Now that we’re done yelling at all the law professors in America who couldn’t bother to submit grades for their classes in a timely manner, it’s time for our other semi-annual tradition of covering total grading screw-ups by esteemed legal academics. Exam period isn’t truly over until at least one professor adds to the misery of current law students in some odd way.
The screw-up in this instant case is a doozy. We’re looking at a large 1L class, a massive administrative failure, and a loss of privacy for the students.
You know your screw-up is noteworthy when the official administrative “solution” to the problem is “wait, don’t read that email…”
* Eric Holder has agreed to serve once more as attorney general during President Barack Obama’s second term, but he still plans to leave at some point — after all, he’s no “Janet Reno of the Justice Department.” [Blog of Legal Times]
* AIG will not join the lawsuit against America. To put that in terms that should be just as outrageous, former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg is still suing America. [Washington Post]
* For those who care about Biglaw firms and the landlords who love them, fear not, because there’s a whole lot of moving and shaking in terms of commercial real estate deals for Arnold & Porter, Goodwin Procter, and Sidley Austin. [Am Law Daily]
* Jacoby & Meyers scored at the Second Circuit: its attack on New York’s ban on non-lawyer firm ownership was reinstated. Soon Walmart will own a firm with “Low Prices. Every day. On everything.” [Bloomberg]
* Who’ll step in to fill Evan Caminker’s $400,000+ shoes as the next dean of Michigan Law? None other than Mark West, who’d like to improve financial aid and loan repayment programs. [National Law Journal]
* Gun nuts, commence your rioting… now. If passed, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s sweeping gun-control proposal would make New York the state with the strictest gun laws in the country. [WSJ Law Blog (sub. req.)]
* Speaking of needless gun violence, by Friday, we’ll know whether there’s enough evidence to move forward with a trial for James Holmes, the accused shooter in the Aurora movie theater massacre. [New York Times]
[S]chools don’t have to go so far as to declare such specifics to the world as having a sheep farmer and a professional poker player in their graduating class to make some salubrious steps toward being a bit more forthcoming.
– Sarah Zearfoss, Michigan Law’s Senior Assistant Dean for Admissions, Financial Aid, and Career Planning, commenting on the need for increased transparency in the employment statistics law schools present to prospective students who peruse their websites.
I generally try to defend Millennials in these pages. They might seem like texting-obsessed kids, but we need to cut them some slack. Because they had the American economy pulled out from under them just as they tried to start their adult lives. You just wait, when these guys are 40, they’ll be telling their kids stories of the “Great Recession” and how patience and frugality are chief virtues. They might be telling their kids those stories in Chinese, but still.
But we do have our occasional disagreements. I think the special snowflake syndrome plagues this generation; they’re so obsessed with their own social-media fueled individuality that they tend to think things like statistics don’t apply to them. Part of that is being young; part of that is being dumb.
And part of that is that Millennials, as a group, seem to need compliments in order to function like normal humans. They want you to LIKE THEIR STATUS and retweet their banter with an inane “lol.” If you don’t give them gushing praise, they take it as a criticism. And if you actually criticize them, well damn, you might as well be questioning their entire existence and telling them to kill themselves.
Yesterday, I saw something that takes “gushing praise” to a new, disgusting, saccharine level. And it’s coming from law schools….
It’s been quite some time since we’ve had the opportunity to openly mock Michigan law students. Well, actually, that’s not entirely true — after all, we did pass judgment on their so-so performance on their own state’s bar exam. But thankfully, these kids have given us another chance to chuckle at their expense.
Remember that not-so secret society they had? You know, the one that tried to prank the campus community by putting sheets with sloppy penmanship up on the roofs of the residential dorms? That was a total fake fraternity fail. But now we’ve got a “real” fraternity fail for you to feast your eyes upon.
It appears that students at Michigan Law are trying to re-live their college glory days of coolness (or pretend that those days existed in the first place) via one of their law fraternities. It’s actually kind of cute, because they think it should be like a real fraternity, complete with insane initiation rituals….
