Don’t you think law schools should do everything they can to avoid inconveniencing their students? I do. I’m a a fan of convenience.
I’m also a fan of heat. Heat isn’t just a convenience, it should be a right. Somewhere in the penumbra of the whatever is the right not to freeze your ass off. At the very least, there are some implied warranties running around up in here.
But one law school has decided to inconvenience students by depriving them of heat, just as the kids gear up for finals.
It looks like building maintenance has already failed….
Doesn’t this road just scream ‘Let’s go take a bar exam’?
So, in case you haven’t heard, they’re having a bit of weather in the middle west today. It’s bad. The climate Gods continue to be angry at us.
The impending snowstorm didn’t stop the good people of Missouri from trying to hold their February bar exam today. Because, I mean, just because we can make some predictions on what’s going to happen with the weather doesn’t mean we should do anything about it or adjust our plans in any way.
For at least one group of students, the infrastructure couldn’t cash the check the Missouri Board of Law Examiners wrote. Their power went out during the bar….
Based here in New York, I’ve spent the last several days watching the news while drinking copious amounts of whisky (klassy hurricane tip: pour the whisky directly into the can of coke — it saves washing a glass later if you’re worried about losing water!). The stream of images showing devastated areas is truly horrifying.
Thankfully my bunker of an apartment survived unscathed, but that did not excuse me from my own share of post-traumatic stress. But in my case it was seeing a number of lawyers-turned-politicians parading across the news channels displaying their own law firm certified brand of crisis management and triggering flashbacks to my years in private practice.
When we suffer the zombie apocalypse (which could happen as early as next Tuesday) or any other movie-level disaster, if we continue to place executive power in the hands of lawyers, we’re all screwed….
The East Coast clean-up from Hurricane Sandy is well underway. When reached for comment, the city of New Orleans said, “Clean-up? You guys need a wet-vac and you’ll be fine.”
In all fairness, you just have to look at the news to see how Sandy hammered the Northeast, especially New Jersey. Havoc abounds, and law schools in the Garden State are not immune from the disaster…
* Shashank Tripathi appears to be behind the fake tweets about the flooding of the New York Stock Exchange. Is that protected speech or (wait for it) DID HE JUST SAY “FIRE” IN A CROWDED THEATER??????? [Gigaom]
* But to be clear, Romney is free to lie as much as he wants. Political speech, even misleading speech, is clearly protected. [ABA Journal]
* Just to be clear, because I know “low information” voters are easily confused, “Government” are the people going around trying to help you out in the storm. “PRIVATE BUSINESS,” in this case insurance companies, are the ones looking to screw you over and profit from the disaster. [New York Times]
* If you want to help the victims of Sandy (instead of just staring at pictures of their suffering like I do), you can. [Red Cross; NY Cares; Humane Society]
* Only now, at the end, do you understand the true power of Disney. Skadden helps Disney buy Star Wars. Now Lucas’s failure is complete. [Am Law Daily]
As we mentioned earlier today, we’ll be operating normally here at Above the Law, notwithstanding Hurricane Sandy. Our physical offices, at the corner of Broadway and Houston in Manhattan, are closed. But your four editors — Elie, Staci, Chris, and myself — will be working diligently from our homes to keep you informed and entertained during Frankenstorm.
It seems that we won’t be alone in telecommuting today. Encouraging (or even ordering) employees to stay home, but suggesting that they work remotely if they can, seems to be a common response to the storm.
Here is information — including many UPDATES — about how various courts, government offices, law firms, and law schools are responding to Hurricane Sandy….
I didn’t mean to interrupt, you were saying something about ‘clean’ coal?
Hurricane Sandy — a.k.a. “Frankenstorm”, because it’s greater than the sum of its parts (and there’s the suggestion that storms like this are growing bigger and stronger because of man messing around with forces he doesn’t fully understand) — is coming. It’s basically a hurricane that’s merging with a Nor’easter that will make it rain, and not in the fun way. The federal government is closed. The New York Stock Exchange is closed. The McDonald’s next to my apartment is closed — Sandy has already cost me a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit.
