What can you get a prospective law student who has everything? How about a free application to Touro Law.
I’m assuming of course, that you’re getting gifts for people you hate. If you like this prospective law student, you should get them the gift of a slap upside their head whenever they talk about taking the LSAT.
Anyway, back to Touro. The Dean of the Law School, Patricia Salkin, sent an interesting message to Touro alums this holiday season. She asked them to “share their stories” with students who are still on the fence about going to law school.
Yes, Touro grads, by all means, share your cautionary stories with people who can still pull themselves back from the law school precipice….
Have you ever visited a political campaign website that greets you with the dulcet tones of “I’m sexy and I know it?”
Well, now you have. You can die in peace.
Candidate Mindy Meyer — slogan “I’m Senator and I Know It,” in diamond bedazzling — is running for New York State Senate, on both the Republican and Conservative Party lines. Meyer is a former judicial intern for the Honorable Judge Rivera in the Kings County Supreme Court and currently attends the Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center in Central Islip, New York. If elected, she pledges to transfer to Albany to continue her studies. Fair enough. It’s not like the New York legislature does enough work to interfere with a full-time law school credit load….
Last week, we asked you to pick your choice for the worst law school in New York. It turned out to be one of most active polls on the site. So many of you had strong opinions.
Your choice for the worst law school was overwhelming — so strong that one would hope that the administration would notice and do something to improve the school’s reputation in the community.
But the battle for the worst school in the five boroughs was heated. Let’s check out the results….
April’s Lawyer of the Month victor won in a landslide. He’s also the first person to win the contest for his practice of law (as opposed to his death or his desire to quit the practice of law).
Yes, I think I speak for all legal bloggers out there by wishing April’s Lawyer of the Month a warm congratulations…
We’re a little bit late with April’s lawyer of the month reader poll. First of all, we’ve been doing a lot of reader voting so far in this month. (There are still a few hours for you to vote in our Law Revue Video Contest.)
The other reason why we’re a bit delinquent this month is because we think we know who is going to win. It’s not every day that a recent law grad finds himself trying a murder case — and getting reprimanded by the judge for “lack[ing] knowledge of proper trial procedure.”
Such is life during the Obama “recovery.” Check out this month’s nominees below…
Look, Touro Law students and alumni, please don’t get mad at me. I’m just the messenger.
The Washington Post is reporting that a D.C. Superior Court judge, William Jackson, declared a mistrial in a murder case on Friday so that the defendant could fire his lawyer. The attorney, Joseph Rakofsky, a 2009 graduate of Touro Law School, showed “numerous signs” that he “lacked knowledge of proper trial procedure,” according to the judge.
If you are wondering why people sometimes make fun of Touro and other very low-ranked law schools, it’s because this kind of stuff is straight-up embarrassing. Good schools try to not let people like this into to law school, and they certainly don’t let them depart so poorly trained.
But most damning of all is that Joseph Rakofsky doesn’t even seem to understand how totally embarrassing this result is for him. The kid is bragging about the result, on Facebook…
Critics of the legal-education industrial complex would probably like to see some radical changes in the U.S. law school system. They’d probably want a few dozen law schools to shut down entirely, to reduce the glut of lawyers in this country. Barring that, they might want to see law schools reduce tuition dramatically — not just freeze tuition, which some schools are already doing, but make an outright cut in the sticker price of a J.D.
Alas, expecting such changes isn’t terribly realistic. Law school deans and law professors aren’t going to willingly reduce their salaries or send themselves into unemployment — and why should they? Despite all the warnings about the risk involved in taking on six figures of debt to acquire a law degree, demand for the product they’re selling, legal education, remains robust (even if it’s showing signs of abating).
Interestingly enough, however, we’re seeing some law schools cutting their production (of graduates, of J.D. degrees)….
Last week, I wrote a post about Touro Law School. The post highlighted allegations of wrongdoing at Touro College. In light of these allegations, and after talking about Touro Law’s reputation with a St. John’s law student I know, I suggested that the ABA might want to take a closer look a Touro Law — a fourth-tier law school that charges students $40,000 a year. Read the original post here.
Students at Touro and other fourth-tier law schools quickly came out of the woodwork. I see myself as a clear voice against the exploitation of these people by institutions charging them way too much. But they see me as an elitist who places institutional prestige ahead of quality education.
In my youth, I knew a lot of Touro Law graduates — I grew up on Long Island, and there are a lot of them out there. But it occurs to me that as an adult (and especially since I started working for Above the Law almost two and half years ago), I’ve had very little opportunity to interact with Touro students or grads, or people from other fourth-tier institutions. Our top-tier readers are often the most vocal, and ATL has put me in contact with scores of law students and alumni from second- and third-tier schools. The fourth tier, not so much.
With that in mind, one Touro Law student took the time to write an epic defense of Touro and fourth-tier legal education more generally. I don’t agree with a lot of it, but here at ATL, we do like to hear and present different sides of important arguments.
Everybody has heard my position on this matter (“the tuition is too damn high”), so let’s take a look at the other side — straight from the mouth of a student actually enrolled at Touro…
This week — in between tweeting some really funny stuff (such as how I want to blow up airports — it was so funny!), buying up every last can of Four Loko that I could get my hands on, and forwarding Skadden employee evaluations to all of my friends — I spent the rest of the time tracking the news articles and blog posts I wanted to cover in The Rundown.
Among other things in this edition, a prominent e-discovery company offers its predictions for 2011, a big fish swallows a little fish, and we engage in more Touro talk (this time positive).
There is even a crossword puzzle — seriously, a crossword puzzle…
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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What can you get a prospective law student who has everything? How about a free application to Touro Law. 
