Staci here. It’s been a few months since we last spoke about our man Sam E. Goldberg’s travails with the New York bar exam. From working hard to hardly working, he brought us the blow-by-blow experience of a first-time test taker in graphic detail this past summer.
Well, the results finally came in last week, but we know that our readers have been dying to know whether Mr. Bar Exam passed the test, perhaps for the schadenfreude. What’s the likelihood that a dude who took a trip to Vegas in the middle of studying passed the test?
Hold on to your hats, because we’re about to find out….
Ed. note: This column will be about entertainment, the law, and the intersection of those two things. If you know of a law-related personality you’d like to see interviewed here, please contact us.
Staci here. We know that lawyers tend to be easily distracted bunch, always seeking out ways to entertain themselves while at work. But why force yourself to do work that’s so boring when you can just flush your Ivy League degree down the toilet and become a comedian?
This week Sam interviewed Matt Ritter, a Penn Law graduate who quit his Biglaw job to become a successful solo comedian and a member of the comedy group Comedians at Law….
It’s beginning to feel like a large chunk of the lawyer world, in an alternate universe, would be professional musicians. In addition to our annual Law Revue contest, we’re hearing day after day about lawyers with secret musical talent (or, uh, passion).
Today, we heard about a young Canadian lawyer who’s been hustlin’ for some time now. He landed a sweet gig at a Bay Street firm. To celebrate, he released a swanky new hip hop video featuring Lamborghinis, luxury boats, beautiful women, and some dope lawyerly rhymes.
If you are one of our older readers, Tosh has a show on Comedy Central called Tosh.0. You’ve seen bits of it before the Daily Show starts playing from your DVR. His show is basically a bunch of jokes based on funny stuff he finds on YouTube.
The other night, Tosh did a video breakdown of a skateboarder slamming into an older woman outside what Tosh called “a community college.” In Idaho. It was pretty funny, especially since the old lady kind of leaned into the skateboarder trying to avoid her, and then tried to beat them up.
But a tipster reports: “That is not a community college, those is the entry steps to the University of Idaho College of Law.”
Hey now! Our tipster says that the old lady is actually an Idaho Law employee….
Occasionally, lawyers send us awesome music videos that they have created. Sadly, we get less appetizing ones much more frequently. It turns out being an attorney does not automatically turn you into the Lonely Island.
We’ve got two painfully funny / bad / uncomfortable lawyer-produced clips today. Normally, I wouldn’t seek out clips like this to write about, but both of these were submitted to us by their creators. So, I guess, be careful what you wish for.
After the jump, check out the mid-size California firm that hopes you’ll call them, maybe, and a war crimes lawyer turned comedienne who sings a love song to Mitt Romney — while wearing a bikini, of course…
F. Scott Fitzgerald once opined that there were “no second acts in American lives.” Similarly, Biz Markie once opined “’cause we all pick our boogers sometime every day.” If you’re already lost, allow me to explain. This is the story of a former Biglaw attorney and his second act. He and his friends started a website devoted to rap lyrics. The website annotates rap lyrics, and it’s this system of annotation that the founders of the website hope will take over the web (including legal research). The website was recently funded by venture capitalists, and the resulting hype has ping-ponged across the web at a pace so rapid that you’d be excused if you made like Steinski and wondered, “What does it all mean?” (affiliate link).
The interviews that have fed the myriad profiles of the site’s founders have been nothing short of entertaining. Just last week, Gawker was prompted to write a guide to the site, rapgenius.com, which managed to sound both condescending and wildly equivocating and which did nothing but illuminate the author’s squeamishness. This promises to not be like that. I don’t know if Rap Genius is going to be Wikipedia or Pets.com.
What I do know is that a Biglaw dropout just ganked $15 million from Marc Andreessen and wants to edge out Westlaw and Lexis (good luck with that).
Keep reading to find out where he went to law school and what firm he worked at. And if you want to see his shirtless YouTube diss track (no homo)….
Ed. note: This column will be about entertainment, the law, and the intersection of those two things. If you know of a law-related personality you’d like to see interviewed here, please contact us.
Danzig here. So, we know a lot of lawyers are somewhat lovelorn and maybe even lonely — due to all those nights burning the midnight billable hour oil. And since apparently most attorneys are Jewish (this was news to me, but you learn something every day), what better way to combine those two factors into a new location-based mobile app for Jews looking for love?
That’s why this week Sam interviewed Luba Tolkachyov, the founder of Yenta, which so happens to fill that niche. Tolkachyov has recently been featured in the New York Post and Huffington Post.
Ed. note: This column will be about entertainment, the law, and the intersection of those two things. If you know of a law-related personality you’d like to see interviewed here, please contact us.
Staci here. This week, Sam was lucky enough to chat with the bassist from The Vandals, one of my favorite bands from my teenage years. It’s likely that only former punk rock aficionados will understand where the title of this post comes from.
This bassist, Joe Escalante, isn’t just a member of a band — he’s a lawyer, too! In fact, you may remember that he ran for a judgeship in Los Angeles County this summer. Escalante is currently the host of Barely Legal Radio, a syndicated entertainment legal advice radio call-in program.
So what’s the best advice that can be given to people who want to become entertainment lawyers, aside from graduating from an Ivy League law school? Let’s find out what Escalante thinks….
Presumably the Princeton Review folks were referring to career prospects in the legal profession. Fortunately for YLS, its graduates possess many other talents besides drafting motions in limine and negotiating software licenses.
Do singing and dancing count as “employed upon graduation”? Let’s check out the latest efforts of these Elis…
* In light of Chief Justice Roberts’s historic vote to uphold Obamacare, should we expect JGR to be more liberal going forward? According to Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Oath (affiliate link), “Do not expect a new John Roberts. Expect the conservative he has always been.” [Talking Points Memo via How Appealing]
* Law firm staff layoffs: they’re not just an American thing. Slaughter and May is dropping the ax on 28 secretaries. [Roll On Friday]
* “[A]ny robot or high school graduate can calculate numbers in a matrix to arrive at the highest possible sentence. But it takes a Judge — a man or woman tempered by experience in life and law — to properly judge another human being’s transgressions.” [Justice Building Blog]
* Professor Dershowitz’s $4 million Cambridge mansion? Robert Wenzel is not impressed: “if I lived in that house, I would want to attack Iran and most of the rest of the world, also.” [Economic Policy Journal]
* A man sues a strip club, alleging that a stripper ruptured his bladder when she slid down a pole and onto his abdomen. Ouch. [Legally Weird / Findlaw]
* Still on the subject of Torts, two attractive blonde sisters walk into a bar — and discuss who can be held liable if a man suffers a heart attack during a threesome. Video after the jump….
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.
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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Staci here. It’s been a few months since we last spoke about our man Sam E. Goldberg’s travails with the New York bar exam. From working hard to hardly working, he brought us the blow-by-blow experience of a first-time test taker in graphic detail this past summer.