Don’t worry about me, I’ve got a three-day supply of alcohol and hot pockets. Hopefully you are all similarly prepared for 36 hours of sustained hype wind and rain. Size does matter with Sandy (if “Sandy” sounds a bit mundane, know that the next one will be “Tony”). We might not get a lot of CGI worthy images out of this storm, but the length of this storm could cause a lot of damage.
One thing that is still open: the Supreme Court of the United States. Yes, because the nation might be able to survive without mass transit or the stock exchange, but old men don’t take a day off from sitting in judgment. Reuters reports that the Court prides itself on working when everybody else takes shelter from a storm: “In 1996, when a major snowstorm closed the federal government and brought Washington, D.C., to a near standstill, court arguments went on. Then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a Wisconsin native undeterred by snow and ruled by a strong sense of punctuality, made sure business that January 8 began on schedule.”
UPDATE (12:00 PM): According to SCOTUSblog (based on a press release from the Court), the Court has now cancelled arguments for Tuesday. So, the case of Sandy v. SCOTUS has been decided 9-0 in favor of the people who might have had to put their lives at risk to cover the proceedings.
Let’s look at some of the other things in and around the legal world that are still open along the Eastern seaboard….
Are you ready for two weeks of sports people only pretend to care about every four years?
* And now for some reflection on the just completed bar exam. [Fink or Swim]
* In most of the country, we slam to door on door-to-door salesmen. In Florida, they shoot them dead. [The Raw Story]
* Here’s another take on how long your hair should be at the office. Apparently it helps to not be stupid. [Sweet Hot Justice]
* Yesterday’s New York thunderstorm had tragic consequences for an area lawyer. [Herald Sun]
* I was on Red Eye on Fox last night/this morning. It’s the first plank in the platform I’m using to run for King of the Homeless. [Red Eye]
* We also covered this ridiculous story about a high school student suing because he got a C+ in Chemistry. [ABC News]
* Uh oh, Mitt Romney has angered Carl Lewis. Now I’m waiting for other relevant 80s athletes to weigh in. Can somebody tell me what Greg Louganis thinks about Romney’s comments? [Politico]
Advanced technology designed to thwart aggressive air conditioning.
When we do stories about law school weather problems, they usually involve the facilities being too hot for the students. That’s because air conditioning costs money, and law schools don’t like to spend money on current students.
But once you get out of school and start an office job (or “win the lottery” as people from the class of 2011 call it), the problem isn’t going to be that your office is too hot. The problem is going to be that your office blasts the AC so high that you’ll think you’ve been running around a hedge maze at the Overlook (just click on the link, millennials).
That’s right, for a lot of lawyers, it’s freezing up in here. And since we’re talking about lawyers, you know we’re talking about people who like to bitch….
* The Obama campaign is going to court to fight for their big ‘O’ trademark. I guess their claim that Romney’s centrist pragmatism was infringing on Obama’s reputation as a practical moderate fell through once Romney started pandering to his base. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Cruise and Holmes have reached a divorce settlement already. I really think they’ve lost that loving feeling. [Ministry of Gossip / Los Angeles Times]
* After a major blackout, you just know lawyers who work for power companies are going to be busy. [Legal Blog Watch]
* British judge tells Arab man “to depart on his flying carpet” to escape paying costs. In other news: even a magic carpet wouldn’t help Brits win their own tennis tournament. [Legal Juice]
* The bad judgment isn’t necessarily that a Brooklyn ADA took these pictures of himself, it’s that he didn’t scrub them from Facebook after he became an ADA. [Gothamist]
* I-bankers suck at managing their own 401Ks. Maybe that’s the corollary to lawyers being bad at representing themselves. [Dealbreaker]
* This is a brilliant look back at everything that happened with the Roberts Affordable Care Act decision, minute-by-minute. [SCOTUSblog]
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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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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