THINGS I KNOW: Your name is Katherine
(or Catherine). You are a lawyer. You live in my building,
on either the 9th or 11th floor. We have talked only once,
but have been in the elevator
together 2 times
THINGS I DO NOT KNOW: How I
can get to know you
better
— from a Craigslist Missed Connections poem.
As I approach the completion of my third full year at Above the Law, you’d think I wouldn’t feel the need to write a memo every time I take a week off so people don’t start partying like I’ve been fired. Yet… well, let’s just say that Dan Savage came to me in a dream and said, “It gets better — except for you, Elie.”
I jest. As regular readers know, this is the time I take off to celebrate my wedding anniversary. I leave you in the always capable hands of managing editor David Lat and ATL’s newest staff writer, Staci Zaretsky. Please send all tips and story ideas to them at tips@abovethelaw.com.
Marriage has been on my mind a lot this summer. I attended the wonderful wedding of an old friend last weekend. But mainly I’ve been thinking about marriage and family in the context of the many strong reactions to my debt posts.
Some of the most surprising reactions were from people who contended that I was essentially being a bad husband by quitting my Biglaw job while still saddled with serious debts. According to these people, including some women, a better husband would have stuck it out in Biglaw for however long it took until my wife and I could be debt-free.
Are these people insane?
Anyone who has spent a swampy June/July/August in D.C. knows that it’s not the ideal setting for a sizzling summer romance. So it is time to shift locations for the Courtship Connection, Above the Law’s dating service for legal eagles.
Given my miserable less-than-perfect matchmaking track record, I was surprised by the number of emails from single lawyers and law students begging for Courtship to come to their city. I guess desperate times call for really desperate measures?
Since the only pleasure Courtship Connection tends to bring is to the readers, we shall let you choose the next city. Which metropolis of lawyers offers the greatest potential for throw-downs, of both the clashing and clicking variety? After the jump, you can vote for one of the nominees — Atlanta, Montreal, Miami, L.A., San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, or Orange County, CA — and hear about the latest D.C. “cage match” of a date….
Continue reading “Courtship Connection: City Voting and Opposites Attracting”
Robert Leighton
Associates in the Chicago office of Sidley Austin seem to be doing a lot of walking these days. Last week, for example, bankruptcy associate Tyler Coulson announced that he was leaving the firm in order to walk across the country with his dog.
Today we bring you the tale of Sidley IP associate Robert Leighton, who apparently walked out on his fiancée, Lauren Serafin. But Serafin didn’t take the diss lying down.
Lauren Serafin is also a lawyer, so what did she do? She sued him, of course. Her suit for “breach of promise” seeks $62,814.71 in wedding and honeymoon expenses.
And it makes some lurid allegations about Leighton. Let’s take a closer look at the lawsuit — and the ex-bride behind it, who’s rather attractive….
Ed. note: The following piece was authored by The Legal Tease, of Sweet Hot Justice fame. Check out her other musings from Sweet Hot Justice here.
If you’re the kind of person who has eyes, you’ve probably noticed that you can’t throw a vial full of Botox down an airshaft lately without hitting a cougar licking her wounds in an alley down below. Whether it’s the latest crop of is-Ashton-cheating-on-Demi rumors, or this week’s bombshell about Courtney “Cougar Town” Cox’s recent humiliation at the hands of her soon-to-be-ex hubby, Hollywood news has no shortage of commentary about famous cougars. But starlets aren’t the only targets when it comes to cougar conjecture. Even here in Big Law, the hunt for so-called cougars has been steadily on the rise.
In the past six days alone, I’ve heard not one, not two, but three anecdotes from or about lady lawyers and their brushes with cougardom. The ages of the women in question ranged from 41 to—wait for it—25. Not one is married. Not one is dating. Not one is what you might consider on the prowl or overtly sexy. All have law degrees. And they’re certainly not the only single female lawyers on the unwitting receiving end the “cougar” treatment. Everyone from yours truly to, yes, the newest ladies of the SCOTUS bench, that notorious hotbed of sexy-time shenanigans, have been slapped with the cougar card lately—whether earned or not.
Which raises the question: Does having a law degree automatically make you a cougar—regardless of your age or personality? Well, if the guys keeping score in and around Big Law are any indication, it looks like the answer, like it or not, is hell yes…
Craigslist might have had to close down its adult section, but its Missed Connections area is still alive and kicking.
And that’s a good thing, at least for one UC Hastings law student who had one stimulating lecture with an adjunct law professor teaching intellectual property. The lady was quite taken by the guest lecturer, as the title to her Missed Connections post implies:
You: Adjunct law professor unjustly enriching my imagination – w4m – 25
That’s just the headline. The body of the note is much more steamy.
Maybe not New York Jets talking to Ines Sainz sexy-talk, but pretty damn explicit for an IP law class, taking place on a lazy day out in California…
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.
Also, we have the two below in-house openings:
Keep reading »
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?
Keep reading »
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