Usually when we hear about courtroom drama stemming from social media, it’s caused by someone, you know, actually involved in the case.
Not today! This week, a judge declared a mistrial in a Kansas murder case after a pesky reporter shot and published a cellphone pic from trial. What kind of scandalous photos was the intrepid journalist taking?
The kind that almost certainly doesn’t warrant a mistrial….
Professor Brian Tamanaha
* Professor Brian Tamanaha: “Not since 1986-1987 have law schools seen total applicant numbers this low.” Good news, or bad news? Actually, a bit of both. [Balkinization via Instapundit]
* Musical chairs: Michael Chepiga, the retired Simpson partner and erstwhile Broadway playwright, has a new and unusual job. [Am Law Daily]
* Elsewhere in job switches, the law schools at Albany and the University of Missouri (Columbia) have announced new deans. [Faculty Lounge]
* Goldman bankers don’t want to own shares in a company connected with sex trafficking. They just want to enjoy its services like normal paying customers. [Dealbreaker]
* One Chicago court seems to think it can quash the social media revolution. #goodluckwiththat [Not-So Private Parts / Forbes]
* Elsewhere in social-media news, thank God for this ruling. Otherwise, everyone we know would be fired and in jail. [WSJ Law Blog]
* If you still aren’t on Twitter, here’s another reason you should jump on the bandwagon. You never know when your boyfriend might get kidnapped in South Africa and thrown in the trunk of a car, and you have to tweet the kidnappers’ license plate so he can be rescued. [Ars Technica]
* Speaking of Twitter, this is unacceptable behavior (unless you’re a federal judge from Montana). [Fashionista]
At this point, there is a plethora of viable excuses in litigation to gain access to your opponents’ Facebook pages. Divorce, workplace discrimination, you name it, you can probably gain access somehow.
That said, most often it is defendants asking for social media access, not plaintiffs.
So we were intrigued to hear about a recent decision that allowed a plaintiff unsupervised access to the Facebook account of the man he sued for punching him in the face during a soccer game gone wrong. Why did he get access? Just for the heck of it….
Continue reading “Pennsylvania Judge Allows Facebook Fishing in Sucker Punch Lawsuit”
I know all you attorneys are a totally Tweet happy bunch. So I know you all can relate to the annoyance of every time you send a tweet about your iPhone, you immediately get seven new followers with names like iPhonemadness and iPhoneaddiction.
Okay, maybe not. But Twitter spam is a problem. It is not only annoying, but it also leads to computer viruses spread through the social media platform. That’s why, in order to avoid slowly going the way of the MySpace, the company has taken a drastic step toward stopping spammers.
Over the last several months, we have spent a lot of digital ink covering Paul Ceglia’s goofy lawsuit claiming 50 percent ownership of Facebook. In that case, we tend to believe Facebook is in the right.
But now it appears that the social media behemoth has caught its own case of silly litigation fever.
Facebook has taken legal action against the makers of a web-browsing widget that allegedly violates its terms of service. And its Biglaw attorneys may have caught an innocent internet commenter in the crossfire….
What's the matter with you? Don't you get it?
After writing about enough jurors who get in trouble for posting about their cases online, one begins to feel like Tom Smykowski in Office Space, desperately and hopelessly trying to justify his job to the Bobs. It seems so simple, but no one seems to get it.
You can’t talk about the case on Facebook! Can’t you understand it? What is the hell is wrong with you people?!
This week, we have two more cases of idiot jurors in California and Colorado who simply could not resist going to Facebook to say, ironically, the same thing about the cases they were hearing.
What did they have to say? What kind of titillating trials were they supposed to decide while they were iPhoning instead? And more importantly, how did the attorneys in the cases respond?
Continue reading “There Has Got to be a Better Way to Keep Jurors Off Facebook”
Attorneys for Facebook went on the offensive yesterday, filing a bold motion to dismiss Paul Ceglia’s lawsuit, which claims a 50 percent ownership stake in the company.
Among other things, the motion, which is a product of an extensive forensic investigation, calls Ceglia’s case “a fraud and a lie.”
I am excited to see this motion, and I hope it succeeds. Ceglia and his cockamamie lawsuit have had their day in the sun. It’s time for Mark Z. to move on to bigger and better things, like handling the company’s impending IPO and fixing the stupid Timeline, which is currently only useful for seeing exactly how terrible my friends’ tastes in music are.
Anyway, let’s look at Facebook’s extensive allegations, as well as Ceglia’s unsurprisingly oddball responses….
Continue reading “Facebook Moves to Dismiss Ceglia Ownership Suit”
Do you really want this guy as your boss?
If there is one golden rule in the technological age, it would likely be that you don’t share your electronic passwords with anyone. Tech companies routinely tell their customers that they will never ask for their users’ security information. Common knowledge says you shouldn’t share passwords with friends, lovers, or even family members. Because when you share that information, you might end up getting arrested for selling contraband to Iran, and your iPhone might wind up at the bottom of a canyon.
So what do you do when a prospective employer wants to login to Facebook — as you — during a job interview? Weep and gnash your teeth? Yeah, that’s what I thought…
Continue reading “Employers Claim Feudal Rights Over Facebook Pages”
* Yahoo! continues to try to save its fading empire… by filing a patent lawsuit against Facebook. [Dealbook / New York Times]
* Dispatch from SXSW: employing homeless people as Wi-Fi hotspots. I see no problems here. [New York Times]
* Dick Cheney has canceled a trip to Toronto. Because Canada is “too dangerous.” It’s actually kind of reassuring that the former Vice President, who drunkenly shot his friend in the face with a shotgun, is just as much of a wuss as the liberals he has mocked for the last 12-odd years. [National Post]
* It’s my jury and I’ll tweet if I want to, tweet if I want to. You would tweet too, if it happened to you. [Wall Street Journal Law Blog]
* A new United Nations report says Wikileaks suspect Bradley Manning endured “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment during the months he was incarcerated before his trial. The report comes just in time for the Department of Defense to completely ignore it and continue throwing the book at Manning. [Threat Level / Wired]
As some of you may have heard, Pinterest is the newest social media craze sweeping the nation. The idea behind the site is to create a virtual pin board of cool crap you find on the internet and want to share with your friends.
I know, it’s totally new and unlike anything we’ve ever seen before!
The site is still in its infancy, but it’s already facing its first backlash/potential legal controversy, a problem kicked off a few weeks ago by a lawyer-slash-photographer who thought she noticed something fishy about the startup’s terms of service policy. Namely, how does a company protect itself when it’s arguably built on the premise of users sharing art they don’t own? Pass the buck, of course…
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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