United Kingdom / Great Britain

The New Way To Pay Back Educational Debt: Sell A Kidney!

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I don't care how it works, just give me my degree.

My wife and I have made this proposal to our Harvard creditors: they forgive our debt, we give the school a baby. A “pure-bred” Harvard baby that Harvard can dress up or perform experiments on or whatever. It will have to be a black baby, which might underwhelm some Harvard officials, but that’s got to be canceled out by the fact that the media won’t much care about what Harvard wants to do to/with a black baby. The “where’s the justice of Caylee????!!!!!” crowd won’t be on their ass.

I think it’s an elegant solution. My wife thinks I’m getting off easy (because my “contribution” to this form of debt repayment would once again be de minimis). And our creditors say: “We only accept straight cash, homey.”

But I’m just ahead of my time. In the U.K., people are already suggesting that indebted students should be given the opportunity to barter down their loans with sacrifices of the flesh….

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Lawyers, You Can Sleep When You’re Dead

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As any law student can tell you, pulling an all-nighter sucks. Biglaw associates, however, have to pull all-nighters quite frequently — and sometimes they’ll have to get by with very little sleep, for multiple nights in a row. As one of our Above the Law editors mentioned to me, a Biglaw all-nighter “is nothing like any other kind of all-nighter [he's] ever experienced.”

So what happens when you’re on your eighth caffeinated beverage of the night and you’re still yawning? You can literally feel the small amount of blood left in your coffee stream getting ready to stage a strike if you don’t catch a few Z’s. As a young lawyer, would you even consider going to sleep? And would your firm approve?

Hell no. Don’t even think about it. You can sleep when you’re dead. But for now, you get a futuristic-looking pod to take a nap in….

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Quote of the Day: The Summer of Her Discontent?

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Last week a student worked through the night on a document for a big international arbitration. She willingly stayed and worked with a female colleague and did a great job, but she was ­actually asked to do so and that shouldn’t have ­happened.

In future we’ll stick to our policy so this doesn’t happen again.

— Nicola Bridge, graduate recruitment partner at the U.K. law firm SJ Berwin, admitting fault on behalf of the firm after a summer associate was asked to work until five o’clock in the morning.

Somebody Always Brings Pie

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We haven’t really been covering the News Corp. / News of the World scandal because I want to be invited on to Fox News again (j/k). Whether or not Rupert Murdoch or his company broke various U.K. laws is not something we’ve looked at in depth.

And we’ll not look at it in depth here. Instead, we’re just going to show you a video of a man being hit with a pie.

Because you never know when your client might be in this situation…

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Non-Sequiturs: 07.12.11

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* TLC’s Sister Wives are challenging Utah’s bigamy laws. More power to these polygamist people, especially the men. They deserve some credit for tolerating a handful of wives. [Jonathan Turley]

* Screw law students, we need to keep our professors employed. This is definitely the most important thing the ABA needs to worry about right now. [TaxProf Blog]

* Even though the fan who caught the ball on Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit is swimming in student loans, he may still have to pony up taxes on all of his new Yankees loot. [Going Concern]

* We all know Julian Assange doesn’t want to get extradited to Sweden because no one understands zeeur phuenteec lungooege-a boollsheet. Börk, börk, börk! [Constitutional Daily]

* A PA restaurant is banning kids under 6 because they are LOUD, NOISY a-holes. Parents, WHY do you think it’s okay to bring your kids to a restaurant if they can’t behave? I’ll never get this. [CNN]

* Crackpot Law, starring Herb Titus and Michele Bachmann. You better get armed and dangerous in God’s Law and “normal people values” if you know what’s good for you. [Religion Dispatches]

* If you think that your law school loans ruined your credit, you should try being “dead.” [ABA Journal]

RollOnFriday Explains The Lawyer Awards

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Ed. Note: This is a guest post from the good people at RollOnFriday. In addition to covering all of the salacious news and gossip happening across the pond, RollOnFriday occasionally endeavors to explain England to us Yankees when we beg them. Check them out.

Awards ceremonies feature large in the British legal landscape.

For our lawyers, it’s not merely enough to trouser wheelbarrows full of cash every month; they’d like some recognition too, please. A cheap statuette to keep in the lobby or to line the window sills of their corner offices. Something to wave at clients as proof that they really are the most awesome at negotiating sales purchase agreements.

And where there are awards, there are awards ceremonies. What essentially started as a ruse by impecunious publications to raise a bit of hard cash seems to have become an industry in its own right. Lawyers are charged thousands of pounds for a table, a dry husk of meat, and a lackluster comedian — all for the so-called prestige of winning an award that almost invariably seems to have been allocated on an entirely random basis.

RollOnFriday was privileged to have been invited to one such ceremony last week, The Lawyer Awards 2011, run by one of country’s most long-running legal publications….

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Job of the Week: Capital Markets in London

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Are you practicing in NYC but find that you are no longer in a New York state of mind? Would you prefer weekend trips to Paris or Prague over idling in traffic to the Hamptons? If you are a New York capital markets associate seeking the sophisticated practice of a top-notch international law firm in London, then check out the latest Job of the Week, brought to you by Lateral Link.

