While performing here at the ATL Cabaret on Wednesday night, the celebrated drag queen of Biglaw, Kaye Scholer, was pelted with rotten fruit — by her own associates. If you haven’t done so already, do check out their rage-filled rants. (If nothing else, they’ll make you feel better about your own firm.)
As we’ve stated before, we’re committed to presenting both sides of a given story here at Above the Law. Sometimes we don’t hear the other side of a story because the sources on that side don’t care to contact us. But when we do have both sides available to us, we present them.
In the case of the People v. Kaye Scholer, we did hear from a character witness on behalf of the defendant. What did this individual have to say?
We previously compared the law firm of Kaye Scholer to a drag queen. Kaye Scholer, Kay Scholer — geddit?
Well, some associates at Kaye Scholer claim they’ve seen underneath all the make-up — and it’s not pretty. This contestant would not go far in RuPaul’s Drag Race.
In terms of responses to our recent discussion of which firms aren’t paying spring bonuses, however, Kaye Scholer emerges a winner. We’ve heard from KS associates in droves over the past day or two — and the depth of their fury is impressive.
What are they so upset about? It’s not just the lack of spring bonuses. Let’s find out….
* Apple was hit with a lawsuit by parents angry that their credit cards were being used by their stupid kids to buy dumb swag in iPhone games. [Time]
* An Italian fortune, an American woman, and the suggestion that paternity sometimes cannot be forcefully established by the simple query “Who dat is?” [New York Times]
* When police use GPS to lojack hoes that drive Volvos and Rodeos, can they do it without a warrant? [WSJ Law Blog]
* An article about the ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20, or something like that. I’m not sure as I dozed off halfway through, like I regularly did during Ethics class in law school. [ABA Journal]
Eric Holder
* This post details various sports goings-on, like the possible move of the Sacramento Kings and former linebacker and all-around gentleman Bill Romanowski. Because Lat demands all the sports coverage we can find. [Am Law Daily]
* A possible explanation for Geoffrey Fieger’s outstanding website content. Smoking only the finest sticky icky. [Chicago Tribune]
* Eric Holder failed to pay taxes on his dead mother’s house. Until he did. Then the Post ran a story about when he didn’t. After he did. Super cool story, Post. [New York Post]
A trial was scheduled to start in Kansas federal court on June 14, 2011. Defendants moved for a short continuance because one of their lawyers is expecting his first child on July 3. (The lawyer in question, Bryan Erman, is quite cute — check out that chin dimple.)
Plaintiffs’ counsel objected to the continuance — strenuously. This took Judge Eric Melgren by surprise. And not in a good way.
Judge Melgren granted the continuance — and took the opportunity to benchslap the lawyers who refused to consent….
A Facebook photo to rival David Lat's infamous mobile upload of post-operative cysts.
When you allow a photo to be taken, you should expect that it will be shown to others. That’s at the heart of a judge’s decision in the famous placenta photo case. Unless you’ve been stuck inside a womb, you must have heard by now about the placenta that almost aborted a nursing student’s career.
As previously noted, a Kansas judge decided that nursing student Doyle Byrnes shouldn’t have been kicked out of her program for posting a photo of herself posing with a human placenta to Facebook (at right). It was a move worthy only of de-friending by the weak-stomached.
The actual written decision in the case has come out, and there’s some interesting analysis in it, as noted by Eric Goldman at his Technology & Marketing Law Blog. It suggests that “photo-taking automatically means consent to widespread publication of that photo.” We imagine Brett Favre might object to that….
There’s been so much talk of Biglaw women and baby making floating around the blogosphere this week that I think there must have been a “repopulate the species” action memo in US Weekly. Existentially, I blame the season. It’s January, and childless professional women just went through another holiday season getting bombarded with images of children on television (to say nothing of little nieces or nephews that might have been swarming like locusts when they visited family). They return back to their regularly scheduled lives, many of them with raises or bonuses for the new year, and now they’re looking around at their barren apartments and thinking, “What am I missing?”
