New Jersey Governor Chris Christie
It’s a certain violation of the cultural norms — that you don’t violate people’s psychological and physical space the way [Chris] Christie does. He violates their sense of space.
– Baruch College Professor Douglas A. Muzzio, in a New York Times piece commenting on prosecutors-turned-politicians who use “bullying” in office. We’ve previously covered Governor Christie’s aggressive tendencies time and again.
This week, Legal Eagle Wedding Watch salutes… a divorce lawyer. This one dutifully dissolved her client’s marriage, seeing him through a contentious custody battle. But then she went the extra mile and set him up with his next wife. Attention, divorce bar: We smell a new business model.
But let’s not let talk of divorce spoil our ooh-ing and ahh-ing over some tender new lawyer marriages. Here are this week’s finalists:
Read on for all the juicy details on these newlyweds, plus a recap of all the recent legal-eagle nuptials….
Continue reading “Legal Eagle Wedding Watch: The Conspiracy”
Jeh Johnson
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fate of Guantanamo Bay. The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The rise of WikiLeaks. The raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound. The conflict in Libya.
On these and many other critical national security legal issues, one of the most important advisers to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and President Barack Obama’s White House has been Jeh C. Johnson, General Counsel of the Department of Defense. In light of his role as senior legal adviser to the largest government agency in the world, responsible for the work of over 10,000 lawyers, it is no understatement to describe Johnson as one of the powerful and influential lawyers in the entire federal government.
I recently went down to Washington to interview Johnson in his office at the Pentagon. If you think security at your law firm is tight, visit the Pentagon. I had to pass through a metal detector and multiple security checkpoints before arriving at Johnson’s office, located on the E Ring within the mammoth structure — the world’s largest office building by floor area, with over 6.5 million square feet housing over 25,000 employees. (I was accompanied at all times by a member of Johnson’s staff, which prevented me from getting lost inside the maze-like complex.)
Before entering Johnson’s private office, I had to surrender my Blackberry – the office is a SCIF (pronounced “skiff”), or “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.” This means that it is specially designed to prevent eavesdropping, thanks to walls and doors of specified thickness and the use of jamming technologies. The windows of Johnson’s office, tinted a yellowish green, are blast-resistant and designed to preclude visual surveillance.
Once I made it to the inner sanctum, I was in for a treat. My wide-ranging discussion with Jeh Johnson covered his remarkable career path, which has included service as a federal prosecutor, partnership at a top law firm (Paul Weiss), and his current post as GC of the Defense Department; the virtues of public service, as well as the growing challenges for lawyers interested in it; and Johnson’s advice for law students and lawyers who aspire to careers in government (hint: keep your nanny on the books)….
Continue reading “An Afternoon With Jeh Johnson, General Counsel of the Defense Department”
Judith Regan (left) and Roger Ailes
The lawsuit captioned Dreier LLP v. Judith Regan was filed back in March 2008, months before Ponzi schemer Marc Dreier’s eponymous law firm went bust. But it’s back in the headlines as of today, thanks to some juicy documents unearthed by the New York Times.
The documents in question — affidavits that were supposed to be kept under seal, but inadvertently kept in the public case file (until their recent removal) — implicate a number of famous figures. The boldface names include controversial publisher Judith Regan, Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, former New York City mayor (and presidential candidate) Rudy Giuliani, former New York City police commissioner (and current prison inmate) Bernard Kerik, and, of course, the now-defunct Dreier law firm….
In the blogosphere the people are divided into two seperate yet equally important groups: the producers who research new content, and the commentators who analyze and talk about it. This is a story of what happens when it all comes together.
[ding ding]
DET. GREEN: We’ve got a man here, a single man, who has endeavored to watch every single episode of the now canceled Law & Order. He’s taking copious notes about conviction rates, plea bargains, and other outcomes, on a season-by-season basis.
Now this other guy is crunching all of that data, cross-referencing it against real New York City crime rates, and making some intelligent conclusions based on the comparisons. It all comes together at Overthinking It. It’s pretty sick stuff.
DET. BRISCOE: I liked TV better when only boobs watched it…
Ed. note: This post is by “Juggalo Law,” one of the two writers under consideration to join Morning Dockette as a Morning Docket writer. As always, we welcome your thoughts in the comments.
You might remember that a month ago, Caroline Giuliani was busted for stealing $100 worth of cosmetics from a Sephora store on the Upper East Side. Well, yesterday the swift hammer of justice came down upon young Miss Giuliani’s perfectly made-up head. And I think it’s fair to say that any young woman seeking to figure out her daddy issues by thieving beauty supplies will think long and hard before she goes on a crime spree:
The daughter of prosecutor and former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani will have a shoplifting charge dismissed and her case closed and sealed if she completes a day of community service at the city’s sanitation department and doesn’t get arrested again in the next six months.
You read that right. A day. Just enough time to think long and hard about what she has… day’s over! Smell ya later, Sanitation Department! Seems like that gross of “Free Caroline” T-shirts wasn’t the good investment I thought it would be.
So what drove Caroline, a Harvard student, to commit such a frivolous crime?
Continue reading “All Made Up and Nowhere to Go — Except for Community Service”
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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