First, there are too many law students training for a J.D. in a market that is already saturated.
– Frank Wu, Dean and Chancellor of UC Hastings College of the Law, in his letter to the American Bar Association’s “task force” on legal education.
(In his letter, Dean Wu outlines an eight-point plan for the ABA — so let’s take a look at the other seven points….)
Continue reading “Quote of the Day: The Top Eight Things Wrong With Law Schools”
Carolyn Barnes
If the law allows a mentally incompetent lawyer to represent a citizen, then the law needs to be changed, because that is ridiculous.
– John Bradley, the outgoing District Attorney for Williamson County, Texas, commenting on Carolyn Barnes’s ability to represent clients from inside her unit at a state psychiatric facility. Barnes has been involuntarily committed since mid-2011, when she was found incompetent to stand trial on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
There is so much to fix in modern legal education. Are student-edited law journals really so bad?
– Brian Farkas, editor-in-chief of the Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution, writing in defense of student-edited law journals in light of critiques published over the years in online and print media like Inside Higher Ed, the New York Times, the Atlantic, and Legal Affairs magazine.
Bryan Garner
How old is “bench slap”? Should I put it in Black’s Law Dictionary? How would you define it?
– Legal writing guru Bryan Garner, editor of Black’s Law Dictionary and co-author (with Justice Scalia) of Reading Law (affiliate links), asking on Twitter about a possible addition to Black’s.
(Information about the origins of “benchslap,” after the jump.)
I was not aware that see-through shirts and cleavage was the trademark of a good lawyer in New Zealand. Apparently I have a lot to learn about their judicial system.
– a comment left on Facebook in response to a picture used by LEX magazine to entice people to “like” the New Zealand Law Students Association (NZLSA) page on the social networking site.
(Read on to see the picture that’s being slammed as sexist by women lawyers the world over.)
Continue reading “There’s Much More to Female Law Students Than Just Their Cleavage”
Charlotte Devlin
What do we want to say to our daughters? That law is a great profession until you have children?
– Charlotte Devlin, co-founder of Obelisk Legal Support, commenting on the legal profession’s loss of female attorneys in the United Kingdom due to the overwhelming process of balancing long hours with child rearing.
Wise Latina?
[F]ederal judges are not just politicians in robes, though that is part of what they are.
– Professor Lee Epstein, Professor William M. Landes, and Judge Richard Posner, writing about judges and politics in their forthcoming book, The Behavior of Federal Judges (affiliate link).
(Additional highlights from Adam Liptak’s article about their research, after the jump.)
Continue reading “Quote of the Day: Partisan Hearts Beating Underneath Their Robes?”
Randall Gay
I didn’t have to really study for football. It’s just something you know. Now, I’m starting from scratch writing briefs. I don’t know what a brief is. I’m taking a tort class. I don’t know what a tort is. In football, we have seven days to prepare. Now I have to do assignments and have them done by the next day. But I’ve learned to adapt quickly.
– Randall Gay, a retired football player formerly of the New England Patriots and the New Orleans Saints, commenting on what it’s like to make the difficult transition from playbooks to law books in his new career as a law student.
(So where is the ex-cornerback going to law school? Let’s find out!)
Robert Barnett
I have no comment. Hope you will understand.
– Robert Barnett, longtime Williams & Connolly partner and D.C. power broker, declining to comment to the New York Times about his representation of General David Petraeus, the former CIA Director who stepped down amid a sex scandal. Our jokey headline notwithstanding, “no comment” was probably the best comment here.
(Additional tidbits about who is representing whom in this messy affair, after the jump.)
Judge Mike Norman
I told my preacher I thought I led more people to Jesus than he had but, then again, more of my people have amnesia. They soon forget once they get out of jail.
– Judge Mike Norman, commenting on the rather unusual sentences he hands down in his courtroom. Last week, Judge Norman gave a 17-year-old who pleaded guilty to manslaughter a deferred sentence, provided that the teen goes to church each week (among other conditions).
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:
Keep reading »
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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