Last time we checked in with Paul Ceglia — the Man Who Would Be King of Facebook — and his lawsuit claiming partial ownership of the social media giant, he was facing sanctions if he refused to provide Facebook with a very touchy document known as the Kasowitz letter.
Well, the production deadline has come and gone, and there’s no letter. You know what that means. All aboarrrd! Next stop, Benchslap City…
A lot of legal work is decidedly uncool. Sadly, there’s just not much sexiness in talking about your latest corporate bankruptcy case or major document review project.
But there are exceptions. Case in point: entertainment lawyers. How sweet would it be to represent celebrities? (Except if you had to work for train wrecks veteran rock stars like Courtney Love).
So, that being said, let’s take a look at the Hollywood Reporter’s newly released Power Lawyers 2012 list, which rounds up the top 100 entertainment attorneys in America.
Maybe you know someone on the list?
Continue reading “Who are America’s Top 100 Entertainment ‘Power Lawyers’?”
Paul Ceglia’s lawsuit claiming a major ownership stake in Facebook is heating up again. There has been a flurry of court activity over the last couple of weeks, and it looks like things are getting close (we can only hope) to a thrilling conclusion.
In a new, strongly worded ruling, a federal magistrate judge threatened to impose more sanctions on Ceglia and ordered him to produce a letter written by Kasowitz, one of his (many) former law firms, which Facebook’s attorneys say will blow the doors off whatever remains of his case.
Let’s take a ride on the benchslap express….
Continue reading “Benchslap of the Day: Ceglia Gets Slammed (Yet Again)”
* A U.S. congressional panel has voted to charge Attorney General Eric Holder with contempt of Congress. [Thomson Reuters News and Insight]
* Paul Ceglia’s motion to stay discovery, pending the resolution of his motion to disqualify Facebook’s attorneys, was denied. In last night’s ruling, the judge was less than sympathetic to Ceglia. [United States District Court Western District of New York]
* We wrote about Thomas Jefferson Law grad Michael Wallerstein‘s struggles with a quarter million dollars in law school debt last year. But it looks like he may have found an unorthodox, if not somewhat dodgy, escape route. On the other hand, maybe he’s gone out of the frying pan into the fire. [New York Post]
* The McCormick legal recruiting firm sued one of its former account managers for violating a noncompete clause. Fun times were had by all no one. [Blog of the Legal Times]
* The lawyer going after The Oatmeal and the charities benefiting from the “Bear Love Cancer Bad” campaign has now subpoenaed Twitter and ArsTechica. That’s pretty impressive for just about a week of work. [ArsTechica]
* An online knitting community feels the wrath of the U.S. Olympic Committee’s intellectual property enforcement team. [Gawker]
* Businesses have to choose their employees carefully so they don’t get sued down the road. Sometimes, apparently that means you should hire criminals. [New York Times]
We have covered the lawsuit filed — and tenaciously fought — by Paul Ceglia against Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg for quite some time now. The embattled entrepreneur/businessman/whatever claims he owns 50 percent of Facebook, according to a contract allegedly signed between him and Zuckerberg back in 2003.
To be frank, Ceglia is not the most popular litigant. He has been fined by the court, dropped as a client by several respected firms, and roundly criticized by Facebook’s counsel and by the media (including some writers for this particular publication).
Today, we have some updates in the case. Facebook’s attorneys at Gibson Dunn are not impressed, but Ceglia claims the new developments could be game changers. Oh yeah, and we also have an interview with Paul Ceglia, where he dishes on the Facebook case, his other inventions, and his general opinion of the legal profession…
No, not that gavel...
