Vivia Chen

Morning Docket: 04.20.11

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* The Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday in a lawsuit asking courts to force major companies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Sotomayor spent the entire oral argument asking attorneys how she could fit more Miami Sound Machine on her Zune. [New York Times]

* Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who can be seen every Thursday night on 30 Rock playing Kenneth the Page, shares none of Jan Brewer’s qualms about a “birther bill.” [Politico]

* The Ecuadorean Slapfight (also the name of my ska band in high school) between Patton Boggs, Gibson Dunn, and Chevron was squashed by a judge yesterday. [Reuters]

* Baker Hostetler is balling out of control on L’Affaire Madoff. [WSJ Law Blog]

Judge Vaughn Walker

* Tiger Blogger Vivia Chen wants white guys to be hunted like animals. [The Careerist]

* A copyright troll has found a way to exact a toll without actually owning any copyrights. No word yet on whether anyone has gained entrance into the boy’s hole. [Wired via ABA Journal]

* Alleged Wikileaker Bradley Manning is being transferred to another prison. Julian Assange celebrated the news by going dancing. [Fox News]

* Sponsors of Proposition 8 are mad that retired judge Vaughn Walker, who presided over Prop 8′s defeat in court, is giving lectures around the country that feature a three-minute clip of the trial. They say the video should remain in the closet. Or a desk drawer of some sort. [Los Angeles Times]

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Size Matters: Breaking Up Need Not Be Hard To Do

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Ed. note: This is the latest installment of Size Matters, one of Above the Law’s new columns for small-firm lawyers.

We all know that sometimes relationships end. Take Renee Zellweger and Bradley Cooper. As my friend (who is a divorce attorney) always says, if things are not working out, end it and do not buy real estate together.

This is true not only with bad relationships, but with bad jobs. I have received emails and had conversations with several small-firm attorneys who are unhappy. One woman emailed me that she worked at a small firm where she had to work in a poorly heated office with roaches and screamers (I guess she worked on a pirate ship). One man told me that he was repeatedly forced to cancel his vacations for faux emergencies. I have heard many different tales of experiences that range from unpleasant to abusive.

The idea of quitting a job (even a bad one) in this economy seems heretical to many. But, it shouldn’t. A recent study suggests that working at a bad job may be more harmful than being unemployed….

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Law School Group Urges Female Students To Get in Better Shape

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How's the job hunt going?

Are you a female law student? Have you put on a few pounds during your time in law school? Would you like to be reminded that fit, attractive women have better employment opportunities?

Then maybe you should consider transferring to Cardozo Law School. The Cardozo Health and Fitness Club is holding a networking lunch, but the flier makes it sound like they’re staging an intervention for fat chicks.

The Health and Fitness Club is forcing me to ask: Are Cardozo women really ready to whore themselves out to potential employers?

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Non-Sequiturs: 02.01.11

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If Mr. Met owned the Mets would things really be any worse?

* Is anybody really surprised that the Wilpons are having trouble finding people to buy a minority stake in the Mets? It’s an awful franchise that is poorly run that plays home games in Queens — why would you want a minority stake in that? Why… why didn’t God make me a Yankee fan? [Dealbreaker]

* American Express never leaves home with manners. [What About Clients?]

* How much of a beating do you have to take while being raped before Republican men will let you have control over your own body? [Gawker]

* Dear federal government, we New Yorkers could really use any ideas you have about dealing with bed bugs. [NY1]

Mark Antony

* February is Black History Month and National Condom Month. Great, two things brothers don’t like, snow and condoms. [Ross's Law Marketing Blog]

* Dude, if pimps can’t get advice from authorized counsel, they’re just going to go to the strip clubs. [Instapundit]

* Egyptian politics hasn’t been this interesting since Mark Antony got his ass kicked. [Huffington Post]

* Is a prospective employer making you take a personality test as part of the job application process? Vivia Chen has some tips for “passing.” [The Careerist]

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Biglaw Baby Making 101

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There’s been so much talk of Biglaw women and baby making floating around the blogosphere this week that I think there must have been a “repopulate the species” action memo in US Weekly. Existentially, I blame the season. It’s January, and childless professional women just went through another holiday season getting bombarded with images of children on television (to say nothing of little nieces or nephews that might have been swarming like locusts when they visited family). They return back to their regularly scheduled lives, many of them with raises or bonuses for the new year, and now they’re looking around at their barren apartments and thinking, “What am I missing?”

You’ll see the same thing happen to men… after the Superbowl. They’ll watch the game and have fond memories of their dad or uncle or somebody teaching them fun things they can do with balls. Then post-Superbowl depression will set in, and you’ll see men sleepwalking through “honey-do” errands with vacant, suicidal looks on their faces. They’ll look around at fathers who don’t even seem to care which NCAA teams are on the bubble, and they’ll think, “What am I missing?”

But this week it’s women who are having replication pangs. Clear as I can tell, Vivia Chen on The Careerist started the ball rolling in the legal blogosphere by repackaging a Slate XX Factor article (by Dahlia Lithwick) that featured one woman telling other women that they were hobbling their careers by planning for a family before they had one.

And since women generally can’t stand to even be in the same room with each other, it wasn’t too long before everybody was rolling out their best women-dogging-other-women content….

