It’s time to announce the winner of June’s Lawyer of the Month competition. Last month, we had a potpourri of lawyers allegedly behaving badly for readers to choose from. In the end, there was one clear winner, who stole almost 50 percent of the total vote (and one pair of candidates who were ROBBED of the award, but more on that later).
Let’s find out who took home the honorific of Lawyer of the Month — and while we’re at it, let’s pray that this character doesn’t sue us in some oddball filing for bestowing it upon him….
* What if — gasp — we rewrote the U.S. Constitution today? Take a look at this discussion once you’ve picked up your shattered originalist jaw from the floor. [Room for Debate / New York Times]
* A photo of $211,223.04 that Matthew Inman of the Oatmeal raised for charity. Hopefully this means that the Oatmeal/Charles Carreon lawsuit circus is finally leaving town. [The Oatmeal]
* “Bada da da daaah… I’m loving it! Now give me my Big Mac or I’ll shoot you in the face.” [Legal Juice]
* A San Francisco restaurant finds an creative way around California’s new foie gras ban. Force-fed duck liver 4Lyfe! [Inside Scoop SF]
* The Supreme Court Term feels like a distant memory, but now’s a good time to look back on it with added perspective. Courtesy of MoloLamken, here’s a great guide to the big business cases of the Supreme Court Term just ended. Download or print it, then read it at your leisure. [MoloLamken (PDF)]
June wasn’t exactly hot in terms of bonus payouts, but the weather sure heated up quickly. And thanks to the lawyers we’ve singled out for Lawyer of the Month candidacy, June turned into a real scorcher in terms of humorous legal antics and allegations of attorney misconduct.
While some lawyers allegedly participated in scandalous aeronautical activities, others were literally condemned to crappy community service projects. But who will come out on top in our monthly contest?
Ed. note: Your Above the Law editors are busy celebrating their freedom today (and we hope that you are, too). We will return to our regular publication schedule on Thursday, July 5.
* At this point, the Supreme Court’s dramatic deliberations on the Affordable Care Act are like a leaking sieve. Now we’ve got dueling narratives on Chief Justice Roberts’s behind-the-scenes flip-flopping. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Life, liberty, and the pursuit of fabulosity! The Department of Justice has asked the Supreme Court to grant cert on two DOMA cases, contending that Section 3 of the statute is unconstitutional. [Poliglot / Metro Weekly]
* A famous fabulist: according to California’s State Bar, disgraced journalist Stephen Glass is a “pervasive and documented liar,” but that’s not stopping him from trying to get his license to practice law. [Los Angeles Times]
* Clayton Osbon, the JetBlue pilot who had an epic mid-flight nutty and started ranting about religion and terrorists, was found not guilty by reason of insanity by a federal judge during a bench trial. [New York Post]
* After a month of bizarre legal filings, Charles Carreon has dropped his lawsuit against Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal. We’re hoping that there will be an awesome victory cartoon drawn up soon. [Digital Life / Today]
* Northwestern Law is the only American law school to have joined a 17-member global justice league geared toward legal teaching and research collaborations. But do they get cool costumes? [National Law Journal]
* UNC Law received two charitable gifts totaling $2.7M that will be used to fund tuition scholarships for current and future students. Maybe their students won’t have to create tuition donation sites anymore. [Herald-Sun]
* This law is for the birds (literally and figuratively). California’s ban on the sale of foie gras had only been in effect for one day before the first lawsuit was filed to overturn it as unconstitutional. [San Francisco Chronicle]
* The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the Department of Commerce recently announced that mermaids do not exist. Not to worry — it’s still legal to believe that Ariel is a babe. [New York Daily News]
* Nothing says justice like for-profit probation companies. [New York Times]
* Was this really a courtroom exchange involving Redskins tight end Fred Davis, or was it a weird performance art piece/Abbott and Costello comedy routine? [Washingtonian]
* There is no such thing as a free trip to Disney World. Well, technically there is. There are many, in fact, at least until you get caught. [Legal Juice]
* The insane legal fight between the Oatmeal and Charles Carreon continues to get weirder. Oh yeah, and serial suer extraordinaire Jonathan Lee Riches has hopped into the fray as well. [Lowering the Bar]
