Author: TSA Press

According to data collected by U.S. News, what is the average cost of tuition and fees at private law schools for the 2018-2019 academic year?

Hint: You’ll pay less at public schools — there, the average in-state tuition and fees are $27,591 and $40,725 for out-of-state students.

See the answer on the next page.

It’s almost the end of the year, you’re barely holding on, but a $25,000 bonus looms on the horizon. You should delay your lateral search and collect your bonus, right? Absolutely not; now is the best time to initiate a lateral search, especially if you are unhappy with your firm. That yearly windfall may make you temporarily complacent, but here’s why you should not leave your lateral search until after you collect your bonus.

1) All of your colleagues are already looking. Yes, every time you knock on their door and your hear them say, “I’m gonna have to call you back,” or, “Let me circle back up with you later,” they were on the phone with a recruiter (probably me) discussing your dream job. By the time you start ramping up your search, they could be finishing their callback. Stay ahead of your peers by prepping as soon as possible for a lateral move.

2) If you feel that you are ready to explore other opportunities, your bonus should not change your mind. No matter how large that number is, it should not sway a decision you have been thinking about for a long time. In the long run, a better fitting firm will pay dividends in multiples of any potentially lost bonus.

3) Take a look at these numbers: The conventional wisdom is that associates don’t move until they get their bonuses, and then positions open up. While this is true to a degree, the numbers don’t lie. Here, we can see that firms are continually opening positions based on needs, and the “bonus musical chairs” may not affect firm hiring as much as we all think. More positions were opened in January and February than were opened in April-May. The numbers show that demand is relatively stable throughout the year, contrary to conventional wisdom.

4) On average, it takes about two to three months from search to hire for an associate lateral. However, it can take up to six months for more difficult searches. You don’t want to be stuck in a miserable job for an entire year longer. The end of the year was time to take stock of your career, but if you didn’t do that while you were home with friends and family complaining about your job, it’s not too late. By the time you finally summon the will to respond to my email, you may be sitting at your desk, ordering on Postmates thinking, “If I can only make it till my bonus in 2020.” This may seem like it’s not that far away, but by that time, you could have easily integrated yourself into a new firm or in-house position.

5) You’ll get to leave like a boss… on your own terms. What’s better than pocketing a five-figure bonus check and dropping the mic briefcase on the way out. If you plan properly, you can ensure that there is little lag time between receiving your bonus and starting at your new firm. Or if you feel a little burned out, ask your new firm for a few weeks off before you start and spend the bonus on a trip to Australia, or the next Fyre Festival if you feel like you have cash to burn. They are usually pretty accommodating about lateral start dates.

Matt Ritter

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts from Lateral Link’s team of expert contributors. Matt Ritter is a Principal based in California where he focuses on moving partners and associates into prominent positions with elite firms and companies throughout the U.S., with a focus on the California and New York markets. Matt has a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and was a corporate associate at both Kirkland & Ellis and Mayer Brown in NYC. Matt has also toured as a comedian, and wrote and produced a few hit TV shows…now he’s trying to help lawyers find their dream jobs! I guess you could say he’s not your typical recruiter. 

Lateral Link is one of the top-rated international legal recruiting firms. With over 14 offices world-wide, Lateral Link specializes in placing attorneys at the most prestigious law firms and companies in the world. Managed by former practicing attorneys from top law schools, Lateral Link has a tradition of hiring lawyers to execute the lateral leaps of practicing attorneys. Click ::here:: to find out more about us.

Pete Williams, NBC’s justice correspondent, says that Ruth Bader Ginsburg has undergone more treatment for cancer.

She had out-patient radiation treatment for a malignant tumor on her pancreas. The treatment started August 5th. A bile-duct stent was put in place.

The Court says that there’s no evidence of cancer elsewhere in the body, and no further treatment is needed at this time.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not going anywhere, as long as she is alive.

I’m going to go drink heavily now. Actually, screw it, I’m sure I still have some opium hidden around here somewhere.