Position / Description: A top US firm is seeking multiple New York-trained Capital Markets associates with 3-6 years of experience for their London office and growing capital markets practice. Candidates must have strong academic credentials and relevant experience gained at a top firm. High-yield experience is necessary. Must be NY admitted and trained.

Interested and qualified candidates should contact Rana Yates Draganja, a Lateral Link recruiter for the New York and London regions, at rdraganja@laterallink.com for more information on this job (position #8881). Rana is a former capital markets associate who worked in Shearman & Sterling LLP’s London office and in Latham & Watkins LLP’s London and New York offices. She holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School, an M.Phil. in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. in Pyschology – Neuroscience from Columbia University.

Click here to learn more about Rana and the rest of the Lateral Link team. Not a Lateral Link member, but want details on this or hundreds of other openings? Register for free at www.laterallink.com to work with an attorney recruiter who is an expert in your market.

Who Are This Year’s Celebrity Summer Associates?

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Chelsy Davy and Prince Harry

In a few months, Chelsy Davy, the on-again-off-again girlfriend of Prince Harry, will be starting as a trainee solicitor in the London office of Allen & Overy. The blonde beauty’s arrival at A&O will set tongues wagging, no doubt.

Meanwhile, here in the States, summer associates are arriving at their law firms — and surely some of them, like Chelsy Davy, are boldface names. We’d like to know about them, of course.

To get the ball rolling, let’s take a look back at some of the more famous summer associates of recent years….

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Fame Brief: Naomi Campbell May Sue Cadbury’s Over ‘Racist’ Ad

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Cellphone beat-downs are back in the news. Last week, New York Times tech writer David Pogue allegedly attacked his wife with an iPhone (if it wasn’t an iPhone 4, his career is over). And now the Grande Dame of Smartphone Assaults, supermodel Naomi Campbell, is threatening to throw her bloodthirsty Blackberry at Cadbury, the chocolate manufacturer, over using her name without permission in an ad she finds racist.

The docile model, who has lived peaceably since beating police officers in 2008, has a big problem with this:

Naomi contends that ad offensively likens her to chocolate: “It’s upsetting to be described as chocolate, not just for me, but for all black women and black people. I do not find any humour in this. It is insulting and hurtful.” Cadbury maintains that the ad was meant to be “a light-hearted take on the social pretensions of Cadbury Dairy Milk Bliss,” but has since pulled it.

Meanwhile, Campbell continues to pursue “every option available” to her, including a possible lawsuit — and maybe a fist fight…

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‘Ryan Giggs’ Is British for the ‘Streisand Effect’

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On the other side of the pond, the principles of the First Amendment often take second place to the right to privacy. Britain, for example, has a smashing little thing called a “superinjunction,” which citizens can get from a court to keep the media from writing stories about them. They also have regular injunctions, which people — usually rich people, since injunctive relief can be expensive — can get to keep their names out of scandalous scoops. This results in lots of tabloid stories that read like Gawker’s blind items, or simply don’t run at all.

A married soccer player (for Manchester United, in case you care — though you probably don’t) got himself one of the latter, when the Big Brother star/model he was balling told him she was selling her story to the press. Unfortunately for him, a Twitter user crusading against muzzling the press with superinjunctions somehow got his tweepy hands on the information and published the rumor about the player’s adulterous scoring, along with a bunch of other supposedly superinjuncted gossip.

It caused an uproar in Britain initially, but the fire died down fairly quickly — until the soccer player’s lawyers decided to give it some more fuel….

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About That Job You Applied For Two Years Ago

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The Squire Sanders email system.

Say this for lawyers: they get around to things. Sure, the process might take a while, much longer than one would reasonably expect. But at the end of the day, lawyers do their paperwork.

Apparently, somebody at Squire Sanders in the U.K. has been catching up on old emails. Really old emails. Like, job application emails that were sent during the height of the recession.

I bet people who applied to Squire Sanders in 2009 thought that the firm had forgotten about them, but that is not the case! The firm just needed to get its ducks in a row. Now that it’s had time to full assess the economic landscape, the firm has decided that it’s no longer hiring….

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An Update on WikiLeaks and Its International Man of Mischief, Julian Assange

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Although I’m no longer an editor here at Above the Law (*tear*), you know my byline occasionally still pops up to bring you news of lonely lawyers and goings-on in the world of privacy. This week, I asked Elie and Lat if they were interested in a lawsuit against a computer rental store accused of spying on its customers via webcam. (Most shocking aspect to me: People actually rent laptops?) Or the recent reminder from the Seventh Circuit that looking at porn at work — even if just for 67 seconds — can get you fired (at least he got the job done quickly).

Instead, Elie saw that I’d recently written about WikiLeaks founder (and dancer extraordinaire) Julian Assange — who’s still kicking it in England — calling Facebook “the most appalling spying machine ever invented.” Elie asked, how is that guy not in a jail in Sweden by now? And why have no major banks bitten the WikiLeaks bullet since we last heard from the white-haired wonder?

An update on the Julian Assange – WikiLeaks saga, after the jump…

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