney allegedly tried to extort jewels and riches from her former flame, a lawyerly Lothario?
As baseball fans are well-aware, the San Diego Padres don’t have a very good record. At 15 games below .500 this year, they’re the second-worst team in the National League West, the fourth-worst team in the National League, and the fifth-worst team in all of MLB right now. The Padres have only won the National League Pennant twice, but lost in the World Series both times. They’re the only team in MLB to never record a no-hitter. To be frank, the Padres suck.
Why anyone would want to apply for a job working with the Padres is simply beyond me. Why that same person, a law student at the time, would apply for a job with the Padres at least 30 times puts her in wackadoodle territory. But who am I to judge?
Anyway, eventually people get sick of receiving rejection letter after rejection letter after rejection letter — or in most cases, no rejection letter at all. These days, people don’t even have the courtesy to tell you to go f**k yourself. I’m sure recent law school graduates can commiserate.
But after applying and being summarily rejected for an extremely low-rent job with the Padres, this former law student had absolutely had it. She was mad as hell, and she wasn’t going to take it anymore. The result? Possibly the best email ever sent from a repeatedly rejected job seeker….
* “I’ve been a restaurant waitress, a hotel hostess, a car parker, a nurse’s aide, a maid in a motel, a bookkeeper and a researcher.” This SCOTUS wife was well-prepared to give a graduation speech at New England Law. [Huffington Post]
* Sniffling over lost profits is the best way to get a court to take your side. Biglaw firms have asked the Second Circuit to consider reversing a decision in the Coudert Brothers “unfinished business” clawback case. [Legal Intelligencer]
* James Holmes, the alleged Aurora movie theater gunman, is being evicted from his apartment. Guess he didn’t know — or care — that booby-trapping the place with bombs would be against the terms of his lease. [Denver Post]
* The ABA has created a task force to study the future of legal education, and its work is expected to completed in 2014. ::rolleyes:: Oh, good thing they’re not in any kind of a hurry — there’s no need to rush. [ABA Journal]
* Indiana Tech, the little law school that nobody wants could, has hired its first faculty members. Thus far, the school has poached law professors from from West Virginia, Florida A&M, and Northern Illinois. [JD Journal]
* When divorces get weird: is this lawyer’s soon-to-be ex-wife hacking into his law firm email account and planning to publish privileged communications online? Yep, this is in Texas. [Unfair Park / Dallas Observer]
* Breast-feeding porn: yup, that’s a thing, so start Googling. A New Jersey mother is suing an Iowa production company after an instructional video she appeared in was spliced to create pornography. [Boston Globe]
* If someone from your school newspaper asks you for a quote about oral sex, and then you’re quoted in the subsequent article, you’re probably not going to win your invasion of privacy lawsuit. [National Law Journal]
What happens in Vegas is supposed to stay in Vegas, but when you’re caught on camera with your pants around your ankles, you may experience some difficulty with that used-up, old cliché.
You’d think that attorneys would refrain from whipping it out in jail after learning about the guy who allegedly offered pro boner services to female inmates, but as usual, you’d be wrong. That being said, the next time you absolutely need to get off, you may want to take some advice from our Lawyer of the Day, Curtis Cannon. He’s facing up to four years in prison for allegedly dipping his Cannon balls in a jailed client’s mouth.
Because really, why bother with client service when you can get your clients to service you instead?
Two porn stars made a “bet” on Twitter that they’d perform oral sex on fans of the Miami Heat if the team won the NBA championship. I’m not sure what these ladies agreed to do if the Heat lost; I’m going to pretend that they promised to “go back to college and blow your minds,” because I like the thought of LeBron being blamed for ruining their chances at an education.
In any event, the Heat won, and the women committed to going through with their dare. They set up a website, TeamBJNBA, to promulgate the rules of their free giveaway — because if they were paid to service the fans, THAT would be wrong and illegal.
But it appears that the NBA noticed their branding. I can only imagine the kind of person who would be confused into thinking that the NBA now sponsored BJs for fans of championship teams… though if they did, I suspect interest in the league would increase exponentially. The NBA moved to stop the giveaway, but you can’t keep good girls up off their knees.
Details, pictures, silicone, and notes on how to retrieve your champion rewards to follow….
Let me begin by making one thing clear: I support the nomination of Brett H. McGurk to serve as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Republic of Iraq. He is eminently qualified for this post, in light of his extensive experience, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, dealing with the complex and sensitive issues that exist between the United States and Iraq.
Brett McGurk’s brilliance lies beyond dispute — he’s a member of the Elect, after all — and the same is true of his heroism and commitment to public service. In the late 1990s, while he was a summer associate at Cravath, he and a fellow summer rescued two drowning women during a beach outing gone awry. After graduating from Columbia Law School, he devoted his legal career to government service — clerking for Judge Dennis Jacobs (2d Cir.) and the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, working as a legal advisor to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, serving on the National Security Council, and counseling two past ambassadors to Iraq, Ryan Crocker and Christopher Hill. McGurk possesses vast expertise about Iraq, acquired through the many years he has spent advancing U.S. interests in the region — at considerable personal risk to himself.
If you are a high-minded individual, you can stop reading here. If you are less high-minded, keep reading to learn about the sexy email messages that Brett McGurk allegedly exchanged with a prominent (and attractive) journalist….
Please note the UPDATES added at the end of this post.
Let's just say that my Google Image search for 'black prophet' was underwhelming.
* When the student debt bubble bursts and causes general economic ruin, I don’t want to be called a “prophet.” You may call me “messenger,” as in the sentence, “We’d like welcome the messenger, Elie Mystal, to the program. Tell us, seer, what it was like being so far ahead of the curve.” [Democrat and Chronicle]
* No one expects the Spanish Inquisition American Government. [The Atlantic]
* Here are some good apps for legal types, but I don’t see the one for models and bottles. [OnlineCollege]
* If you are writing a new Constitution would you really want to start by copying ours? Really? Really? Nothing of import has happened in the past 200 years that you wouldn’t at least want to reflect in your brand new governance document? [Recess Appointments]
* Who will be fined for MIA flipping the bird during halftime of the Super Bowl? I think the FCC should fine itself. It’s only by acting like shocked prudes every time a bare breast shows up that some no-name thinks she can make a big name for herself by giving the finger to nobody in particular. For the love of Christ, Adriana Lima offered me a goddamn blow job during the Super Bowl, but the FCC wants to react to the finger? [The Legal Blitz]
* Sonia Sotomayor couldn’t make time to attend the State of the Union, but you can find her on Sesame Street after the jump…
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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.
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?
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