New Rule: The next law school person who wants to bitch about the unfairness of the “employed nine months after graduation” metric must offer to make loan payments for all students who don’t have a job at nine months until they find one. If law schools are going to knock up their recent graduates they should at least have to throw in some child support.
Oh, wait, NO law school dean wants to actually be on the hook for student loans from when they come due six months after graduation until… whenever this unnamed point in the future comes when students can expect to have jobs. Given that, I don’t really want to hear about how your school is so freaking “unfairly” treated because CONSUMERS of legal education need to know if they will be employed within shouting distance of when they will start having to pay back their loans.
Fine, you want a compromise? It looks like we’re moving to ten months anyway…
‘You may take our false hopes for employment, but you will never take our right to sue!’
* Many have compared the possible outcome of the gay marriage cases to the Roe v. Wade decision, saying that constitutionalizing the right to gay marriage will create a similar culture war. Relax, bro, your bigotry is showing. You won’t be any less married if everyone has equal rights, promise. [New York Times]
* Everyone thought Justice Kennedy was going to be the deciding voice in the Obamacare case, and that didn’t happen, but when it comes to the future of gay marriage, in the words of RuPaul, Kennedy’s got the right amount of “charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent” to save the day (at least as far as California’s Proposition 8 is concerned). [Sacramento Bee]
* Meanwhile, people waiting in line outside of the Supreme Court in the hopes of grabbing one of the 50 seats reserved for the public like it’s a Black Friday sale outside of Walmart. Unemployed law grads, just think, you could be getting paid to sleep outside in a tent right now! [The Caucus / New York Times]
* Modern-day legal education is a “failure” in the eyes of this Supreme Court justice. Now don’t get it twisted, Scalia wasn’t referring to the post-graduate employment crisis that we’ve all come know and loathe — he just thinks we need fewer “law and [insert bullsh*t here]“ classes. [Portsmouth Herald]
* Dewey know when we’ll be able to retire this punny phrasing? Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight because more than a dozen former partners (including John Altorelli of spy-shagging fame) are still clinging to their claims that the failed firm’s estate owes them money. [Am Law Daily]
* Seeing as Widener’s motion to dismiss as to its allegedly deceptive job statistics was denied, it looks like there’s still time to rally behind the law school litigation cause. Someone on Team Strauss/Anziska needs to go all William Wallace and inspire more would-be plaintiffs to sue. [Law 360 (sub. req.)]
On Friday, we mentioned an East Coast law school student who was arrested for allegedly trying to meet up and have sex with an undercover officer posing as an underage girl. We’ve received numerous tips about the icky news, and we wanted to provide the full, sordid story.
This 3L might have some trouble passing a character and fitness review — or graduating, for that matter. Keep reading for the details (and to learn where he went to law school)….
* Stab your lawyer with a pencil once, shame on you. Stab him a second time, shame on me. Stab him a third time, they will strap you to your chair with a “stun cuff” so it doesn’t happen a fourth time. [Legal Blog Watch]
* (Crack) cocaine is a hell of a drug. [Legal Juice]
* A first-person account of why you don’t ever, ever want to end up in central booking. [The Crown]
* Telling opposing counsel you hope she “sleep[s] with the fishes” is mean and inappropriate. But on top of that, what the heck do you even stand to gain from saying that sort of thing? [Minneapolis StarTribune]
* If you want to complain about racial profiling at airports, there’s an app for that! [Prawfsblawg]
* To catch (an alleged) law school predator. Icky. [Delaware Online]
* Seriously? This “Is it Kanye or the LSAT?” quiz is surprisingly tricky. [LSAT Blog]
On Friday, we brought you what could be classified as one of the worst law jobs of all time: a job as an unpaid potato chip tester/taster.
And much like the side effects of eating an Olestrafied potato chip, the law school in question has announced that the notorious job was full of crap….
Here at Above the Law, we write all the time about crappy law job postings. A good deal of these awful employment listings come from law school career services offices (which is not at allimpressive!).
We recently received word about a law school career services job posting that was so horrendous, so ridiculous, that we could not help ourselves but to write about it. After all, writing about crappy law jobs is like opening a can of Pringles: once you pop, you can’t stop.
