Legal industry notes

LawRiot’s notes from the 2010 National Asian Pacific American Bar Association Convention:

On Hiring, Reading Your Resume:
(1) Where you went to law school matters most
(2) Then they look to where you went for undergrad, any other grad degrees
(3) Then they look at your grades and activities (don’t bother writing Moot Court if you didn’t win any external competitions, it carries little weight without some standardized method of ranking)
(4) Then they look at experience, especially technical experience if patent-related position sought

It’s troublingly fascinating that the brand name of not only your law school, but also your undergrad school, appear to outrank how well you actually did at law school when lawyers consider who to hire.

Biglaw bonus season has started, and with Cravath having announced yesterday (and Skadden having matched today), it will be as anemic as last year. Which can only be an almighty kick in the face for those that billed in the high 2000s (or more), because profit per partner figures are expected to rise from the nadir of 2009 and bonus compensation at most biglaw firms is lock-step.

  8:08pm  •  Law  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Three moving capos

Trace Bundy plays a song on his acoustic guitar with three moving capos:

See also this song, where he uses 5 capos. And here’s a clip of him playing Pach’s Canon with Korean wunderkind Sungha Jung.

  10:53pm  •  Music  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Another TSA backscatter machine story

This story’s a good one. The TSA is making US citizens pass through the backscatter machine on re-entry into their own country. Obviously the TSA didn’t think this through thoroughly enough. You can’t deny a citizen re-entry into his or her own country, which means you can’t really deny them re-entry if they don’t step through the machine. Otherwise you’re looking at false imprisonment. The most the cops can do is arrest someone for walking through without going through the machine, but that would pre-suppose that there is a law which requires people to follow the TSA’s instructions on that – and for that law to be constitutional. This led to this scenario:

This new line led to a TSA security checkpoint. You see, it is official TSA policy that people (both citizens and non-citizens alike) from international flights are screened as they enter the airport, despite the fact that they have already flown. Even before the new controversial security measures were put in place, I found this practice annoying. But now, as I looked past the 25 people waiting to get into their own country, I saw it: the dreaded Backscatter imaging machine.

Now, I’ve read a fair amount about the controversy surrounding the new TSA policies. I certainly don’t enjoy being treated like a terrorist in my own country, but I’m also not a die-hard constitutional rights advocate. However, for some reason, I was irked. Maybe it was the video of the 3-year old getting molested, maybe it was the sexual assault victim having to cry her way through getting groped, maybe it was the father watching teenage TSA officers joke about his attractive daughter. Whatever it was, this issue didn’t sit right with me. We shouldn’t be required to do this simply to get into our own country.

So, since I had nobody waiting for me at home and no connecting flight to catch, I had some free time. I decided to test my rights.

  9:58pm  •  Law  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

In the business news

Ireland’s debt troubles are continuing, and it hasn’t been doing the Euro any favours. Bond yields are spiking and the economy is in bad shape. It looks like they will need to get financial assistance from the IMF and EU. However, as a condition of making this aid available, Ireland’s creditors-to-be are angling to change its tax policy. Ireland’s 12.5% corporate tax rate is one of the lowest in the EU, which has caused a whole bunch of IP-heavy companies to set up large offices there (Google, Microsoft, and some pharma). I wonder what effects this will having.

Is there another startup bubble in the Valley? "Certain areas of the Internet, there are some crazy things going on. Getting overheated. People are getting crazy, they’re showing up to their first meetings with term sheets. In the early stage market, two-, three-person teams are getting $30, $40, $50 million valuations. That’s not right." That sounds pretty crazy. There are lots of very early start-ups that seem to be managing to score $5m valuations as angels (and even some VCs) pile on, but $30-50m?

Meanwhile, the legal market in the US is still sluggish. As biglaw associates around the nation hold their breath waiting for bonuses to get announced (they’re really late this year!), things seem to be going quite healthily in Australia. And Google is hiring like crazy as well: 2,000+ job openings, including more than 50 legal job openings! I know two SLS people who were recently hired for the Brazil and Italy offices.

Twitter is try to raise funding at a $3 billion valuation. A few weeks ago, Michael Arrington wrote that, "The company is still effectively revenue-free." They have their promoted tweets… but they are hardly generating the revenue, let alone profit, that you would expect a $3bn company to generate.

  10:11pm  •  Business & Finance  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

How they do airport security in Tel Aviv

US airport security has not been having a lot good press lately. People these days now have a choice between a TSA backscatter machine (which experts worry may be carcinogenic and which reveal more about people’s bodies than they like) and a pat down by a TSA officer (which has been described as legalized sexual assault). Israel has been grappling with terrorism for a very long time, and this article explains how incredibly efficient getting through security at Ben Gurion is:

At the check-in desk, your luggage is scanned immediately in a purpose-built area. Sela plays devil’s advocate — what if you have escaped the attention of the first four layers of security, and now try to pass a bag with a bomb in it?

“I once put this question to Jacques Duchesneau (the former head of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority): say there is a bag with play-doh in it and two pens stuck in the play-doh. That is ‘Bombs 101’ to a screener. I asked Ducheneau, ‘What would you do?’ And he said, ‘Evacuate the terminal.’ And I said, ‘Oh. My. God.’

“Take Pearson. Do you know how many people are in the terminal at all times? Many thousands. Let’s say I’m (doing an evacuation) without panic — which will never happen. But let’s say this is the case. How long will it take? Nobody thought about it. I said, ‘Two days.'”

A screener at Ben-Gurion has a pair of better options.

So, can the TSA learn?

  10:17pm  •  Travel  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Hong Kong’s coked up bankers

Danwei has an article about the white-collar drug scene in Hong Kong:

“Hong Kong is like London on steroids!” he says. “Look where we are,” he adds, gesturing around the tight network of streets that make up Hong Kong’s main bar area [Lan Kwai Fong]. “This is a one-kilometer-square party zone. Everything is just more concentrated here.”

For young expats working in high-pressure and high-rolling jobs, Hong Kong has always been a party town. The majority of the foreign population is male and single, and looking for a good time before returning home to settle down.

As one long-term resident and bar and restaurant owner put it: “There are a lot of single guys here. They are often posted here by their companies, without their families and they like to party and go out chasing women.”

And just as cocaine has become the drug of choice in London and New York, it is now the preferred sharpener of Hong Kong’s expat community.

  10:20pm  •  Business & Finance  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

One very driven plaintiff

Here is a case brief for a case, Young v. Facebook, that has its origins in the following facts:

Plaintiff took offense to a certain Facebook page critical of Barack Obama and spoke out on Facebook in opposition. In response, many other Facebook users allegedly poked fun at plaintiff, sometimes using offensive Photoshopped versions of her profile picture. She felt harassed.

But maybe that harassment went both ways. Plaintiff eventually got kicked off of Facebook because she allegedly harassed other users, doing things like sending friend requests to people she did not know.

When Facebook refused to reactivate plaintiff’s account (even after she drove from her home in Maryland to Facebook’s California offices twice), she sued.

Twice. That’s over 15,000km of driving. If I had no other facts apart from the above, I would put money on the defendant winning. And of course, it did.

Most of the claims made by the plaintiff are pretty wild, but the case does have some interesting remarks which have implications for terms of use and especially those which purport to give service providers the right to terminate service for any reason (California law implies a duty of good faith and fair dealing into contracts).

  12:39pm  •  Law  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  •