* Illinois is suing Standard & Poor’s, accusing the financial services company of misleading investors and putting the country in the poorhouse thanks to its high ratings for mortgage-backed investments. [Washington Post]
* CHECK YOU LATERALS: William Burck, who served in the White House counsel’s office under President Bush, is leaving Weil to co-manage the Washington, D.C. office of Quinn Emanuel. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* Groupon: now ethical for advertising legal services in New York thanks to this recent opinion from the New York Bar Association Committee on Ethics. Will Biglaw start catering to deal hunters? Prediction: hell no. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Get off my lawn, you damn kids! A lawyer from Long Island was arrested after firing a warning shot into the air and holding a neighborhood teen at gunpoint following several rounds of “ding dong ditch.” [CBS New York]
* A woman is suing Lindsay Lohan, claiming that LiLo hit her with her Maserati. She’s suffered from disabling personal injuries, pain, anguish, and a lack of settlement money. [Daily Mail]
* After an alleged freaky sex-and-drugs party, all Angelica Marie Cecora wants from Oscar de la Hoya is $5M and an apology. Is that really too much to ask? [New York Daily News]
Former Sullivan & Cromwell associates take many different career paths. Some join smaller firms or go in-house; some file lawsuits against S&C; and some join government service.
Last week we wrote about the high-powered William A. Burck (OT 1999/Kennedy), who has had his ticket punched by some of the legal world’s top employers: Sullivan & Cromwell, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District, and the White House Counsel’s office. We announced that Burck was leaving the White House for the U.S. Department of Justice, but we didn’t have information on his new post at the DOJ.
We now have that information, courtesy of some Justice Department tipsters. Burck will be serving as Counselor to the Assistant Attorney General, Alice Fisher. From an internal memo that was circulated on Friday by Fisher:
Bill will be responsible for overseeing and advancing the legislative agenda of the Criminal Division, supervising the Office of Policy and Legislation, and representing the Division before the United States Sentencing Commission and the Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure of the U.S. Courts.
In our prior post about this move, we noted the incestuous nature of conservative legal circles. One of our tipsters had this to add:
Re: incestuousness, note that Dabney Friedrich (nee Langhorne) — a former colleague of Bill Burck at the White House [whose nomination to the federal bench was discussed in the same post] — is married to Matt Friedrich, Alice Fisher’s former Chief of Staff/Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General in Crim (and now a member of AG Gonzales’s staff).
Whew! Did you get all that?
In light of how well Republicans groom their young lawyers (figuratively and literally), we share this commenter’s interest in learning about high-powered young LIBERAL lawyers. We realize that it’s tougher when your party doesn’t control the executive branch, which is home to so many plum executive appointments (and doles out plum judicial ones). But still, we’re curious. We welcome your comments and emails.
It’s not terribly exciting; but if you’d like to see it, Alice Fisher’s memo announcing the arrival of Bill Burck appears after the jump.
Continue reading “Musical Chairs: More Info About Bill Burck”