And this job — well, let’s just say that it takes the cake, or the potato chip, as the case may be….
* “Dominique Strauss-Kahn Gets Off, As Did Everyone Else Who Stayed In His Room At The Sofitel.” Or: what you don’t want to know about your high-end hotel room. [Dealbreaker]
* F**k yeah — trademark law! Or: some reflections on the “immoral or scandalous” bar to trademark registration, by fashion lawyer Chuck Colman. [Law of Fashion]
* The New Jersey Supreme Court just issued a major new decision calling for changes in the way that courts handle eyewitness identifications — an issue that will also be going before SCOTUS in the coming Term. [The Innocence Project]
* Congratulations to Professor Neal Katyal, former acting U.S. solicitor general, who’s apparently headed to Hogan Lovells. [Am Law Daily]
* Does signing a bill into law with an autopen present constitutional problems? Professor Terry Turnipseed explains how it might. [Slate]
* Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain thinks that President Obama’s decision not to defend DOMA constitutes an “impeachable defense.” [Poliglot / Metro Weekly]
* Interesting historical perspective from Professor Dave Hoffman on the current debate over legal education. One critic wrote that “there are too many lawyers in this country,” “many of them are not busy,” and “many of them are on the margin of starvation” — back in 1932. [Concurring Opinions]
* And some thoughts on the subject from someone who, despite all the warnings, has decided to go to law school — Shon Hopwood, our former Jailhouse Lawyer of the Day. [The Cockle Bur]
* Professor Paul Horwitz has a response to Governor Rick Perry’s “Response” — and Horwitz seems somewhat sympathetic. [New York Times]
* No, University of Chicago law review editors, Professor Stephen Bainbridge is not going to give up his valuable time to help you do your jobs. [Professor Bainbridge]
* The 7 Habits of Highly Useless Outside Corporate Lawyers. [What About Clients?]
* The latest salvo in the ongoing battle between Professor Lawrence Connell and Widener Law School: Widener demands that Professor Connell undergo a psychiatric evaluation. [Instapundit]
* Some West Village pet stores won’t let you buy a puppy if you are drunk. I don’t know if this fact represents a high point in intelligent rulemaking or a reason to bomb a place like the West Village that makes a law like this necessary. [Village Voice]
* People under 30 are most satisfied with their standard of living. I think that’s because people under 30 assume things will get better for them one day, so I’m not sure they’re “satisfied” so much as “delusional about a future that will be hotter, wetter, and has already been sold to the Chinese.” [Huffington Post]
* The only thing worse than an unaccountable judiciary is an underpaid, disgruntled, unaccountable judiciary. [Faculty Lounge]
* Embattled Widener Law Professor Lawrence Connell is now suing students? Be careful man, “embattled” is usually the stage where the wheels start coming off. [FIRE]
* You can once again purchase “Raging Bitch” beer in Michigan. See, now that we know Jim Tressel bought his dominance over Michigan, I think the whole state will lighten up a bit. [Legal Blog Watch]
* Before rising 3Ls realize nobody is coming to interview them, maybe we should point them towards the Schola2Juris program of Waller Lansden one more time? [Schola2Juris]
Remember Lawrence Connell, the professor at Widener Law School who got in trouble for coming up with teaching hypotheticals in which he killed Dean Linda Ammons? Well, perhaps Professor Connell wishes the dean’s death was more than hypothetical.
Apparently Professor Connell wants to slay Dean Ammons — in a court of law. He has sued the dean for defamation.
Suing your current boss or employer — as opposed to suing after you’re gone, a la Matthew Kluger v. Fried Frank — can be awkward. Just ask JoEllen Lyons Dillon of Reed Smith or Raymond Carey of Foley & Lardner, two partners who have sued the law firms where they still work.
But they don’t have tenure, unlike Larry Connell. Let’s see what the good professor is suing over….
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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New Rule: The next law school person who wants to bitch about the unfairness of the “employed nine months after graduation” metric must offer to make loan payments for all students who don’t have a job at nine months until they find one. If law schools are going to knock up their recent graduates they should at least have to throw in some child support.
