Technology

Georgetown University Law School Georgetown Law School GULC Above the Law blog.jpgGeorgetown is an excellent law school — “T14″ (top 14), as some like to say — with many things going for it. Supreme Court justices love to visit. Students get to take classes like The Law of 24. The diva-licious Nina Totenberg speaks at commencement.
Perhaps most importantly, at least to readers of ATL, Georgetown grads land excellent jobs. Not surprisingly, in a recent poll, a majority of respondents said they’d need $100,000 to turn down 14th-ranked Georgetown in favor of, say, 51st-ranked Arizona State (maybe ’cause they’d like to be separated from Kumari Fulbright by multiple states).
But GULC isn’t perfect. Mistakes get made — mistakes that could, say, compromise your personally identifiable information (and mess with your credit score). From several tipsters:

“You might want to post this so anyone who graduated during this time but didn’t get the e-mail knows about the stolen identities.”

“I got this warning this morning. Evidently, not everyone is affected, as students next to me in class have not received the email. Just thought I’d forward this along to show the problems at American could be worse – at least their identities aren’t at risk.”

View the email, after the jump.
Update: We have also posted a follow-up to the original message.

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laptop computer web surfer Above the Law.jpgRemember MacGate, at American University’s Washington College of Law? It was resolved. But technology problems persist at WCL:

Date: January 28, 2008 2:34:20 PM EST
Subject: Wireless at WCL

Dear Student Body:

The following problems have been discovered with the WCL network:

1. All access points in room 101 were either turned off, or nonfunctional for the past two years.

2. All access points on the 5th floor were located in elevator shafts, or other places where they did not provide coverage.

3. Certain points on the 6th floor were assigned the wrong IP address,and so did not provide access.

The Technology department is working to address these problems. If you continue to experience problems with the internet, please inform the Student Services Committee at [xxxx]. You can also file an online trouble ticket, when you find yourself in an area with internet access, at [xxxx].

Regards,
Student Services Committee

At first we thought this was satirical, but we were assured that it’s not: “This is for real — we got it from the SBA today. Our wireless has been terrible recently.”
Your friends at ATL obviously want you to have wireless access in class. But we realize that some professors contend that internet access in classrooms is an impediment to instruction.

Morning Docket: 12.28.07

Benazir Bhutto Pakistan Above the Law blog.jpg* Rest in peace, Benazir Bhutto; God knows you weren’t able to live in it. [CNN]
* That seems like a pretty good starting point for liability against the zoo. [BBC]
* We don’t know if you know Tom Goldstein, but he’s a pretty big deal. [SCOTUSBlog]
* If he could only apply all of that genius to acquiring some money to actually make a mortgage payment… [WSJ Law Blog]

Kwanzaa Happy Kwanzaa Above the Law blog.jpgWe see that the WSJ Law Blog has beaten us to this subject. We’ve had this post ready for a while; unfortunately, technical difficulties have prevented us from posting for the past hour.
The WSJ folks have already presented some of the cards that we were going to cover. But here are a few firm holiday greetings not on their list (click on each firm name to see their card):
1. Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft: Trying too hard, sort of like their Wild West-themed holiday party? Then again, it must have been fun for those underemployed structured finance associates to try their hand at web design.
2. Dewey & LeBoeuf: Not trying hard enough? This may take subtlety and understatement too far, to the point of banality. But at least the card’s not signed “Sieg heil.”
3. Schottenstein Zox & Dunn: This firm, which has about 110 lawyers in three Ohio cities and Raleigh, NC, explains in its cover email that it “strive[s] to approach life and law from a different perspective.” So they designed not one but TWO holiday videos. You can view them, and vote for your favorite, over here. We’re partial to the video of the skateboarding attorneys, which must have been a challenge to film.
For each vote, the firm will donate $1 to Project Mentor Big Brother Big Sisters of Central Ohio. How nice! (But it’s too bad you have to provide your name and email address to vote, which will probably depress voter turnout.)
Update: It appears that the WSJ’s link to the holiday card of Grodsky & Olecki, an entertainment law boutique, is broken. We’ve posted the card, which we also received, after the jump.
Law Blog Law Firm Holiday Cards Of the Day [WSJ Law Blog]

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Mac PC advertisement.gifIt appears that the situation we reported on earlier, concerning the plight of Mac users at American University’s Washington College of Law, has been resolved. Several of you forwarded us an email from the WCL administration outlining the steps they’re taking to address the situation, including “providing $12,000 towards the cost of laptop rental for all upper-level users of MACs that are incompatible with the exam software.”
Some reactions from students:

“At times it has felt like a modern PCU, sans George Clinton of course: ‘These, Tom, are the Causeheads. They find a world-threatening issue and stick with it for about a week.’”

“Although I am not a Mac user, and am fairly tired of hearing Mac users whining at school, it’s good to see my school do the right thing.”

“We just received this email from the Dean. Looks like your post helped us out. Thanks!”

