Marriage can be a tricky business, especially when it comes to an end. Just ask the former Skadden partner whose remarkable departure memo has everyone talking. Both his former and current marriage have attracted a lot of attention.
And at least his marriages were between one man and one woman. When same-sex unions fall apart, things can get especially complicated….
* It’d be easy to say “a former Tea Party candidate posted about assassinating the President.” But it’s probably more accurate to say a crazy, racist, loony person scrawled something naughty on Facebook and is now in trouble. [Huffington Post]
* I’d like to buy this, and then use it to TP Herman Cain’s house while screaming, “It’s less complicated than your sex life!” [Tax Prof Blog]
* I wonder if, a generation from now, people will look back on Citizens United like Plessy v. Ferguson. Like, there will still be a few holdouts saying, “money is speech now, money is speech forever,” but most of society will have moved on to a more enlightened state. [Congressman John Yarmuth]
In my lifetime, Kobe has been one of the most fun players to not like.
* Maybe all we need is a simple Constitutional amendment clarifying that “only people are people.” Corporations are not people. Animals are not people. Artificially intelligent robots who one day rise up to threaten humanity’s existence are not people. [Miller-McCune]
* Oh, Kobe. When you beat a rape rap yet still have to publicly admit you bang hoteliers in Vail, you should just get divorced right then and there. No number of diamond nor championship rings is going to put that back together. She’s still going to kill you in the divorce, and all you’ve bought yourself is a few extra years of living with a woman who openly hates you. [L.A. Now via ABA Journal]
* You think bloggers suffer from group think too much? I vote for 2012 being the year when the mainstream media stops stealing story ideas from the blogs (without credit), and does some actual original reporting again. You know, like they are supposed to with their huge staffs and massive budgets. [What About Clients?]
* According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 400 new jobs were added to the legal industry last month. Talk about progress. That’s like a fraction of a job for every successful bar exam taker. [Am Law Daily]
* Biglaw firms in Washington, D.C. are racing to get more green. Sadly, we’re not talking about money or bonus news. We’re talking about tree-hugging, environmental hippie design initiatives. [Washington Post]
* Same-sex couples in New Jersey will get the chance to challenge the state’s civil union law. Here’s hoping that my home state gets with the program and allows gay marriage like our New York neighbors. [Star-Ledger]
* “Lawsuit-crazed groomzilla” Todd Remis isn’t happy with the media’s coverage of his wedding woes. We’re “turning this into a circus,” he says. Uh, you did that yourself, buddy. [Huffington Post]
* What’s the best way to get out of a possible 15-year jail sentence? It’s as easy as saying that you’re an illegal immigrant and getting yourself deported to Mexico. [ABC News]
* Kim Kardashian has a pricey clause in her prenup. She’ll have to pay her soon-to-be ex-husband the purchase price of her gaudy engagement ring if she wants to keep it. [New York Post]
(A New York judge, Laura Drager, recently barred Silverman from using scientific evidence to prove his “innate genius” in court, in litigation against his ex-wife, Nancy Silverman. A creative way to try to get around the lack of a prenuptial agreement, don’t you think?)
Well, this is not going to make Bingham McCutchen partners happy. A judge today ruled that the marital agreement between Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt and wife Jamie McCourt is invalid — and therefore Frank might not have sole ownership of the Dodgers.
We wrote about Bingham’s boo-boo back in September. Some copies of the postnuptial agreement use the word “inclusive” in a way that would have given Frank sole ownership, while others use the word “exclusive,” which would have made Jamie a co-owner.
Bingham’s agreement may have been thrown out by the court, but don’t think for a second that Frank McCourt is done fighting for sole control of the team…
Breaking: Scion of fatuous family which contributes absolutely nothing to society chooses a mate.
Sorry, if we were living in Britain, that sentence would have read “Prince William to wed Catherine (Don’t call me Kate) Middleton.”
Thank you, George Washington, for saving me from the horror of actually having to care about the British Royal Family. Obsessing over the Britney Spears is much more respectable. At least she can dance.
But there is an interesting wrinkle to the massive waste of time, money, and ink about to be spent on the royal nuptials. For the first time, U.K. laws would appear to hold pre-nuptial agreements enforceable. Which leads to the obvious questions: should the royal couple sign a prenup?
I think the answer is yes, and not to protect the crown jewels from a spurned future Catherine. See, it turns out that Kate Middleton is a “commoner” only in the insulting, archaic, British sense of the word….
So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that a former Wachtell partner has gotten the best of his ex-wife in contentious divorce proceedings. Leigh Jones of the National Law Journal reports:
It may have been the result of some crafty legal maneuvering by a Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz partner, or it may have simply been part of his tempestuous marriage to a “European Playmate” nearly 30 years his junior. Whatever the reason, the now-retired partner has thwarted a second bid by his ex-wife to invalidate a prenuptial agreement and collect a share of the annual retirement payments that he receives from the firm.
The Appellate Court of Connecticut, in a decision released on Thursday, affirmed a divorce judgment between retired Wachtell partner Peter McKenna, now 72, and Roberta Delente, a one-time model from Brazil who was working for an agency called “European Playmates” when the couple met in 1997. She was 32 at the time.
The divorce judgment left Delente, from whom McKenna sought a divorce less than a year after their wedding in August 1999, with virtually nothing from the marriage.
Let’s cut to the question that everyone is curious about: How big is McKenna’s (retirement) package?
UPDATE: And how hot is Roberta Delente? We’ve added a photo — as well as a link to the appellate court’s opinion, but that’s less exciting — after the jump.
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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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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