* RIP Andy Griffith, a.k.a. Matlock, one of the most famous television attorneys of all time. My grandmother is probably very sad today. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Dewey still have some folks who owe us money? Yes we do. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Facebook will change its terms of service, specifically regarding the way it handles “sponsored stories” in order to settle a large lawsuit [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* A man opposing a Virginia attorney in a child custody hearing shot at the lawyer outside the courthouse. Luckily, he missed. [Gettysburg Times]
*The Fifth Circuit said yes, the law firm of Smith & Fuller is on the hook for $30,000 for accidentally releasing its client’s secret information. [ABA Journal]
* Recently released interviews with George Zimmerman tell his side of the death of Trayvon Martin. [New York Times]
* We wrote about Thomas Jefferson Law grad Michael Wallerstein‘s struggles with a quarter million dollars in law school debt last year. But it looks like he may have found an unorthodox, if not somewhat dodgy, escape route. On the other hand, maybe he’s gone out of the frying pan into the fire. [New York Post]
* The McCormick legal recruiting firm sued one of its former account managers for violating a noncompete clause. Fun times were had by all no one. [Blog of the Legal Times]
* The lawyer going after The Oatmeal and the charities benefiting from the “Bear Love Cancer Bad” campaign has now subpoenaed Twitter and ArsTechica. That’s pretty impressive for just about a week of work. [ArsTechica]
* An online knitting community feels the wrath of the U.S. Olympic Committee’s intellectual property enforcement team. [Gawker]
* Businesses have to choose their employees carefully so they don’t get sued down the road. Sometimes, apparently that means you should hire criminals. [New York Times]
Last week, we wrote about the legal spat between online comic artist Matthew Inman, who runs The Oatmeal, and the website FunnyJunk.
The folks at FunnyJunk threatened to sue Inman for copyright infringement and defamation, and the internet comedian responded with another comic, of course, and a plea to his readers to raise $20,000, not for settling the legal threat, but for a “Bear Love” charity campaign on behalf of of the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. (Inman also mentioned something about a drawing of the FunnyJunk attorney’s mother seducing a Kodiak.) In any case, we’re off a pretty good start here, right? Sure, but it gets way better….
* The Justice Department dropped the remaining charges against John Edwards. That’s an anti-climax for the record books. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Gina Chon, the Wall Street Journal reporter whose sensuous e-mails with Brett McGurk, a U.S. ambassadorial nominee, were released last week, resigned her job at the paper. But temporary unemployment is no match for true love (or super hot sex, for that matter)! [Washington Post]
* UMass Law is now the first accredited public law school in Massachusetts. Thank God, because our law school reserves were running dangerously low. [Boston Globe]
* JPMorgan’s CEO admits, “I was dead wrong.” Congratulations, I hope that makes you feel better. Now why don’t you give us taxpayers all our money back? [Gothamist]
* The attorney for FunnyJunk is totally befuddled by the Oatmeal’s hilarious response to his legal threats, as well as the internet at large’s response to the response. Come on man, loosen up and feel the lulz. [Gawker]
* Congratulations to Andrew Schilling, the former top civil prosecutor at the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office, who is joining BuckleySandler as a partner. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* I get stopped at the airport because some TSA agent thinks my belt buckle looks like a bomb or something, but this guy becomes a commercial pilot??? I just don’t get it. At all. [Wall Street Journal]
An unfortunate reality of the modern era seems to be that if you stick around creating online content long enough — doesn’t matter what it is — eventually, someone will decide to sue you. It makes no difference if you are a legal blogger or the creator of hilariously nerdy web comics.
Our inbox has been exploding the last few days with tips about The Oatmeal, a popular web comic, facing what appears to be a pretty absurd defamation lawsuit. The lawsuit in and of itself looks fairly spurious, but the best part is the author’s animated response.
Let’s take a look at our Potential Lawsuit of the Day, which serves as a good reminder that if you want to win an online argument, don’t get mad, get funny…
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:
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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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It’s time to announce the winner of June’s Lawyer of the Month competition. Last month, we had a potpourri of lawyers allegedly behaving badly for readers to choose from. In the end, there was one clear winner, who stole almost 50 percent of the total vote (and one pair of candidates who were ROBBED of the award, but more on that later).
