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According to a recent study by LexisNexis, which surveyed 209 law firms on their website’s place in their marketing, 85% of respondents stated that their most visited pages are their lawyers’ biographies.
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As part of its ongoing series on Departure Memos, Above the Law has posted the departure memo of a young mother detailing the untenability of being a biglaw associate and mother at the same time. This one is making the rounds on the interwebs, having been picked up by the New York Times, among others. The tale of woe starts at 4:00 am and ends at 1:30 am, followed by the unfortunate word, “REPEAT.”
ATL writer Elie Mystal notes in his introduction to the memo:
I don’t know this woman, and I don’t know what her hopes and dreams are or might have been, but it shouldn’t be so damn hard — in the richest country on Earth — to have a big-time job and be a loving parent. The struggles highlighted by this woman make me sad as a new parent myself.
That is the moral of the story for me—that there is an inherent impossibility in excelling at a great job and excelling at being a parent. Not being a parent yet myself, I would love to know how others balance their work-family lives.
Read Departure Memo of the Day: Parenting Gets The Best Of One Biglaw Associate at Above the Law.
(photo: Shutterstock: 86606719)
A lawsuit brought against the John Marshall Law School in Chicago alleging misrepresentation of graduate employment numbers was dismissed with prejudice. The lawsuit was brought by the Law Offices of John Anziska on behalf of three named plaintiffs, citing advertising materials from the school stating that within 9 months of graduation, 90 to 100 percent of its graduates had found full time employment. The complaint [pdf] goes on to assert that:
The context of these representations make it appear to the reasonable consumer…that the jobs reported are full-time, permanent positions for which a law degree is required or preferred…[and that the John Marshall Law School] grossly inflates its graduates’ reported mean salaries, by calculating them based on a small, deliberately selected subset of graduates who actually submit their salary information.
The judge in the case “found all of plaintiffs’ claims defective for want of proximate cause and speculativeness of damages,” said PRWeb.
Anziska brought many other cases against law schools based on the same claims, so it will be interesting to see if they all begin to fall like dominoes now that this case has been dismissed. I suspect that will be the case given the problems with trying to blame a law school for the fact that a person can’t find a job in a bad economy.
(photo: Shutterstock: 83382025)
This Australian guy won over $200,000 suing Google for delivering results associating him with the mob. The judge explained the jury verdict by saying Google search results are just like publishing a newspaper:
Google Inc. is like the newsagent that sells a newspaper containing a defamatory article. While there might be no specific intention to publish defamatory material, there is a relevant intention by the newsagent to publish the newspaper for the purposes of the law of defamation.
Read Australian wins $208k from Google for defamation on Phys.org (via The Verge).
This is how liberty dies:
The poll found almost one third of American adults would accept a “TSA body cavity search” in order to fly. Moreover a majority believes that it is reasonable to criminalize the act of disobeying any TSA agent.
We kill it.
Read Poll: One-Third of Americans Would Accept Cavity Searches By TSA on Jonathan Turley.
Most of us got into law because of some noble, high-minded principles of justice and promotion of the greater good…but at the end of the day, it turns out that money is still rather important. Tangential to the news addressing jobs for lawyers in the current economy is data collected by American Lawyer magazine addressing compensation for Biglaw non-equity partners.
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The Wall Street Journal Law Blog has a nice piece on the increasing importance (and pay) of in-house attorneys. As more space is being made for general counsel toward the top of the food chain in large companies, the level of responsibility and level of compensation is rising commensurately.
Recently the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia issued a per curium opinion on a disciplinary matter [PDF] for attorney Joshua M. Robinson, who had severely beaten a client with a baseball bat. The court determined that:
It is apparent from the record before us that Mr. Robinson intentionally violated his duties to his client, the public, the legal system, and the legal profession. Mr. Gump was seriously injured when Mr. Robinson repeatedly beat him with a wooden bat and then continued to beat him as he lay defenseless on the ground.
A number of courts in New York and New Jersey are still closed due to power outages following hurricane Sandy. The ABA reports that:
The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will remain closed through Friday, along with federal trial and bankruptcy courts in Manhattan; Newark, N.J.; and Trenton, N.J., according to court websites and a summary by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. State courts in Manhattan were closed, except for emergency hearings, on Wednesday, while most state courts in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island reopened.
Following up on my prior post on the dearth of employment for lawyers, please fix your attention on the following article. The Washington Post recently published a very good article on this same problem, focusing on the numbers associated with law school growth until 2020, and questioning the decision of people to attend law school if it’s not one of the elite institutions. Here are a few numbers from the article:
Georgetown’s law school is the largest in the country, with current enrollment at 2,216.
In 2010, law school graduates took on approximately $3.6 billion in loans.
Nine months after graduation, only 20.5 percent of 2011 graduates of the University of the District of Columbia’s law school were employed in full-time jobs requiring a J.D.
There’s no doubt this continues to be a big problem. Although some people familiar with the problem are quoted in the article talking about the need to revamp how law schools are run, there are no easy solutions to either the number of lawyers without jobs or the grossly out-of-proportion enrollment at law schools.
(photo: Shutterstock: 99873665)
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