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

At this year’s ILTACON, taking place this week in Orlando, Above the Law’s Kathryn Rubino sat down with ETL member Wolters Kluwer to talk about innovation within the industry. Their conversation explored the imperative of pursuing innovation at all levels and across all categories, whether its the small tech startup or the partners at your own firm, in order to create and foster ideas.  For Wolters Kluwer itself, current innovation initiatives include efforts to take the company’s highly regarded traditional content and align it with the practitioner’s workflow, to help save time and increase accuracy. This focus echoed and underscored our other conversations at ILTACON 2019, which also put an emphasis on pushing process into workflow. Tune in below to hear more!

In a world of “do more with less,” corporate legal operations teams are often faced with an increasing contract volume but with no additional resources. Whether you use a homegrown or an older solution that’s just not working anymore, or you have no solution at all, chances are that the growth in your contract volume and complexity are difficult to manage and resource intensive. Join us for a webinar that will focus on:

– Why you need a simple, yet scalable, solution that you can configure and maintain on your own;
– How consumer-style business tools are revolutionizing the operational experience; and
– What AI is NOT capable of, namely, the replacement for your contracting expertise.

Click here to learn from our panel of experts on Friday, September 27, at 1 p.m., including Stephanie Corey, a widely respected veteran in the legal ops field and co-founder of UpLevelOps, and Matt Patel, a CLM solution expert with over 15 years of experience in CLM technology and co-founder of Malbek.

Basketball star and former white Jesus, Larry Bird, is very popular in his home state of Indiana. He’s not just a man, he’s a brand, and has a vested interest in how he’s portrayed.

Jules Muck is an Indianapolis based street artist. She makes, you know, art. Her current thing is to make photo-realistic building murals of real people and adorn them with fake tattoos. Which, okay, I guess, sure, why not?

One of her installations is a drawing of Larry Bird sporting a number of tattoos that he, somewhat obviously, doesn’t have in real life. Her Bird has a spiderweb tatt and a tatt of two bunnies have sex (a call back to one of her other installations) and a face tattoo of a cardinal. If I were Bird, that cardinal would really piss me off because Bird played for the Indiana State Sycamores and the Boston Celtics and ran the Indiana Pacers and NONE OF THEM use a stupid cardinal like a heathen from Kentucky or St. Louis.

But for Bird’s lawyers, I guess it was the bunnies thing. From ABA Journal:

Bird’s lawyer, Gary Sallee, explained his client’s objection in an interview with the Indianapolis Star.

“”Larry’s position is he has elevated himself from where he began to where he is now through a lot of hard work. He has developed a brand that is marketable and he needs to protect that brand,” Sallee said. “The mural, as originally painted, was a departure from that brand.”

To avoid litigation over, like, street art, Muck agreed to remove most of the tattoos.

“Larry deserves some sort of prestigious mural,” she said. “That’s not my calling. That’s not what I’m here to do. I just wanted to have a little fun.”

Do not disrespect Larry Bird in Indiana. It’s never worth it.

You can see the original painting here.

Larry Bird mural with tattoos of mating bunnies and spider web brings objection from his lawyer [ABA Journal]

Vladimir Gagic was hired by the public defender’s office to represent Lamont Payne on assault charges stemming from an alleged beatdown Payne delivered to a corrections officer while already in jail. When Payne grew irritated with the first day of jury selection, he decided to take a swing at his lawyer and clocked him one.

If Payne was this testy during jury selection, one imagines he’ll be really salty when the jury comes back with a verdict.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

It’s always fun when people realize for the first time that their votes for President of the United States don’t really count. I was raised in a very political household, so I don’t remember a time “not” knowing that the President is not elected by popular vote, rather by the electoral college. But it wasn’t until late middle-school that I learned that the “electors” themselves were actual people who weren’t necessarily bound by the popular votes in their states.

It blew my mind. I think it blows everybody’s minds the first time they learn about it. When we vote for President we’re really voting for a slate of electors, and those electors then cast the “real” vote for the President? What if they choose somebody else? Can anybody stop them? What the hell kind of “democracy” are we running here? This Key & Peele sketch neatly sums up our entire ridiculous system.