You’ll see the same thing happen to men… after the Superbowl. They’ll watch the game and have fond memories of their dad or uncle or somebody teaching them fun things they can do with balls. Then post-Superbowl depression will set in, and you’ll see men sleepwalking through “honey-do” errands with vacant, suicidal looks on their faces. They’ll look around at fathers who don’t even seem to care which NCAA teams are on the bubble, and they’ll think, “What am I missing?”
But this week it’s women who are having replication pangs. Clear as I can tell, Vivia Chen on The Careerist started the ball rolling in the legal blogosphere by repackaging a Slate XX Factor article (by Dahlia Lithwick) that featured one woman telling other women that they were hobbling their careers by planning for a family before they had one.
And since women generally can’t stand to even be in the same room with each other, it wasn’t too long before everybody was rolling out their best women-dogging-other-women content….
I did a podcast a while back with the ABA Journal. The topic was “work/life balance.” You can listen to it here.
It was a weird experience – like living on another planet.
I was the sole male. The other panelists and the moderator were women. That’s fine, but somehow, faced with the topic of “work/life balance,” everyone turned into Gloria Steinem circa 1971.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a shrill, strident feminist committed to full equality for women, and I have no beef with Gloria Steinem.
But how is work/life balance in the legal world strictly a gender issue? Women are admitted to law schools, and graduate from them, like men. They go to the same law firms, make the same money and take the same abuse…
It’s time for a brief postscript on one of this month’s juicier (and well-trafficked) stories: the dismissal of three women associates from litigation powerhouse Boies Schiller. We have a few additional tidbits that we can share with you.
But this is probably the last story we’ll be doing on this drama, since we don’t expect anything else to emerge. One piece of information we’ve received is that the associates were offered severance pay — “very generous” severance, in the words of one source — but had to release any claims against the firm in exchange. All three took the deal, including the expectant mother. So don’t expect any “Aaron Charney for pregnant women”-type lawsuits.
What other details can we reveal about the situation?
This morning brought more lawyer layoff news. As reported by Peter Lattman over at DealBook, David Boies’s celebrated litigation firm, Boies Schiller, last week laid off three associates.
(The DealBook piece refers to the dismissals as “layoffs,” and we’ve used that terminology in the title of this post and the first paragraph. But whether these terminations should be considered true “layoffs” is open to question — please keep reading.)
As noted in Am Law Daily, the three associates “worked on the firm’s representation of British private equity firm Terra Firma in its unsuccessful civil suit against Citigroup.” Now that the three-week trial is over, presumably the firm felt it could let the women go — and perhaps make them the “fall guys” (or gals) for the adverse result.
Two of three associates used to work in the firm’s former office in Short Hills, New Jersey. After that office was spun off last year into what is now Stone & Magnanini, the two jumped across the Hudson to join the New York office of Boies. So perhaps they didn’t have powerful patrons at BSF – NYC to protect them from the ax.
There’s also a bit of backstory here, which didn’t make it into the reports of DealBook, Am Law Daily, and the ABA Journal….
LeBron James is taking his talents to Washington. Well, at least his lawyers are. Lawyers for King James have filed their motion to dismiss the suit filed by Leicester Bryce Stovell, a D.C.-based lawyer. Stovell claims that he is LeBron’s father and that LeBron’s mother, Gloria James, tampered with the paternity test that would have proven his claims. Our own Gabe Acevedo did an interview with Stovell back in July.
We offered LeBron the opportunity to appear on Above the Law during an hour-long special called “The Paternity,” where he would reveal the identity not of his biological father, but of whichever man gave him the best chance of expanding LeBron’s global reach. My money was on Justin Bieber, but so far LeBron has declined our offer.
So, for the moment, we’ll have to content ourselves with what his lawyers say about this Leicester Bryce Stovell character…
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.
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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While performing here at the ATL Cabaret on Wednesday night, the celebrated drag queen of Biglaw, Kaye Scholer, was pelted with rotten fruit — by her own associates. If you haven’t done so already, do check out their rage-filled rants. (If nothing else, they’ll make you feel better about your own firm.)
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