1974 was a good year. The IRA bombed the Tower of London, President Nixon was forced to resign in scandal, gasoline shortages led to long lines at the pump, a smallpox epidemic ripped through India, and famine savaged the continent of Africa. So yeah… great year, history!
But in the midst of all this human suffering, there were lulz to be had. All it took was a litigious Cleveland Browns fan and an attorney with balls big enough to set the Cuyahoga on fire (awesome metaphor!).
After the jump, a letter from the fan, Dale Cox, followed by the rejoinder from ATL’s Lawyer of the Year for 1974, one James N. Bailey…
Is there anything more pathetic than a “sports dad”? You know, one of those middle-aged losers who takes his kid’s athletic competitions way too seriously because he wants little Junior to “be a winner” — a title the father undoubtedly never achieved in his own life? I hate these punks, and if I ever have children I’m going to really enjoy heckling the sports dads who heckle children (then getting the living crap beat out of me, and suing their pants off for assault).
In my limited experience with the sports dad, I’ve generally assumed that higher education is a great tonic to this phenomenon. I think that if you’ve actually accomplished things in your life (or if you at least have the intellectual curiosity to read about people who have accomplished things in their lives), you come to understand that a kiddie sporting event isn’t something to get all worked up about.
So when I read this latest story about a dad menacing a pee-wee hockey team, I was dismayed to learn that the culprit is a lawyer. A tipster sent in the story with the subject line “more proof that lawyers are a**holes,” but I had thought that lawyers only behaved badly around childhood sports when some kid takes a puck to the face and the lawyer/parent tries to sue the entire league into the ground.
I didn’t know that lawyers would use their powers to humiliate and embarrass little girls who weren’t playing all that well…
Social media savvy teen causes national controversy in Australia
‘Tis the season for… lover’s revenge via the Internet. Last week, Elie brought you the tale of a cuckolded man who filmed his wife making out with a fellow SMU Law student (and intervened to throw a weak punch). Then the husband posted the sad, sordid video to YouTube. Because shame makes the hurt go away.
Meanwhile, over in the land down under, a 17-year-old in Melbourne is using her social network savvy to punish a couple of Australian football players who allegedly did her wrong. Kim Duthie claims to have scored with two of the players (and to have had a miscarriage as a result). Feeling used and abused, she’s now using all the digital tools at her disposal — Facebook, YouTube, Formspring, and Twitter — to broadcast her story, as well as a handful of naked photos of the St. Kilda football players. This girl makes Karen Owen look like a saint.
And apparently she didn’t think through the legal implications of putting photos of the football players’ “lands down under” up on her Facebook page…
Well, this is not going to make Bingham McCutchen partners happy. A judge today ruled that the marital agreement between Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt and wife Jamie McCourt is invalid — and therefore Frank might not have sole ownership of the Dodgers.
We wrote about Bingham’s boo-boo back in September. Some copies of the postnuptial agreement use the word “inclusive” in a way that would have given Frank sole ownership, while others use the word “exclusive,” which would have made Jamie a co-owner.
Bingham’s agreement may have been thrown out by the court, but don’t think for a second that Frank McCourt is done fighting for sole control of the team…
He’s in his late-30s and has been around the block and seen the world.
He can self-finance his own education and won’t need to make a whole lot of money when he gets out of school.
He has talked to actual practicing attorneys in his hometown to get a sense of what they do for a living.
He’s already thinking about his marketing strategy to sell his legal skills to clients.
Former NBA defensive player of the year Ben Wallace wants to go to law school when he’s done with basketball. He thinks he wants to be a defense attorney.
I think that would be a wonderful decision for him. Not only will he get to experience the intellectual joys of learning a new trade, he’ll be able to employ himself after he’s done and he won’t be in a mountain of debt. Don’t call me a law school hater, I just want everybody to make informed and financially sound decisions like Ben Wallace…
Readers, please buckle your seatbelts and prepare to be astounded, because I am about to talk to you about football. Yes, I know — football and breasts don’t normally mix (hello, Ines Sainz) – but Elie, who would usually write about football and the law, is pulling me from the JV squad and letting me stand in as quarterback for this post. Let’s hope I don’t get sacked.
Speaking of quarterbacks, today we’re going to be talking about everyone’s favorite Heisman trophy winner, Gator-turned-Bronco Tim Tebow. Although Tebow is a relatively squeaky-clean guy, he has had his fair share of controversy in his football career.
Tebow, who was notorious for writing bible verses on his eye black, is rumored to have brought about the NCAA’s decision to propose the “Tebow Rule,” which banned college football players from displaying any messages on their eye black. Tebow also endured some major backlash after appearing in an anti-abortion ad sponsored by Focus on the Family which aired during Super Bowl XLIV.
Given that Tebow is the NFL’s equivalent of Dudley Do-Right, you wouldn’t expect that he’d be implicated in any sort of legal wrongdoing. But Tebow must have been a very bad boy and neglected his prayers during the Bronco’s bye week, because this week, he was named in a Florida restraining order request. You’ll never guess who his alleged co-conspirators are…
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…
Horribly embarrassing for everybody, but this guy (who topped the 'F*** List')
When Tom Wolfe wrote I Am Charlotte Simmons, he interviewed his Duke daughter and Stanford son about their college experiences, and tried to capture what university life would be like for a highly intelligent, young, innocent virgin at an elite school obsessed with frat parties and athletics. It was an enjoyable read. If you want something similar to that, but a non-fiction version with less innocence and more alcohol, check out An education beyond the classroom: excelling in the realm of horizontal academics.
2010 Duke grad Karen Owen facetiously called it her “Senior Honors Thesis.” I summarized it over at my new bloggerly digs:
Owen kept detailed notes on her sexual adventures with 13 members of Duke’s lacrosse, baseball and tennis teams over the last four years. She then put those notes, along with the athletes’ names and photos into a 42-slide PowerPoint presentation, that concludes with a ranking of the 13 on what she calls her “F*** list.” (Congratulations, I suppose, to this guy for topping the list.)
Owen sent it by email to three friends, and then because it was too brilliant, hilarious, and painstakingly-elaborate to keep among four friends, one of them forwarded it on. Like an STD in a frat house, it went viral…
I have friends who support the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) as an effective non-playoff means for determining the national champion of college football. These friends say that the BCS preserves the sanctity of the college football season (“Every game is a playoff”). They say it gives power conferences (like the Southeastern Confederacy and the Big Oil Alumni conferences) their due for their consistently tough conference schedules. And they say (somewhat counter-intuitively but almost certainly true) that a playoff system favors the team that gets hot at the right time, not the team that was the best in college football over the course of the season. They don’t say that the current system is perfect, but they don’t view a playoff as inherently better just because the champion will be decided “on the field” after a tournament.
Of course, these friends are elitist, anti-competitive pricks who support BCS teams and use their lawyer skills to avoid punishment from bar fights they start when their teams get their asses kicked.
Me, I’m a man of the people. Okay, not really. But I am a man who stands against the ridiculous accumulation of wealth by a cherished few. The BCS is just a huge pot of money that only a few conferences and athletic directors have access to. And as long as multimillion-dollar boondoggles are being thrown around, I think everybody should have a shot at getting in on the action.
Of course, it’s really hard to get rich people to give up some of their money for the greater good of a larger community. They won’t do it willingly. Thankfully, this is why God invented tax law. Our brother-from-another-mother, Caleb Newquist of Going Concern, explains how a political action committee is trying to use the tax code to stop the BCS….
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Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
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.
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