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/gc87eq/key-and-peele-dunk-the-vote

A “faithless elector” overturning a Presidential election is a great plot for a novel. And, every four years or so, somebody usually brings up the possibility (usually on behalf of the candidate who is losing). In reality, they’re not really a thing. Most states have laws mandating that electors follow the popular vote of their state. The kinds of people who are chosen as “electors” are usually hardcore partisans who are going to follow the dictates of their party. And even if you find a few electors who are wiling to use their “power” to vote for whoever they want, getting enough of them together to actually flip the results of an entire election is more fantasy than reality.

Still, as a purely technical matter it could happen. And a ruling this week from the Tenth Circuit affirms that it’s entirely within an elector’s power to vote for whoever they like. In Baca v. Colorado Department of State, the court ruled that Colorado could not force its electors to vote according to the popular will of Colorado, despite having a law mandating just that. Instead, 10th Circuit Judge Carolyn B. McHugh (an Obama appointee) ruled that the Constitution inherently gives electors the right to choose, and that right is a federal right that cannot be impinged upon by the state.

From a certain point of view… THAT’S INSANE. Look at what happened in the instant case. Hillary Clinton carried the state of Colorado in 2016. Colorado therefor “elected” a slate of electors chosen by the Democratic Party. But Michael Baca, a Democrat because of course Democrats are freaking terrible at demanding discipline, decided not to vote for Clinton. Instead, he wrote in John Kasich. This guy didn’t vote for the person who won his state, didn’t vote for the person who won the popular vote, didn’t vote for the other person running for President, and instead voted for some other guy.

And the Tenth Circuit says that’s entirely Constitutional for him to do so. And, not for nothing, but Judge McHugh is probably absolutely right about that. There just isn’t anything in the Constitution that requires Baca to do anything but vote for who he thinks should be President.

In our bitterly and closely divided country, it’s not hard to imagine a faithless elector or two banding together and swinging the outcome of a close Electoral College outcome.

But… it’s also not hard to “imagine” an intruder lurking outside your house. The mind does terrible things in the dark of night. Most likely though, that noise you heard was not an axe-murderer trying to climb into your bedroom, it was just a raccoon digging in your trash.

Donald Trump lost the popular vote but “won” the Electoral College in a very close election by 77 votes. To overturn the results of the election you’d have needed to get 78 Republican electors to vote their conscience (as if they had one) and vote for the popular vote winner. That’s not an actual thing that would happen. It’s possible to play with the map to produce an Electoral “tie” or only a one or two vote margin of Electoral victory. But, what we’ve seen is that states tend to move as a group so the kind of results you’d need to get to make that happen are unlikely. You’re just unlikely to get a candidate who loses Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, but wins Ohio and Florida despite losing Virginia yet hanging onto Iowa.

To “overturn” an election, you’d have to get a slate of electors chosen by the winning side to, en masse, not just to write-in a different candidate, but actively vote for the candidate from the other party. It’s possible, but not very plausible.

Don’t get me wrong, the political science dork in me would love to see this happen. Faithless electors overturning an election is pretty much the only way I can see getting enough popular support to amend the Constitution to provide for direct, popular election for the President of the United States. It’s a change that should have been made 200 years ago. The only reason that the Electoral College was a thing in the first place is that lower-population states wanted to protect slavery and Jersey was like “yeah, that makes sense.” The only reason the Electoral College is still a thing is because… the Electoral College is a thing and everybody who might want to be President someday knows that they can’t piss off Iowa or Wisconsin or a bunch of low-pop flyover states that nobody would give a s**t about if not for the Electoral College. Small states know that the Electoral College over-represents them. They’ll never give that up, unless they figure out that Electors can completely ignore them altogether.

So I kind of hope they do, one day. It would be interesting if a bunch of Electors from Missouri decided “screw the people of Missouri, we’re voting our conscience.” Interesting in the way that a nuclear explosion is a fascinating example of the power stored in atoms, but interesting nonetheless.

But it probably won’t happen. And the Electoral College will probably trundle on, doing its part to ensure white-minority rule over the popular will of the country.

Faithless elector: A court ruling just changed how we pick our president [NBC News]

Why Zimbabwe is running on empty, again