Thoreau admonished us that we cannot “kill time without injuring eternity.” But what did he know? That proto-hippie pond-fetishist could not have imagined today’s world, where our collective attention spans have shriveled to goldfish levels and so much actual productive white-collar labor can be, to an observer, indistinguishable from simply loitering in front of a computer screen. Unless someone is looking over your shoulder, nobody knows whether you’re on PACER or playing Angry Birds.
We asked you, the ATL readership, where you turn for distraction when you don’t feel like billing or studying. The results of our research poll, after the jump….
* Now that Chicago has bared it all, isn’t it time for other law schools to fall in line? Show us the stats for the class of 2010 already. [Law School Transparency]
* And this is why your mother told you not to talk to strangers. [Legal Juice]
* If you’re going to send out a survey asking who your bros would like to rape, at least be classy about it. “Surprise sex” just sounds better. [Yahoo!]
* Five useful tips on how to be a better law prof, written by a law prof. Sleeping with students didn’t make the list. [PrawfsBlawg]
* In America, we make television shows about women and their witchy ways. In Saudia Arabia, they just kill them. [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Martin Klotz, outside counsel for SAC Capital’s Steve Cohen, demands that you respect his client. [Dealbreaker]
Why your 3,500 sq ft wife shouldn't be driving a Lexis.
* Maybe we need law school law firms in the first place because law school professors — the ones who drill law into our heads for 3 years — are “incapable of practicing law.” [Adjunct Law Prof Blog]
* “Boss, I’m stuck in traffic. No, I’m literally stuck.” Driving your car into wet concrete is a pretty great way to perpetuate the stereotype that women can’t drive. Thanks for that. [Daily Mail]
* Star Wars Old Republic ships in November, so clients better get used to the old, “I’m too busy playing video games to attend to your matter” automated message. [Legal Profession Blog]
* If you’re Asian American and you want to be a lawyer, according to Lat it would be a good idea to have some social skills (not just study skills). [Northwest Asian Weekly]
* If you’re still thinking of taking the LSAT in October, get a leg up on the competition by getting inside the mind of one of the nerds who helped write questions for the test. [LSAT Blog]
* Proofreading is probably something that we here at Above the Law could stand to actually do every once in a while. [What About Clients?]
You’ve got Antonin Scalia writing the majority opinion in a 7 – 2 case. You’ve got Scalia throwing a barb at the merely concurring Samuel Alito. You’ve got Clarence Thomas dissenting from an opinion Scalia wrote. (Can somebody tell me how many times that’s happened? What if I put the over/under at 9 times, ever?) And you’ve got Justice Breyer arguing against First Amendment Protections in a barely safe for work way.
And all of this happens to defend my right to walk into a Russian airport and gun down my enemies. I really hope I live long enough to see a Supreme Court with nine people who have all at least fired the Duck Hunt gun before they’re asked to rule on violent video games…
The Supreme Court is on record as being a grand protector of the people’s right to free speech — so long as by “speech” we mean money and by “people” we mean corporations. But when it comes to the right of artists (in this case, video game producers) to do their thing, the Court wants to take a closer look.
And so tomorrow (Tuesday) the Court will hear oral argument in the case of Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association. If you’ve been too busy riding roughshod over zombie ranchers to follow along, the key issue is the constitutionality of a California law restricting the sale of violent video games to minors. The Ninth Circuit already threw the law out, and other Circuits have dispensed with similar state laws on free speech grounds. But SCOTUS apparently wants to take a look at the restrictions…
I know a little something about video game addiction. While working in Biglaw, I was a respected guild member in Everquest II — before I realized that I was wasting giant amounts of time and had more than enough money to be able to interact with fellow humans in the flesh. In law school I once played 28 seasons of Madden (every game, ten minute quarters, including preseason; I would even make up a draft board). In college I played enough Civilization 2 that I thought it should count for one of my history core requirements. I legitimately fear for my job when Civilization 5 drops one month from now.
I’m serious about the Civ 5 thing. I quit my job at Debevoise just before Civilization 4 was released. I can’t truthfully say that the one thing had nothing at all to do with the other. I’m considering not even buying Civ 5, just because I like writing for you guys. I’m married, for Christ’s sake. A wife, a job, and a new Civ game? Something’s gotta give.
