Staci here. It’s been a few months since we last spoke about our man Sam E. Goldberg’s travails with the New York bar exam. From working hard to hardly working, he brought us the blow-by-blow experience of a first-time test taker in graphic detail this past summer.
Well, the results finally came in last week, but we know that our readers have been dying to know whether Mr. Bar Exam passed the test, perhaps for the schadenfreude. What’s the likelihood that a dude who took a trip to Vegas in the middle of studying passed the test?
Hold on to your hats, because we’re about to find out….
Last week, a friend told me he hoped the Giants didn’t win the World Series because of the rioting that would inevitably follow. Now I understand why.
When I left Oakland, I thought I was also leaving behind insanity like this. Apparently not.
Last night, after the Giants swept the Detroit Tigers to win the World Series, San Francisco literally went up in flames. In the Mission — my neighborhood — alone, I saw at least four large fires burning in the middle of major roads. In other parts of the city, cars were set ablaze.
Click through to see pictures and video of the mayhem, and let’s ask ourselves how the law should handle this kind of widespread destruction celebration….
Ed. note: This column will be about entertainment, the law, and the intersection of those two things. If you know of a law-related personality you’d like to see interviewed here, please contact us.
Staci here. We know that lawyers tend to be easily distracted bunch, always seeking out ways to entertain themselves while at work. But why force yourself to do work that’s so boring when you can just flush your Ivy League degree down the toilet and become a comedian?
This week Sam interviewed Matt Ritter, a Penn Law graduate who quit his Biglaw job to become a successful solo comedian and a member of the comedy group Comedians at Law….
It’s beginning to feel like a large chunk of the lawyer world, in an alternate universe, would be professional musicians. In addition to our annual Law Revue contest, we’re hearing day after day about lawyers with secret musical talent (or, uh, passion).
Today, we heard about a young Canadian lawyer who’s been hustlin’ for some time now. He landed a sweet gig at a Bay Street firm. To celebrate, he released a swanky new hip hop video featuring Lamborghinis, luxury boats, beautiful women, and some dope lawyerly rhymes.
If you are one of our older readers, Tosh has a show on Comedy Central called Tosh.0. You’ve seen bits of it before the Daily Show starts playing from your DVR. His show is basically a bunch of jokes based on funny stuff he finds on YouTube.
The other night, Tosh did a video breakdown of a skateboarder slamming into an older woman outside what Tosh called “a community college.” In Idaho. It was pretty funny, especially since the old lady kind of leaned into the skateboarder trying to avoid her, and then tried to beat them up.
But a tipster reports: “That is not a community college, those is the entry steps to the University of Idaho College of Law.”
Hey now! Our tipster says that the old lady is actually an Idaho Law employee….
Occasionally, lawyers send us awesome music videos that they have created. Sadly, we get less appetizing ones much more frequently. It turns out being an attorney does not automatically turn you into the Lonely Island.
We’ve got two painfully funny / bad / uncomfortable lawyer-produced clips today. Normally, I wouldn’t seek out clips like this to write about, but both of these were submitted to us by their creators. So, I guess, be careful what you wish for.
After the jump, check out the mid-size California firm that hopes you’ll call them, maybe, and a war crimes lawyer turned comedienne who sings a love song to Mitt Romney — while wearing a bikini, of course…
F. Scott Fitzgerald once opined that there were “no second acts in American lives.” Similarly, Biz Markie once opined “’cause we all pick our boogers sometime every day.” If you’re already lost, allow me to explain. This is the story of a former Biglaw attorney and his second act. He and his friends started a website devoted to rap lyrics. The website annotates rap lyrics, and it’s this system of annotation that the founders of the website hope will take over the web (including legal research). The website was recently funded by venture capitalists, and the resulting hype has ping-ponged across the web at a pace so rapid that you’d be excused if you made like Steinski and wondered, “What does it all mean?” (affiliate link).
The interviews that have fed the myriad profiles of the site’s founders have been nothing short of entertaining. Just last week, Gawker was prompted to write a guide to the site, rapgenius.com, which managed to sound both condescending and wildly equivocating and which did nothing but illuminate the author’s squeamishness. This promises to not be like that. I don’t know if Rap Genius is going to be Wikipedia or Pets.com.
What I do know is that a Biglaw dropout just ganked $15 million from Marc Andreessen and wants to edge out Westlaw and Lexis (good luck with that).
Keep reading to find out where he went to law school and what firm he worked at. And if you want to see his shirtless YouTube diss track (no homo)….
Ed. note: This column will be about entertainment, the law, and the intersection of those two things. If you know of a law-related personality you’d like to see interviewed here, please contact us.
Staci here. This week, Sam was lucky enough to chat with the bassist from The Vandals, one of my favorite bands from my teenage years. It’s likely that only former punk rock aficionados will understand where the title of this post comes from.
This bassist, Joe Escalante, isn’t just a member of a band — he’s a lawyer, too! In fact, you may remember that he ran for a judgeship in Los Angeles County this summer. Escalante is currently the host of Barely Legal Radio, a syndicated entertainment legal advice radio call-in program.
So what’s the best advice that can be given to people who want to become entertainment lawyers, aside from graduating from an Ivy League law school? Let’s find out what Escalante thinks….
Presumably the Princeton Review folks were referring to career prospects in the legal profession. Fortunately for YLS, its graduates possess many other talents besides drafting motions in limine and negotiating software licenses.
Do singing and dancing count as “employed upon graduation”? Let’s check out the latest efforts of these Elis…
* In light of Chief Justice Roberts’s historic vote to uphold Obamacare, should we expect JGR to be more liberal going forward? According to Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Oath (affiliate link), “Do not expect a new John Roberts. Expect the conservative he has always been.” [Talking Points Memo via How Appealing]
* Law firm staff layoffs: they’re not just an American thing. Slaughter and May is dropping the ax on 28 secretaries. [Roll On Friday]
* “[A]ny robot or high school graduate can calculate numbers in a matrix to arrive at the highest possible sentence. But it takes a Judge — a man or woman tempered by experience in life and law — to properly judge another human being’s transgressions.” [Justice Building Blog]
* Professor Dershowitz’s $4 million Cambridge mansion? Robert Wenzel is not impressed: “if I lived in that house, I would want to attack Iran and most of the rest of the world, also.” [Economic Policy Journal]
* A man sues a strip club, alleging that a stripper ruptured his bladder when she slid down a pole and onto his abdomen. Ouch. [Legally Weird / Findlaw]
* Still on the subject of Torts, two attractive blonde sisters walk into a bar — and discuss who can be held liable if a man suffers a heart attack during a threesome. Video after the jump….
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Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
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Staci here. It’s been a few months since we last spoke about our man Sam E. Goldberg’s travails with the New York bar exam. From working hard to hardly working, he brought us the blow-by-blow experience of a first-time test taker in graphic detail this past summer.