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Yale Law Professor Amy Chua Writes in Praise of Crazy Asian Moms

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Amy Chua: Yale Law professor and Tiger Mother.

Right now the legal world is abuzz about an essay published over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal by Amy Chua, a prominent (and pulchritudinous) professor at Yale Law School. The essay’s title, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, pretty much says it all. The piece is based on Chua’s new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, described by its publisher as “[a]n awe-inspiring, often hilarious, and unerringly honest story of one mother’s exercise in extreme parenting, revealing the rewards-and the costs-of raising her children the Chinese way.”

What does raising children “the Chinese way” entail? It’s not hard to guess. Here’s a good summary from Vivia Chen (one of the many Asian-American females to write about Chua; see also Jen Chung of Gothamist and Elizabeth Chang of the Washington Post): “Chua is an überachiever who’s hell-bent on raising her kids to be at least as accomplished as she is. Chua seems to delight in playing up to the stereotype of the pushy, academically obsessed Asian mom. So much so that I thought (for a moment) that she was pulling our legs. But she’s serious.”

Very serious. Let’s take a look at how Chua and her husband — Jed Rubenfeld, a Yale law professor, overachiever, and certified hottie, just like his wife — raise their two daughters, Sophia and Louisa Chua-Rubenfeld….

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Hot Women Lawyers

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This month’s issue of the American Lawyer includes a very interesting feature. The magazine identified 45 up-and-coming female attorneys under the age of 45, at Am Law 200 firms. These kinds of lists tend to be nothing more than a popularity contest, but Am Law seemed to do a thorough job in culling through a lot of nominees to come up with their 45 people. They put in a lot of work.

What caught my attention was Am Law’s stated reason for putting together the list:

Whether it’s “Dealmakers of the Year,” “Litigation Department of the Year,” “Big Suits,” or “Big Deals,” the pages of The American Lawyer typically brim with pictures of men. But time and again, we’ve come across remarkable women lawyers, many of whom fell outside of our deals-and-suits-heavy coverage. To give them their due, we decided to identify the best of the best among young women lawyers in The Am Law 200, and bring them together in a single issue.

Does that strike anybody as slightly patronizing?

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Boies Schiller Throws Down Gauntlet, Calls Out Davis Polk on Associate Comp

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If you haven’t already done so, check out Vivia Chen’s series of interviews with hiring partners over at The Careerist. They’re fun and interesting reads. (Our favorite was her unintentionally hilarious interview of Steven Glaser of Skadden.)

Recently Chen sat down with Alan Vickery of litigation powerhouse Boies Schiller (which scored a major victory in the Prop 8 case). Here’s how Vickery described the Boies lawyer:

What’s typical is the diversity of personality and style at the firm. David [Boies] has a broad scope of interests and abilities; he sends a strong signal that individualism is tolerated and encouraged. For instance, there’s lots of support for our work on Prop 8 [where the firm is arguing against the ban on gay marriage in California], but there are also lots of Federalist Society members here.

(Well, in fairness to the Fed Soc, many of its members are libertarian rather than social conservatives, and as such sympathetic to gay marriage — at least as a policy matter, if not necessarily a matter of constitutional law.)

Who are your competitors in the hiring game?

The usual suspects: Wachtell, Davis Polk, Cravath. And if they’re looking for a [litigation] boutique, it’d be Susman Godfrey, Williams & Connolly, or Quinn Emanuel.

Speaking of the competition, Vickery got in a good dig at Davis Polk….

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Wearing Peep-Toe Shoes to Court? Women Judges Weigh In

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Earlier today, on the Senate floor, debate took place on whether to confirm Solicitor General Elena Kagan as the nation’s 112th Supreme Court justice. The Kagan nomination is not very controversial, due to the nominee’s impeccable credentials and the Democrats’ 59 votes in the Senate.

In the legal blogosphere, a far more divisive debate is raging, over a subject just as important as confirming the fourth woman ever to the Supreme Court: Are peep-toe shoes appropriate professional footwear? Can female attorneys wear them to the office? What about to court?

The debate was ignited over at The Careerist, by Vivia Chen (no style slouch herself — not many legal journalists own floor-length mink coats). Chen recounted this anecdote:

Waiting in line in the ladies room at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel recently, I heard this discussion: “In my day, I always wore pumps to court,” said in a woman in her fifties. “Can you believe this associate went to court with open-toe shoes?” Her companion shook her head, then asked: “How did she do?” The first woman replied, “Her work was good, but her shoes weren’t right.”

Chen then surveyed a number of lawyers, from around the country, and they could not reach a consensus on the appropriateness of peep-toe shoes. The debate continued over at the ABA Journal, where a post by Debra Cassens Weiss generated a flurry of comments.

Given that so many law firms are business casual nowadays, it is probably safe to wear peep-toe shoes to the office. The fashion guidelines issued by the New York office of Weil Gotshal, for example, officially bless “open toe or open heel shoes.” (Still unacceptable: “Athletic shoes, clogs, beach shoes, flip flops, beach shoes.”)

But what about wearing peep-toe shoes to court? On this subject, we decided to turn to the experts: namely, a panel of fabulous female federal judges….

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