See, I know what I’m getting into when I open the box on certain video games. Hawaii resident Craig Smallwood claims he did not. He’s sued the makers of Lineage II, claiming that the game makers didn’t adequately warn him that its game was addictive.
Shockingly, his lawsuit has survived a motion to dismiss…
Virginia is for lovers (of video games). A judge in Wise, Virginia was so enamored of the shooting game Halo that he may have crossed ethical lines to play it.
The not-so Wise judge struck up a friendship with a defendant he’d previously sent to jail. Their gaming relationship came to light when Judge Joseph Carico got into a car accident while driving his Halo partner/courtroom visitor home after a night of shooting people up. From the Bristol Herald Courier:
The game of choice that night, said passenger Jeremy Hubbard, was the popular first-person shoot-’em-up Halo 3 on the X-Box 360 gaming platform.
The two also played some sports games on the Nintendo Wii platform, which Hubbard, 28, said is the judge’s preferred gaming system.
Carico may have quick reflexes in virtual reality but hit a tree when a real deer sprinted in front of his car while driving Hubbard home at one in the morning on a Saturday night. (At least, he wasn’t playing until the wee hours on a school night like some other judges we know.)
Hubbard and Carico first met due to Hubbard’s legal troubles — he’s previously been found guilty of felony shoplifting and heroin possession. Carico has now stepped down from the bench and area lawyers believe it’s because of the November car accident and gaming revelation. But c’mon, what’s the problem with a judge playing video games with a convicted felon?
In most entertainment industries, the distributors of content reap a much larger share of the profit than the creators of said content. There are some very good reasons for this (see generally the galactically stupid writers strike) and some bad reasons for this (as evidenced by Geoffrey Fletcher’s clear inability to afford the public speaking coach he desperately needs).
In the video game industry, distributors get bank, while creators … well, they get to play with video games all day. Do they even need money?
But a lawsuit pits the creators of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare franchise against Activision, and the results could well have serious fallout across the entire gaming industry. The Guardian puts the issue plainly:
[W]hen studio heads Jason West and Vince Zampella filed that astoundingly vitriolic 16-page lawsuit against their former publisher, they slammed a question mark down over the nature of IP ownership in the modern videogame era. If, as West and Zampella allege, Activision granted them ‘contractual rights’ over the Modern Warfare brand, could they really defect and take a Modern Warfare-like title to another publisher, as news sources are indicating? And step back a little; would a multinational corporation really sign off a massively profitable franchise extension merely to appease its workers?
West and Zampella truly went nuclear on Activision. Let’s check their mission parameters …
In December we announced a contest for ATL readers. We called upon you to play Do I Have A Right?, one of the educational video games launched by Our Courts. Today we’re pleased to announce the winners.
In case you’re not familiar with it, Our Courts is “a web-based education project designed to teach students civics and inspire them to be active participants in our democracy.” It was the brainchild of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (who spoke with us about Our Courts for this Washington Post piece).
Above the Law’s “Do I Have A Right?” tournament was a huge success, with 8,650 plays from nearly 7,500 unique players. People logged games in 49 states — c’mon, North Dakota, where’s the love? — and the average play time was 7:55 minutes. Justice O’Connor was very pleased:
I want to congratulate the winners of the Our Courts – Above the Law Tournament. I was thrilled by the participation and interest in our game. It just goes to show that even trained lawyers can always use a refresher course in middle school civics.
And who were the winners? There were two, tied with a high score of 13,653. The first was David Cohen, a sports lawyer in Southern California. The second was “Anonymous,” who chose to remain nameless “so that people he knows don’t think he spends all his time [in the office] playing DIHAR.”
These winners will be featured as characters in a future Our Courts game. Speaking of Our Courts, they have a new game out, Argument Wars, which allows players to argue landmark Supreme Court cases. The preview case allows readers to argue Brown v. Board of Education; two more cases will launch next Monday, and two more by mid-February.
The full list of high scorers in the DIHAR challenge — perhaps you know some of them? — appears after the jump.
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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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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Thoreau admonished us that we cannot “kill time without injuring eternity.” But what did he know? That proto-hippie pond-fetishist could not have imagined today’s world, where our collective attention spans have shriveled to goldfish levels and so much actual productive white-collar labor can be, to an observer, indistinguishable from simply loitering in front of a computer screen. Unless someone is looking over your shoulder, nobody knows whether you’re on PACER or playing Angry Birds. 
