Steubenville, Ohio, the small town that taught (or at least, “should have taught”) Americans that rape cases are often the subject of powerful efforts to cover up the truth, has decided to reward the highest profile alleged cover-up artists. Because, ugh.
There are basically two related legal arguments for extending the contract of Steubenville head football coach Reno Saccoccia: (1) unless and until he is convicted of something, the school shouldn’t act on mere allegations; and, (2) if the school parted ways with the coach, it exposes itself to a later employment claim.
* Forget playing with Wade. LeBron took his talents to South Beach to avoid tons of state taxes. [The Legal Blitz]
* Steve Susman of Susman Godfrey just completed the 180-mile trek from Houston to Austin by bike. Susman took part in this MS fundraiser with his grown kids and 35 other Susman Godfrey team members. Kudos. (You can donate via the link.) [National MS Society]
* The Obama administration is entering a showdown over its use of the “state secrets” privilege. The government is concerned that if it cannot shield “no-fly list” paperwork, it might chill their frank discussion of racial profiling. [Politico]
* A new in-house tool to replace outside counsel? Sure it may be cheaper, but can a computer get you playoff tickets? [Associate's Mind]
* We have a follow-up to the earlier Nevada benchslap. Now we have video of the judge handing out contempt charges for no reason. Wow. That’s some hardcore abused discretion. [Las Vegas Law Blog]
* Remember the L.A. Law puppets video from a couple weeks ago? Well, it’s now a series. Watch Episode 1 after the jump….
The only good things to ever happen to the city of Cleveland occurred in the movie Major League. From “Wild Thing” Ricky Vaughn to Willie “Mays” Hayes, the Indians were never such a joy to watch as they were during that fateful summer, when they climbed back into contention against the cretinous Yankees and their slugger Clu Haywood (“Haywood leads the league in most offensive categories, including nose hair.”). With a roster that resembled nothing so much as the Island of Misfit Toys, the Indians were an absolute delight to watch.
In real life, Cleveland is an angry, festering boil of despair. The Indians suck, the Cavaliers suck, and the Cuyahoga River catches fire likes it’s made of charcoal briquettes. If there is a God, and he is a vengeful one, that God hates Cleveland. There is no other explanation for the singularly awful string of events that have befallen Cleveland sports during my lifetime. The Drive, the Decision, the Fumble, the Shot. God hasn’t sodomized a town like this since Sodom.
Yesterday, news leaked that the Cleveland Cavaliers were considering rehiring coach Mike Brown. While hilarious, this has nothing to do with the law. Instead, we are here to talk about Jimmy Haslam. Haslam bought the Cleveland Browns just this past October. This week, it was announced that the FBI and the IRS had raided the headquarters of Haslam’s company, Pilot Flying J. Yesterday, the feds announced why they had done this.
* The New York Post responds to critics of its Boston attack coverage. [The Onion]
* I’m just going to quote our tipster on this one because I cannot improve upon his commentary: “Because we should publicize every time a Donald Trump lawsuit fails.” [Chronicle of Higher Education]
* DOUBLE F**KING NEWSFLASH: this pissed off sorority girl will write the BEST cease and desist letters someday. [Gawker]
* The Supreme Court stands up to warrantless searches. Sort of. [Simple Justice]
* Sports franchise owners totally rip off the communities they supposedly serve? [Lawyers, Guns & Money]
* You’d think an intellectual property firm would know better than to commit copyright violations. [Law 360]
* Good news, law students! You can get a casebook for the low, low price of $200! [PrawfsBlawg]
* Rachel Ray sued for negligence in trying to help a teen lose weight. If the goal was weight loss, Rachel should have just forced the girl to exclusively eat from Rachel Ray’s cookbook. Nothing can turn someone off eating like that. [US Weekly]
* How to hire an effective expert — in the model of Han Solo. [The Expert Institute]
* Here are the 10 most annoying lawyer clichés. Punch yourself in the face for every one you’ve used (non-ironically, of course) in the past month. [The Careerist]
* The NCAA chooses revenue for their member schools over the welfare of students? Shut the front door! [Sports Law Blog]
* Poor plaintiff trying to get off the Internet keeps putting herself on the Internet. Hail Streisand Effect! [Lowering the Bar]
* Grammar fail. Lawyer inadvertently calls his wife a “bitch” with poor sentence structure. [Spadea, Lanard, & Lignana]
* Georgetown Law is holding its second Iron Tech Law Competition, challenging students to develop technology to improve the access to justice or increase the effectiveness of representation. Cool idea. Other schools should consider this kind of program. [Georgetown Law]
* Do you think our lawmakers should reform the Senate filibuster procedure? I agree. Though Patton Oswalt gives an almost nine minute, improvised tour de force of how a filibuster could be awesome that will be — presumably edited down — and used in this week’s Parks and Recreation. Video after the jump. [Cinema Blend]
As you have probably heard by now, multiple explosions just went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The situation remains in flux, but early reports from the Boston police claim that at least two people have been killed and 23 people have been injured. You can follow the latest news about this tragedy at Boston.com, Fox 25, the New York Times’s Lede blog, and social media.
