If there were such a thing as the perfect benchslap, this would probably be it. It comes from the great state of Texas, where federal judges are prone to calling attorneys stupid attention whores, where invitations to “kindergarten parties” are issued to lawyers who can’t be civil with their adversaries, and where judges order each other to “shut up” in open court.
And now, for your viewing pleasure, we present this gem….
If the law allows a mentally incompetent lawyer to represent a citizen, then the law needs to be changed, because that is ridiculous.
– John Bradley, the outgoing District Attorney for Williamson County, Texas, commenting on Carolyn Barnes’s ability to represent clients from inside her unit at a state psychiatric facility. Barnes has been involuntarily committed since mid-2011, when she was found incompetent to stand trial on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
If you pour this into a cup of coffee, it doesn’t taste as bad.
* Dear New York City, you can take my caffeine when you want to become “the city that sleeps sometimes and charges rents that can be earned while working only eight hours a day.” Not a moment before. [Reason]
* They want to put Lenny Dykstra in jail, but the Wilpons get to run around free. [Dealbreaker]
* Fracking might never have developed without our unique “subsurface” property rights. In a different life, understanding this stuff is why I thought it’d be good to go to law school. Studying law > Practicing law > Paying for your legal studies. [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Okay, hear me out. How about every owner who won’t make their building wheelchair accessible for “aesthetic” reasons has to contribute every year to help fund research in the design of a wheelchair that can also climbs steps. Then they have to contribute to the fund that will get these new “chairsteppers” out to all the people who need them. Think about it, disabled people would get a better product, and ramps would be a thing of the past. Don’t tell me the tech is beyond us, if we can make amphibious attack vehicles/tour buses, we can make a wheelchair that climbs steps. [Simple Justice]
* Do it yourself divorces now coming to Texas for indigent clients with no children. So, to recap, when gay people want to get married in Texas, it’s an affront to God and traditional America. But when childless heterosexuals want to get divorced, it’s just a simple legal matter that shouldn’t require a lawyer. [Tex Parte Blog]
* Thanks to Cision Blog for including us in their rankings. [Cision Blog]
It’s been great fun to watch archconservatives wake up and realize what country they’ve been living in this whole time. Minorities vote too. Single women don’t like being called sluts. Gays and lesbians are everywhere. And people can understand that sometimes, taxes are necessary.
The emerging American consciousness — from both Democrats and Republicans — that if we want government to do things we have to pay for them with taxes, has been particularly fun to watch. In Austin, Texas, there was a ballot initiative which contemplated raising property takes to in order to pay for “a medical school in Austin and other health care projects,” according to the Austin American-Statesman. And it passed!
But that didn’t sit well with some Texans. Don Zimmerman, treasurer of the Travis County Taxpayers Union political action committee, argued that the initiative — called Proposition 1 — was discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act. Zimmerman and his attorney argued that Prop 1 was confusing to minorities who “have lower reading comprehension than whites.”
Maybe so, but I sho’nuff can spy me a racist when I done read one….
* In a move to “end the vacancy crisis,” one week after being reelected, and one day after the Senate returned to session, Barack Obama nominated seven people for open seats on federal district courts, including two S.D.N.Y. slots. [Blog of Legal Times]
* Dewey know how much the Los Angeles Dodgers will have to pay the now defunct firm for its work on the team’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy case? About $13M — the equivalent of their pitcher’s salary, or 62% of their first baseman’s pay. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Which Biglaw firms in the Am Law 200 are the most LGBT friendly? Overall, of the 145 firms that participated in the Human Rights Campaign’s survey, 71 received perfect scores. Absolutely fabulous! [Am Law Daily]
* The American Bar Association’s Task Force on the Future of Legal Education wants to know what should be done about law schools. This is a time to keep it simple, stupid: change EVERYTHING! [National Law Journal]
* The New York Court of Appeals invoked the Major Disaster Rule for the first time ever, allowing out-of-state attorneys to perform pro bono services for Hurricane Sandy victims. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* William Adams, the Texas family court judge who got caught beating his daughter, returned to the bench yesterday after a year-long suspension. At least he won’t get physical abuse cases, anymore. [Fox News]
* John Coffey, Senior Status Judge of the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, RIP. [Journal Sentinel]
I wasn’t trying to take no one’s house. I was just trying to take the property under adverse possession.
– Testimony given by David Cooper, a defendant who started squatting in a 4,320-square foot home Arlington, Texas, while the owner and his family were in Houston so his wife could get cancer treatments.
In the wake of last week’s election, citizens from all 50 states have signed petitions calling for secession from the United States. These petitions have been filed with the White House’s “We the People” website, an initiative of the Obama administration to encourage public involvement in government. Once a petition reaches the threshold of 25,000 signatures within 30 days, the White House forwards the petition to its policy experts to draft a formal response.
It’s kind of ironic that these neo-secessionists submitted their formal demands through a government initiative specifically created by Barack Obama. It’s ironic because, while each state’s petition varies a bit in substance, the crux of every petition is “we don’t like that crazy Kenyan socialist president.”
As of this hour, only a handful of states have reached the signature threshold to trigger an official White House response. Wanna take a guess which states are ready to bail? If you guessed “states that have past experience with secession,” you’d be right. Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas have all finished their secession petitions.
Do these petitions signal a new round of secession?
* Deep in the heart of Texas, plans are in the works for the state’s secession from the nation via online petition. The most likely White House response? Probably something like this: “HAHAHAHAHAHA!” [Hillicon Valley / The Hill]
* Paula Broadwell, better known as ex-CIA director David Petraeus’s side piece, has officially lawyered up. This guy had better watch out, because he kind of looks a little bit like her former flame. [Washington Post]
* And then they came for the Steves, but there was no one left to speak for them. The day of reckoning has finally come for the men who are being blamed for cooking Dewey’s LeBoeuf. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* Law firms in Manhattan are still recovering from Hurricane Sandy. Not for nothing, but all of the staff members at WilmerHale who were tasked with getting rid of all of the rotten food in the firm’s cafeteria should get a double bonus. Just saying. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Good news, underemployed law school graduates baristas! The First Circuit just affirmed your $14.1M tip-sharing judgment. Maybe now they’ll be able to afford the Starbucks diet. [National Law Journal]
* “This lawsuit is a massive fraud on the federal courts and defendants. It has now descended into farce.” Facebook is yet again seeking dismissal of Paul Ceglia’s ownership claims. [Threat Level / Wired]
* There may be five deciding factors when it comes to law school admissions, but serious candidates should focus on the two most important ones: LSAT and GPA. [Law School Admissions Lowdown / U.S. News]
(A lot of nervous bar takers have turned to Twitter to express their anxiety. Check out a couple of our favorite tweets after the jump. We’ve also got some responses to the Texas and D.C. results, which came out today.)
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.
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?
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