Law School Applications

* Special counsel Robert Mueller is seeking immunity for up to five witnesses who are set to testify in Paul Manafort’s upcoming bank and tax fraud trial. Oooh, who are these mystery parties and why do they deserve amnesty? [USA Today]

* Just how conservative is Judge Brett Kavanaugh? Using Judicial Common Space scores, Kavanaugh lands “just to the left of the arch-conservative [Justice Clarence] Thomas.” Yay. [FiveThirtyEight]

* Be careful out there, small firms. According to a report from the Association of International Law Firm Networks, it’s not Biglaw firms that should be afraid of the Big Four, but instead, independent firms in mid-sized markets. [American Lawyer]

* Remember Evan Greebel, the ex-Biglaw partner who was convicted of conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud thanks to his representation of pharma bro Martin Shkreli? Per his colleagues, after his “terrible encounter with the devil incarnate,” Greebel shouldn’t get jail time like his former client. [New York Law Journal]

* When it comes to law school applications, it’s very helpful to know the difference between early decision (binding) and early action (nonbinding), but it’s even more helpful to know the difference between out-of-state tuition (drowning in loans) and in-state tuition (treading water in loans). Do your research, applicants! [U.S. News]

* Robert Traurig, co-founder of Greenberg Traurig, RIP. [Daily Business Review]

* What’s behind the Supreme Court’s sluggish pace, and does Justice Gorsuch have anything to do with it? Only 18 rulings have been sloooooowly handed down so far this Term, and the world is still waiting for decisions to be made in some of the high court’s most contentious cases. [Reuters]

* House Republicans are so pissed the DOJ failed to comply with a subpoena deadline to turn over more than a million documents related to investigations of Hillary Clinton’s emails, alleged FISA abuses, and Andrew McCabe’s firing that there’s a “growing consensus” Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein could be held in contempt of Congress — or even impeached. [Washington Examiner]

* There may be a law school brain drain when it comes to a lack of applications from students at top undergraduate institutions, but the Law School Admission Council is reporting that the number of applicants with LSAT scores of 160 or higher is up by 21 percent since last year. We’ll have more on this interesting news later. [Law.com]

* In case you missed it, with an average deal size was $3.7 billion and a market share of about 24 percent, Skadden came out on top of Bloomberg’s law firm league table for global M&A deal volume in 2018’s first quarter. Congratulations! [Big Law Business]

* According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the legal services industry added 400 jobs between February and March. The entire profession now ranges from 1.2 to 1.3 million jobs, down from pre-recession highs of 1.8 million jobs. Sorry, but after about a decade, it’s looking like those jobs may be lost forever. [American Lawyer]

* Stormy Daniels, the porn actress who was paid six figures in exchange for not spilling the beans about her affair with Donald Trump, is now suing him, claiming that the “hush agreement” she entered into prior to the election is invalid because he never signed it. [Washington Post]

* File this under Not Top Ten: Former ESPN legal analyst and sports anchor Adrienne Lawrence, a onetime associate of Greenberg Traurig, Arent Fox, and McGuireWoods, has filed a sexual harassment suit against the sports network, claiming that SportsCenter anchor John Buccigross constantly harassed her. [American Lawyer]

* Not only will the government be able to seize more than $7.3 million of disgraced pharma bro Martin Shkreli’s assets — including his one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album — but prosecutors want to throw him behind bars for no less than 15 years. [New York Law Journal]

* Attorney General Jeff Sessions will announce today that the Justice Department will be filing suit against California over its “sanctuary state” laws. As alleged in the complaint, the Golden State’s laws — AB 450, SB 54, and AB 103 — were all created to impede immigration laws. [USA Today]

* “When I heard the gun went off accidentally, that just didn’t ring true. Someone has to pull the trigger. They just don’t accidentally discharge.” Prospective jurors in former Biglaw partner Claud “Tex” McIver’s murder trial weren’t exactly buying his defense. [Atlanta Journal-Constitution]

* Forget about the egregious law school tuition you’ll have to pay in the future, because it can cost quite the pretty penny to apply to law school in the first place. You may want to look into fee waivers so you can save yourself some cash. [U.S. News]

* Billy McFarland, the millennial entrepreneur who organized the disastrous Fyre Festival, has taken a plea deal after defrauding the investors who bought into the failed event. He’s looking at sentence of eight to 10 years in prison. [Big Law Business]