The Boston Marathon is one of the greatest events in American running and, for that matter, all of American sports. Lawyers and law students have performed very well in it over the years, as we noted back in 2007.
Please keep the Boston marathon victims in your thoughts and prayers.
UPDATE (8:00 p.m.): At least 100 people have been injured, according to Boston.com.
* Louisville coach Rick Pitino promised his players that he’d get a tattoo if they won the NCAA tournament. I’m hoping Peter Kalis makes the same pledge if K&L Gates makes its projected annual profits. [Huffington Post]
* The Harvard Federalist Society held a conference on the importance of intellectual diversity in the legal academy. Somewhere out there, Ted Cruz nods solemnly. [Volokh Conspiracy]
* A public service announcement: Don’t wank and drive. [Lowering the Bar]
* Hey, Houston readers! Since I’m in town for our event tonight, I wanted to give a plug for the OKRA Charity Saloon. I visited last night and it was great — a beautiful space and all the profits go to a charity that you get to vote on (one ballot for each drink you get). An all-around great idea. So if you’re looking for a location for your next happy hour… [OKRA Charity Saloon]
* James Poulos makes a good point: it may put you horribly, horribly in debt, but education is still a good thing. [Forbes]
* Tomorrow check out our newest series: Unofficial Orientation to Law School. We will be video chatting with students, professors, and hiring managers about how 0Ls can successfully launch their legal careers. This series is presented by LexisNexis, BARBRI, and Law Preview, a BARBRI Company. [Above the Law]
* Have you ever wanted to see puppets set to the L.A. Law theme song? No? Well, after the jump you can see it anyway….
* Thieves made off with 5.5 tons of Nutella. Damn you Danny Ocean! [CBS News]
* Don’t try to play Baseketball in Canton, Ohio. [Legal Juice]
* The SEC finally allows companies to distribute disclosures via social media. Welcome to the 21st Century, SEC. [IT-Lex]
* Speaking of the SEC, Mary Jo White was confirmed by the Senate. [Fox Business]
* Chief Judge Alex Kozinski: “Can I get an oy vey up in here?” [COLLive]
* Kentucky is just all kinds of screwy. Lawyer jailed for not turning over documents/running drug ring. [AP]
* Energy law was number two in law firm activity this quarter. For the billionth quarter in a row, Third Amendment law failed to crack the top 10. [AOL Energy]
* Ha! “Thus, it seems that (as has so often occurred in IP law) the focus on the problems of copyright and patent has allowed trademark law to engage, unsupervised, in a great deal of mischief.” [Law of Fashion]
* Just a reminder: Legalizing gay marriage does not end discrimination. [National Law Journal]
How does someone find themselves on trial for armed robbery with almost no attention paid to due process? If you answered, by playing football for Auburn, it looks like you’re right.
There are two things I know about Auburn football. First, the school boasts some really great fans. I met a number of them when I went to the BCS National Championship game three years ago to watch Auburn eke by Oregon on a last second field goal. Most everyone was reasonably nice, which made them very different than, say, Ohio State fans.
Second, Auburn cheats like it’s its goddamned job. Historically, it’s not even very savvy about it. In 2006, the school got busted handing out ‘A’s to players for classes that didn’t exist, a scandal that came to light when the school overdid it and NCAA reports revealed Auburn had better students than any program but Stanford, Navy, and Boston College. Oops.
Then there was the whole Cam Newton thing.
But I can say without hyperbole that these new allegations are a million times worse…
* Roger Ebert has died at the age of 70. A great critic (his audio commentary track on the Citizen Kane DVD is amazing), whose work with the late Gene Siskel basically defined film criticism for a generation. At least now we know how we will be judged when we die — a simple thumbs up, thumbs down from Gene and Roger. [Chicago Sun-Times]
* Exploring the link between baseball’s antitrust exemption and Roe v. Wade. It’s more than just saying the Royals are an abortion of a team. [Concurring Opinions]
* “Bring me the head of the person who did this”: the best closing to a C & D letter ever. [Popehat]
* A Rutgers-Camden 3L breaks down the looming sh*tstorm at Rutgers over basketball coach Mike Rice’s treatment of players. [The Legal Blitz]
* If you’ve pulled off a successful robbery, don’t taunt the victim from a traceable phone. I mean, act like you’ve been there before, man. [Legal Juice]
* It is a little funny to say that a city is looking for weaker swimmers to serve as lifeguards, but ultimately this represents the simplistic nature of the anti-affirmative-action argument: no one is saying lifeguards shouldn’t be qualified, just that a system that only privileges a strong swimming résumé will always result in affluent white kids with 10 years of swim classes getting these jobs. [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Lawyers are often jerks, but this is a new twist. Help out a lawyer trying to make it in the small-batch, artisan jerky business.[Kickstarter]
* Maybe there aren’t actual Commies at Harvard Law School, but the ratio of liberals to conservatives/libertarians on the faculty is still extremely high. [Nick Rosenkranz]
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.
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.
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Steubenville, Ohio, the small town that taught (or at least, “should have taught”) Americans that rape cases are often the subject of powerful efforts to cover up the truth, has decided to reward the highest profile alleged cover-up artists. Because, ugh.
