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Bitter News

Bitter News, 1-20-10

by Bitter Newsroom
01/20/10

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Bitter News

Bitter News, 1-19-10

by Bitter Newsroom
01/19/10

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Social

Headlines from the Bitter Newsroom as random as Scott Baio death threats over a Michelle Obama joke:

• Fortune magazine’s list of the best 100 companies to work for in 2010 includes six law firms.  Holla!  Bingham McCutchen ranked the highest at #12 (up from #30 in 2009).  Amazing at what offering benefits for transgender employees can do for PR.  [Fortune via ABA Journal]

• Conan O’Brien has settled terms to leave the Tonight Show and abdicate the thrown back to Jay Leno.  But, legally and financially speaking, it’s not cheap.  First, he signed a $45-million deal to walk away.  “The accord includes about $33 million for O’Brien and about $12 million for his employees.” But Conan is also milking the network for the legal rights to Rolling Stone music he’s using in intentionally expensive bits.  (See video below.) What does NBC get in return?  Well, they are claiming the legal rights to all of Conan’s old comedy routines that were created while he worked for the network.  So you likely saw the last of Triumph, The Year 2000 and Masturbating Bear.  [BusinessWeek]

News continued below video.

• Lawyers need lawyers.  And although Senator-elect Scott Brown runs a small law practice out of his home on Massachusetts, Duane Morris partner Daniel Winslow led the Republican victor’s legal team during the special election campaign.  Winslow and Brown are homies who go way back to law school at BC.  But not only did he handle legal issues relating to the campaign, he also had an idea for getting the word out that his boy was da’ man.  He “developed a method of writing campaign slogans using aerosol food coloring on snow.” A unconventional method so successful, he’s got his firm’s IP lawyer working on a patent.  Secrets to success: Think like a campaign lawyer and don’t piss spray food coloring into the wind.  [The National Law Journal]

• Other news about politician lawyers: John Edwards admits he’s a baby daddy again—this time to his mistress’ baby.  (Coverage that could snag the National Enquirer a Pulitzer?) Before this admission, Andrew Aldridge Young, Edwards’ former campaign aide, tried to take paternal responsibly to shield the hopeful presidential candidate.  Young, now 42, had finished law school at Wake Forest but apparently has never practiced law.  He’s worked for Edwards since 1988—assumed to be making a middle-class wage—and in 2005 was the director of development at the UNC Law School for $70K.  Yet he lives pretty high on the hog with million-dollar houses, a wife, children and such.  What gives?  [NewsObserver]

• Eugene Volokh loves gunners.  Cardozo law students?  They really don’t.  When one star student hits “Reply to All,” sending his straight-A record campus-wide, shit, panic, hate, resent, shock and jealousy hit the fan.  [Above the Law]

• For London lady lawyers who’ve had their water brake, there’s a new watershed moment in English BigLaw.  Trying to end the pressure to chose between being a partner or a parent, leading firm Allen & Overy is now allowing female partners to work part-time or take extended leave over school holidays without any financial penalty.  “A&O will now allow partners to work a minimum of a four day week or take up to 52 days extra leave a year for up to eight years.” [Telegraph]

• All of the internet will soon exist in a “cloud.” So Microsoft’s General Counsel—a job you all voted as to really wanting on Tuesday (poll below)—is imploring Congress to get moving on laws that would protect cloud users and work against cloud-jumping hackers.  [Reuters via Money Control]

• Learn to be the overly cautious CEO you’ve always wanted to be.  Duke is launching a two-semester Law and Entrepreneurship LLM Program in the fall.  “The program will provide a rigorous academic and experiential foundation for lawyers who plan to be involved with innovative business either as advisers or, as is increasingly common, as CEOs or other executives.” [Duke News]

• The Supremes are hard at work.  Not only did they rule in favor of an Albanian immigrant who slept through his alarm and missed his final asylum hearing (woops!), they also came to some decisions on corporations’ rights to fund ads for political candidates. In a 5-4 decision, it was ruled that corps and individuals have equal rights.  America!  [Los Angeles Times]

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