(Plus, check our our update with some relevant information from a current member.)
Was one of the essay questions “design an American truck that runs on candy and rainbows but still has enough power to make a Texan feel better about his small penis”? Because that would be a hard question. And it would explain the abysmal bar passage rate achieved by test takers on the July 2012 Michigan bar exam.
The people who took the Michigan bar exam passed at a rate as if all of them went to Cooley. Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but it was still pretty bad. The bar passage rate for the state was 55 percent. Tipsters and commenters contend that those ridiculous numbers are due to a change in scoring the essays, but the Michigan Bar hasn’t released an official reason for the low rates.
Hell, maybe they want it this way. One way of slowing the saturation of the legal market is to make it a harder market to enter.
Let’s take a look at a school-by-school breakdown…
Good news, everyone! Princeton Review — the other, other white meat U.S. News — has released its very own law school rankings. This year, we are treated to the Best 168 Law Schools Rankings. As usual, the rankings are divided into 11 categories filled with mostly nonsensical results. After all, where else will you find Cooley Law on a list for having the “Most Competitive Students”?
But nonetheless, in this kind of a down market, everyone’s been itching to see a rankings list of the law schools that will verily ensure graduates’ employability (except for the purposes of suing over employment statistics, of course). Honestly, why go to law school in the first place if as a result you’re only qualified to stock shelves at the local convenience store?
That’s why everyone breathed a sigh of relief when Princeton Review released its somewhat-ridiculous “Best Career Prospects” rankings list. Because any list that doesn’t include Yale is sure to be worth reading….
We mentioned in Morning Docket that something awesome happened. But I want to emphasize it here. THE WEST WING CAST CAME BACK TOGETHER FOR A MINUTE.
And it was glorious. Anyone who has watched 20/20 Hindsight RoomNewsroom knows that the West Wing involves a lot more than witty dialogue and a sense of civic responsibility. The West Wing also required acting, ensemble chemistry, and at least a passing respect for women.
The cast brought all of that to bear in a video made to raise awareness about judicial elections.
And it all happened because a professor and assistant dean at Michigan Law School has awesome family and friends….
There is not a single member of this Court, at a single time, who has made a decision, who has cast a vote, based on do I like this president, do I not like this president … will this help the Democrats, will this help the Republicans? It is just not the way any member of the Court thinks.
‘This herpes thing is less embarrassing than my 72-day marriage to Kim Kardashian.’
* Want to know what they call the Supreme Court attorney who deals with requests for stays of execution? The death clerk. Paging John Grisham, because this guy’s nickname would make a great book title. [New York Times]
* “If you’re going to sue, it’s better to sue earlier rather than later.” Probably why battleground states like Florida, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are in a tizzy over their election laws. [Washington Post]
* WikiLeaks or it didn’t happen: Bradley Manning’s lawyer has demanded that seven years be cut from his client’s prospective sentence due to allegations of improper treatment while in military custody. [The Guardian]
* Michigan Law’s Sarah Zearfoss, she of Wolverine Scholars fame, finds media coverage about the awful job market for recent law grads “really frustrating.” Try being unemployed. [Crain's Detroit Business (reg. req.)]
* Kris Humphries is being sued for allegedly giving a girl herpes. But alas, the plaintiff seems to have no idea who actually gave her the herp — four John Doe defendants are identified in the complaint, too. [Star Tribune]
* “Given the police idiocy, one wonders where the boobs really are.” A nude model who was arrested during a body-painting exhibition in Times Square won a $15K false-arrest settlement from the cops. [New York Post]
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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:
• 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.
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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Now that we’re done yelling at all the law professors in America who couldn’t bother to submit grades for their classes in a timely manner, it’s time for our other semi-annual tradition of covering total grading screw-ups by esteemed legal academics. Exam period isn’t truly over until at least one professor adds to the misery of current law students in some odd way. 
