Dear Sir:
I was a bit late to the CLE today, so I probably missed your explanation that you were doing a social experiment on the instructor to see how much of a dick you could be before she kicked you out. By the time I arrived you were already nose deep in your newspaper. I didn’t really have a problem with that. You were quiet enough and you looked pretty cool. Everyone was able to see that you didn’t really NEED to be there. It was actually kind of cute how we all pretended not to be impressed by your nonchalant attitude.
I really enjoyed how you kept telling the instructor that she was wrong. I’m glad it didn’t bother you that she usually pointed out that you were mistaken. I think it made you even more ambitious. You stopped raising your hand and just started shouting out your comments and the who bit. That’s confidence!
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Alton Jay Ferris (born August 6, 1995) is an attorney and child law prodigy. He got his start in the legal profession at age 4 when his father—a textbook editor for West Publishing—brought home a civil procedure treatise. Ferris became mesmerized by the applied logic of the rules and began to read anything related to the law, often asking his father to bring additional books home from work. At age 5 he pawned the family piano in order to purchase subscriptions to various treatises and to buy online legal periodical subscriptions. He also made a game of pointing out legal errors in many of the texts that his father brought home to him, circling them and making notations with red crayon.
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Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house —Robert A. Heinlein
If you ever want some entertainment, walk into a law school and ask a group of students what 17 times 50 is. Chances are you’ll get a bunch of blank stares. One or two might be attentive enough to pull out a smartphone and open up the calculator. What you probably won’t see are students trying to figure out the answer in their heads.
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One of the more popular notions around “modern” law schools today is that the traditional practice of teaching “Black Letter Law” (that is, teaching students what the law actually says) is, at best, only a tangential concern. What students really need, the modern theory goes, is “practical experience.”
Of course, we can’t simply throw students into an actual courtroom and have them “give it the ol’ college try” (well, technically we could, and it would likely be just fine, but the ABA gets all testy about that sort of thing and most schools like being accredited). So how do we get students something that looks superficially like the experience they will need? ”Skills” courses, of course.
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If you have ever asked what species of person would steal a ham and cheese sandwich out of the common refrigerator at work, I have your answer. I am that species. I am the lowlife cretin who stole your lunch. Or your Stouffer’s. Or that Weight Watchers. And though you probably imagine me as an evil man with no soul and less than half a brain, you’d be surprised to witness my normalcy at work and shocked to know how often you laugh at my jokes and enjoy my company. In other words, I’m complicated—a well-paid young associate in a mid-size law firm who takes food out of the lunchroom fridge. That’s all I’ll say about myself. But, to be fair, I’ll reveal a bit more of my work ethic.
First, I have three rules that I live by:
- I eat what I steal;
- I steal only what I can eat; and
- I steal only from those higher up on the food chain
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Dear Mr. or Ms. Namby Pamby:
You know what this is. I went through OCI and came up with bubkes. I’m now writing cover letters and attaching them to my resume. I am assuming it is then being forwarded to mid-level or long-term associates like you. Is this cover letter unique? You never know. Let’s assume it is.
I won’t waste your time going through every single one of my qualifications in the hope that one of them—say my participation in Maynard Pirsig Moot Court—makes you raise an eyebrow and say “whatever.” Not worth our time. But here’s the deal. We all know that—apart from certain things going viral and getting messy—kickbacks can be an efficient way to do business. I propose the following:
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I was once a young associate in a small firm, and I thought I knew better. As in I knew how to write better than the four partners for whom I worked, including the one partner who only dictated. Most of the time I think I was right, but in retrospect it may not have been such a big deal. Or at least not worth the fight.
For one, I made it a mission to release all legal documents from the grip of the hereins, wherebys, and hereunders of the world. Those words no longer had any business clogging up “my” contracts and memoranda. In my mind, they were coughs in a document, elaborate throat-clearing devices that had no purpose other than to show that the drafter had a genuine fondness for Geoffrey Chaucer or wore an ascot while relaxing and smoking a pipe at home.
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The Brazilian Blowout is your standard femme fatale: sexy, mysterious, & potentially deadly. What is it? It’s a keratin hair straightening technique that claims to make hair healthy, shiny, & straight. And it has been wildly successful and enormously profitable, commanding $200-$350 per session. The Brazilian Blowout is a typical fixture on many daily deal sites, such as Groupon.
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File this under Bitter Lawyer’s lawsuit of the week. A New York man brought a civil rights claim against White Castle last week, claiming the restaurant chain made him fat did not reasonably accommodate his own White Castle legacy. While the complaint really doesn’t say what disability or impairment the man has, you can infer it is one of two things: 1) he is a large man or 2) he attends both Yankees and Mets games. It may be a combination of both, but from what we can best determine it’s a claim of being too big to fit into a White Castle restaurant booth.
Before we get started, here’s the complaint to review. As a tip, skip over the legal mumbo jumbo and go straight to the exhibits, a series of letters between the plaintiff and White Castle. Here’s the pertinent text of the plaintiff’s letter, which lays out the origin of the dispute:
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