* Slater & Gordon, the world’s first publicly traded law firm, claims that it isn’t planning to conduct any layoffs in the wake of its latest operations review. The firm, which once found itself on the verge of insolvency and is now owned by a hedge fund, is no stranger to conducting massive layoffs. [The Australian]

* Andrews Kurth continues to lose lawyers left and right, with a group of up to 25 attorneys from its public finance group in Texas soon expected to defect to Orrick. How’s that merger talk with Hunton & Williams going these days? [American Lawyer]

* Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein will be delivering the commencement address at Campbell Law’s graduation ceremony this spring. At this rate, given how much the president likes him, let’s see if he’s still Deputy AG come May. [News & Observer]

* ASU Law is on track to receive a record-breaking number of applications for the upcoming academic year. According to LSAC, ASU is one of only four law schools in the country to have seen an increase in applications of 50 percent of more. [ASU Now]

* “Jane Doe,” the New Hampshire woman who won the $560 million Powerball lottery last month, has filed suit against the state’s Lottery Commission in an attempt to remain anonymous. Now that she’s a multimillionaire, she doesn’t want to risk the “significant invasion of privacy” of her name being released. [USA Today]

* Now that special counsel Robert Mueller has interviewed Attorney General Jeff Sessions for hours on end, he’s getting closer to interviewing the president himself, and it looks like the focus will be on the ouster of Michael Flynn and James Comey (i.e., obstruction of the Russia investigation). [Washington Post]

* After the federal government shutdown ended, Justice Neil Gorsuch dined with Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn and other Republican senators and Trump administration officials. Ethics violation? Nah. “Justices don’t take vows to be hermits. Nothing here remotely suggests ethical issue.” [National Law Journal]

* More than one million corporate email addresses from the United Kingdom’s top law firms were found on the dark web, and 80 percent were associated with passwords, which puts those firms at a very significant risk of being hacked. Be wary about cybersecurity breaches in the future thanks to this. [Infosecurity Magazine]

* The University of Windsor Faculty of Law in Ontario, Canada, suffered a major data breach earlier this month after a law school staff member accidentally posted confidential information — names, GPAs, LSAT scores, the works — about current applicants to a blackboard accessible by current students. Oops! [Lawyer’s Daily]

* If you’re thinking about applying to law school, make sure you keep in mind that anything you include (or neglect to include) in your application can and will be used against you during your character and fitness evaluation when you apply to take the bar exam after graduation. [Law Admissions Lowdown / U.S. News]

* President Trump included a signing statement when approving the funding legislation that will keep the government running through the end of September. In it, he questioned the limits of his spending power and suggested he’d ignore advance notice requirements for Congress when taking foreign policy and military actions, amid other troubling stances on legal matters. [Bloomberg Politics]

* In other news, sometime this week — possibly even later today — President Trump is expected to announce some of his picks for the more than 120 vacancies in the lower federal courts, all of whom are known for their “scholarly credentials and ‘intellectual boldness.'” As luck would have it, we already scooped predicted the names of many of the nominees. [New York Times]

* #NoFilter necessary for this case: The End, a Brooklyn coffee shop, has filed suit against Starbucks, claiming the coffee giant copied its Unicorn Latte with its highly Instagrammable Unicorn Frappuccino. The End registered the name of its whimsical drink with the Patent and Trademark Office in January, and seeks all profits Starbucks made from its sale of its mythical sugar bomb. [Newsweek]

* Even if you’re a passenger in a car, you’ll have no reprieve from police searches in this state. The Utah Supreme Court has ruled that police may ask for passengers’ identification and run background checks on them — without any suspicion of wrongdoing — during traffic stops, and that doing so will not stand as a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights. [FOX 13 Salt Lake City]

* Think you’ve found the perfect person to write you a law school rec letter? Think again. “Like in the world of dating, it helps if your partner/prospective partner is supportive of your plans.” Here are some red flags to look out for that may indicate your reference isn’t going to meet your deadlines, isn’t going to remember who you are, and isn’t going to write you a glowing letter. [U.S. News]

* Celebrity trial attorney Mark Geragos has filed a $100 million class-action lawsuit against rapper Ja Rule and entrepreneur Billy McFarland, the organizers of the ill-fated Fyre Festival, an event marked by “incompetence on an almost inconceivable scale.” In an interview with Variety, Geragos referred to the disastrous event as a “Petri dish of fraud, incompetence and hubris.” [Variety]