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.)
* For the first time in history, both major party presidential candidates are graduates of Harvard Law School. When reached for comment, Yale Law School said, “President, that’s one of those jobs that you don’t get for life, right?” [Harvard Law Bulletin]
* Please tell me our election technology has at least caught up with 1996 by now. [Election Law Blog]
* Uruguay legalizes abortion — subject to a panel review, a five-day waiting period, and getting the father’s opinion on the matter. Yay? [Salon]
* Twitter censors a user! But it was a Nazi group, so nobody is going to freak out too much. [Slate]
* If this freaking idiot makes it even harder for young, intelligent students to come here on student visas, then his thwarted attack will have caused real damage to American interests. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Abraham Lincoln would have gotten tort reform done. [Futility Closet]
Alex Macgillivray
Bad day for the Internet…. Having been there, I can imagine the dissension @Google to search being warped this way.
– Alexander Macgillivray, general counsel of Twitter, commenting via Twitter about Google’s recent plan to alter search results based on users’ Google+ networks. Macgillivray used to be in-house counsel at Google. Corporate Counsel analyzed his comments yesterday.
We’ve collected a couple of tips on reports of election day problems around the country. And I have to say, so far, so good. It’s nothing like 2008.
Even in New York, things seem calm, despite the fact that the city is rolling out new voting machines which were a total joke during the primaries. They seemed to have worked out the kinks in time for today’s general election. From City Room:
New Yorkers using the new computerized voting system on Tuesday seemed to encounter fewer problems than they did during the September primary, when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg complained of “a royal screw-up.”…
Mr. Bloomberg cast his ballot just after 7 a.m. at a school on East 81st Street. “The process, in all fairness,” he said, “was different, smooth,” compared with what happened on primary day.
And things seem to be doing well in Connecticut. Shockingly Vince McMahon decided not to be a jackass. But in Indiana voters will have to make their way past pedestrian pigs to get to the polls…
We’ve seen lawyers request continuances because of major sporting events before. There was a great continuance motion last year, when the Alabama Crimson Tide played in the BCS Championship game. Obviously, the entire state of Louisiana lost its collective mind during the New Orleans Saints Super Bowl Run.
Notice how we’re talking about football? Football is “America’s Passion,” while baseball is “America’s Pastime” — which is a nice way of saying, “Baseball is something cool to have on the television while you take an afternoon nap.” (Full Disclosure: I’m a Mets fan, so baseball has been dead to me for many months.)
But we’re seeing unusual passion from Texas Rangers fans. Maybe it’s because the team had never won a playoff series until this postseason. Maybe it’s because Cliff Lee really is a witch.
Lawyers who are Texas Rangers fans appear to have gone all the way around the bend…
Continue reading “Lawyers Who Follow the Texas Rangers Are Crazy”
The Drive-Thru at the Kocian Law Firm
We all knew it would come to this eventually. The legal profession — once reserved for studious minds who diligently ponder the most complex moral, ethical, and legal issues of the day — has been reduced to a collection of short-order cooks, who whip up documents instead of eggs and toast.
Actually, that change probably happened many years ago. Generations ago, even. But there is something visual striking about the new Connecticut offices of the Kocian Law Firm. The firm is operating out of an old Kenny Rogers Roasters building. The Kocian lawyers are keeping the drive-thru window — and they’re using it as an easy and efficient way to exchange documents and quick advice with their clients.
Somewhere, Partner Emeritus is crying…
The news has been all over the place over the past 20 hours, but it seems like a lot of people want to talk about the passing of Greg Giraldo. The comedian died yesterday. TMZ reported that he died of an apparent drug overdose.
What many people didn’t know was that before his comedy career, Giraldo graduated from Harvard Law School and was a lawyer at Skadden.
UPDATE: Lat here. Giraldo also graduated from my alma mater, Regis High School. I’ve heard from a number of fellow Regians who knew him at Regis and/or Columbia; they describe him as a great guy. (Speaking of Regis, I hope to see some of you at the Regis Bar Association reception next month, on October 19.)
Apparently this biographical information has surprised many people, to the point that we’ve received a number of emails asking us if it’s true. Is it that hard to believe that an HLS grad and Skadden associate decided to do something radically different with his life?
I knew about Giraldo’s past, even though he never really talked about it…
Continue reading “Greg Giraldo, Comedian and Former Lawyer, Dead at 44″
Since we last checked in on him on Twitter, John Quinn — founding partner of litigation powerhouse Quinn Emanuel, and one of the nation’s ‘s top business litigators — has gained about 200 followers. And if he keeps tweeting in such insightful, funny, and brutally candid fashion, his following — right now he’s at 665 followers — will only grow.
Check out his latest tweet, which is a bit… impolitic….
Continue reading “Tweet of the Day: John Quinn on a Possible Squire Sanders / Hammonds Merger”
It’s been a while since we checked in with the coming junior associate apocalypse that is legal outsourcing. Rest assured, LPOs around the globe are working hard to make sure that the Biglaw junior associate becomes extinct — at least as we know it.
There’s a fascinating article on Law21 that discusses the evolution of legal process outsourcing — and what LPOs need to do next:
Still in its relative infancy, legal process outsourcing has already had a huge impact on the legal services marketplace: scoring major deals with the likes of Microsoft and Rio Tinto, garnering the attention of private-equity investors, and helping to expose the degree to which law firms have overcharged for the simplest legal work, among other accomplishments. But this impact has set off two important chains of events.
The first affects LPOs themselves: they now need to move their value proposition beyond cost savings in a market they helped to make more sophisticated. The second affects everyone: the legal profession’s response to LPO is having an unexpected effect on how legal work is distributed and how legal resources are allocated.
Some law firms still seem to be fighting the last war and are committed to fending off outsourcing until the bitter end. But other firms are preparing themselves for the next war: remaining the primary legal advisor to their clients in a world where the clients themselves can go to a number of providers to get the work done…
Continue reading “Outsourcing: It’s Not Just About the Money”
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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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