* Dewey retired partners with unfunded pensions get a seat at the table for this bankruptcy circus? Yeah, but only because the U.S. Trustee did something unheard of and appointed a committee of former partners as creditors. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Yesterday was definitely a great day to be gay on the east coast. In addition to the First Circuit’s DOMA decision, a New York appellate court ruled that being called gay is no longer defamatory per se. [New York Law Journal]
* Milberg is the latest firm to dump Paul Ceglia of Facebook lawsuit fame, but Dean Boland, his other lawyer, says the Biglaw firm just “serve[d] as a distraction.” Somebody please give this man a dislike button. [Buffalo News]
* Humblebrag of the day by Judge Alsup of Oracle v. Google fame: he’s written lines of code “a hundred times before.” He also squashed Oracle’s API copyright infringement claims like bugs. [Courthouse News Service]
* Remember Kimberly Ireland, the Kansas attorney who falsely accused Judge Kevin Moriarty of waxing his gavel beneath the bench? She got a retroactive two-year suspension. [ABA Journal via Legal Profession Blog]
* Elizabeth Warren has confirmed that she told Harvard Law and Penn Law that she was a Native American, but only after she had been hired. She didn’t get any action of the affirmative variety, no sir. [Associated Press]
* Recent law school graduates are a little more desperate than we thought they were. At least 32 people have already applied for that BC Law job advertising a salary below minimum wage. [Boston Business Journal]
* Activision settled a lawsuit with two Call of Duty developers, but isn’t worried about an effect on its financials due to a strong third quarter performance. And you can thank your damn Elite packages for that. [PCMag]
* “I think that you know what the president said … was appropriate.” While the DOJ scrambles to meet Judge Smith’s memo deadline, Attorney General Eric Holder is busy defending Obama’s con law faux pas. [CNN]
* Six more partners have fled from Dewey & LeBoeuf, bringing the grand total of partner defections to at least 46 since January. Good Lord, somebody needs to get this firm a freakin’ tourniquet. [Wall Street Journal]
* Facebook filed a motion to dismiss Paul Ceglia’s ownership claims, but he isn’t going anywhere soon. Ceglia’s got two months to submit expert reports as to the authenticity of his fake contract. [Associated Press]
* Joe Jamail, “America’s richest practicing lawyer,” donated his $3M law library to TSU’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law. Now students can learn more so they don’t have to sue over being graded on a curve. [Fox]
* McDonald’s doesn’t have to worry about its G-rated Happy Meal toys in California anymore. It’s that XXX-rated lawsuit over a former employee’s “Filet-O-Fish” that the company’s really got to keep an eye on. [Reuters]
Attorneys for Facebook went on the offensive yesterday, filing a bold motion to dismiss Paul Ceglia’s lawsuit, which claims a 50 percent ownership stake in the company.
Among other things, the motion, which is a product of an extensive forensic investigation, calls Ceglia’s case “a fraud and a lie.”
I am excited to see this motion, and I hope it succeeds. Ceglia and his cockamamie lawsuit have had their day in the sun. It’s time for Mark Z. to move on to bigger and better things, like handling the company’s impending IPO and fixing the stupid Timeline, which is currently only useful for seeing exactly how terrible my friends’ tastes in music are.
Anyway, let’s look at Facebook’s extensive allegations, as well as Ceglia’s unsurprisingly oddball responses….
Continue reading “Facebook Moves to Dismiss Ceglia Ownership Suit”
'Hahaha, and then I said that I didn't know they were prostitutes.'
* Was the Obamacare case brought prematurely? Did the Supreme Court’s judicial intervention come too soon? Yesterday’s arguments before SCOTUS can be summed up in four simple words: “That’s what she said.” [New York Times]
* Howrey going to get out of this one? The defunct firm’s bankruptcy trustee, Allan Diamond, is trying to decide whether he’ll be bringing adversary claims against the dissolution committee and its members. [Am Law Daily]
* U.S. News is doing what the American Bar Association refuses to do: make law schools its b*tch. Listen up, administrators, because your next “reporting error” could cost you your ranking. [National Law Journal]
* Armed with a treasure trove of new evidence, Facebook has moved to dismiss Paul Ceglia’s lawsuit. What does his lawyer from Milberg have to say? A hacker planted all of the evidence, duh. [Wall Street Journal]
* Apparently Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s got hos in different area codes. He’s been keeping his pimp hand strong — so strong, that he’s been charged with aggravated procurement of prostitutes. [Bloomberg]
* Broke your nose trying to walk through a glass wall at the Apple store and now you’re suing for $1M? That’s an app for that! It’s called common sense, and for a limited time only, it’s being offered free of charge. [Forbes]
* Due process, judicial process, yeah, yeah, same difference. Not so, says Attorney General Eric Holder — especially when it comes to assassinating killing Americans abroad. [Blog of Legal Times]
* Now that BP has settled claims made by private sector plaintiffs, state and federal government lawyers are getting ready to wait “months, not weeks” for their new trial date. [Financial Times]
* Newt Gingrich wants his “Eye of the Tiger” copyright infringement suit to be dismissed. Listen, judge, if he can’t play this song, we won’t get our moon base or cheaper gas. [The Caucus / New York Times]
* As if being a Mets fan wasn’t bad enough on its own, Judge Jed Rakoff has struck again. He refused to dismiss Irving Picard’s lawsuit, and now the team’s owners must go to trial over millions. [Businessweek]
* Lawyers from Milberg will be joining Paul Ceglia’s legal team. They must not have checked this dude’s Facebook timeline — this is the the fifth firm to sign up for a Gibson Dunn sucker punch. [Bloomberg]
* Thanks to a decision by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit, Jared Loughner will continue to be forcibly medicated. What better way to restore him to competency than to shove pills down his throat? [Reuters]
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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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.
Keep reading »
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