You’re welcome. We aim to please here at ATL.
Read the full email, after the jump.
Earlier: American University MacGate
MacGate Update: An Explanation from the University of Kentucky

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maclaptop.gif
Wow. Sorry for the delay in new posts, but you guys have been going wild in the comments, and have thereby crushed our servers. We suck. Anyway, here’s some more on MacGate:
University of Kentucky law students received a memo earlier this week explaining the school’s decision to use Exam Soft (and thus impact Mac users in the same negative fashion as American University). The long and the short of it is that Exam Soft is better than the other two choices, and that putting Mac users out is a necessary evil. The other choices rejected by Kentucky were Secure Exam (the company responsible for the New York Bar Exam Laptopgate clusterf**k) and Extegrity. Extegrity works with Macs, but Kentucky memo’s description of the company makes it sound pretty fly-by-night:

The company
itself is very small, however, and has a small number of users. When
we asked the owner about addressing problems that might arise during
the administration of exams, he suggested that he would give us his
cell phone number and we could just call him on the west coast.

So what have we learned? First, if you’re going to law school, it’s probably going to be easier on you if you have a PC laptop instead of a Mac one (also, you might consider remembering how to use pen and paper; we did it for all of our law school exams and the bar exam). Second, some real company needs to write a program for taking exams on laptops that is compatible with Macs.
The full memo after the jump.

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macpc.gif

“Hello, I’m a Mac.”
“And I’m a PC. I may not be great at making newfangled new media graphics, but at least I won’t cost you extra when you’re taking law school exams at American University.”

Apparently American University is not the best place to go law school if you plan on using a Mac laptop. From a tipster:

My sister is a 2L and was told before she went to the school that a Macintosh would be compatible for test-taking. Turns out this is not the case and the students with Macs must either pay $200-300 to download the software to take exams or rent a non-Mac to take the exam. In essense, students with Macs must pay to take their exams.
This is an appalling situation as I am told that at least 1/3 of the students there have Macs. Also, when I called the Student Tech Support Analyst at the school and told them that I was a potential incoming student and was looking to buy a PC, they initially told me that as long as the Mac has XP, that exam taking would be fine.

Is this a huge injustice to Mac users, or should the Mac users just man up and pay, or take the exams on paper?
We’ve got a portion of an email exchange between an angry Mac student and a dean of the school after the jump to help you decide.

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laptop pink girl woman Abovethelaw Above the Law blog.jpg
Lat is here (and apparently partying like a rock star), so you’ll have to put with me for the rest of the day.
The first order of the day is to announce that the New York Bar Exam results are up on the BOLE website.
We had anxious tipsters this morning who were quite worried (and can you blame them, really?) that there was another screw-up with the exam. The link was already there to go to the results page, but clicking on it produced a large, red-lettered “ERROR” message. It appears from later tips that we received, though, that the results were available promptly at 9:00 a.m. just as it was previously announced they would be.
Ok, so they managed to get the results up, but what’s up with Laptopgate? Anybody got any updates?
Earlier: Update: What’s Going on with the New York Bar Exam Results?
Update: In our haste to get the post up, we missed an update on Laptopgate in the BOLE press release. The relevant paragraph is after the jump. The quick and dirty version: about a third of the 47 exam takers who had essay answers that were not retrieved passed even assuming a 0 score on those essays; about another third failed even assuming a perfect score on the essays; and for the final third, they guessed based on performance on the rest of the exam.

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laptop pink girl woman Abovethelaw Above the Law blog.jpgIf you visit the New York State Board of Law Examiners website, using Internet Explorer (it doesn’t seem to work with Firefox), you’ll see this message scrolling across the status bar at the bottom of your screen (be sure to have the status bar activated under “View”):

July 2007 examination results will be available here for candidate private lookup on Thursday, November 15th at 9:00 a.m. Eastern, the general passing list will be posted on Friday, November 16 at 9:00 a.m…..

Thanks to the many tipsters who wrote us about this. Especially this person:

On another note, what kind of crappy web designer does BOLE have?! Probably the same ones who programmed the SecurExam software that screwed up all the laptop exams this year…

Indeed. Compare this site with this one.
New York Board of Law Examiners [official website]
July 2007 New York Bar Exam Fiasco [unofficial website]
Earlier: What’s Going on with the New York Bar Exam Results?

Here is the latest Job of the Week — actually, make that Jobs of the Week — courtesy of ATL’s career partner, Lateral Link. Because Lateral Link does no cold-calling and is more efficient than traditional recruiting firms, successful candidates receive $10,000 upon placement.
Positions: Junior Corporate Counsel and Senior Corporate Counsel
Employer: Software Company
Location: Irvine, California
Description:

(1) A corporate counsel (3-6 years experience) that will take responsibility for all aspects of product support for the MAS and Accpac product lines.

(2) A senior corporate counsel (8+ years) with strong academics, prior in-house experience and advanced interpersonal skills. This person will provide counsel on business issues, negotiating and documenting a variety of transactions and dispute resolution as well as supporting the Company’s North American operation in mergers and acquisitions activity.

More details, after the jump.

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