Doublethink
Soulless bloodsucking lawyer/leech.
I exist to write needlessly long blog posts to fight the tide of Tumblr's obsession with pictures and macro-Tweets.
E-mails: remarkablybrilliant at gmail.
I have general ambivalence towards sports in general, but Deadspin keeps murdering it and forcing me to pay attention. The NBA scorekeeper story is pure heart-warming investigative journalism, blowing open the surface of the seedy underbelly of professional sports. The fact that this hasn’t been picked up by the likes of ESPN shows the level of wink-wink/nod-nod collusion there is between sports media and leagues/owners (hmm, sounds a lot like business media and major investment banks, doesn’t it…). There’s too much good stuff to quote, so click the link and read, but I’ll drop in the last paragraph for kicks.
In the end, the league has little incentive to address the issue, even now, in this tight-assed, post-Donaghy era, when the NBA wants desperately to convince you there are no magnets in the pinball machine. And so the scorekeepers will continue doing the professional equivalent of rolling their Dungeons and Dragons dice, perhaps saying, “Fuck it” now and again and giving a guy a shitload of assists, mostly for the hell of it, and Chris Andersen will go on looking like Larry Nance every Nuggets homestand. The NBA: Where Fudging Happens. “It is,” as Alex says, “an entertainment thing.”
Link is to Orin Kerr’s analysis at Volokh.com (as an aside, Orin is very sharp and his posts are worth following); here’s the gist.
The Fourth Amendment allows police to seize evidence of a crime that is in “plain view” and recognizable as contraband, without a warrant. “Plain view” usually happens when police see, e.g., drugs, when executing a search warrant for something else, e.g., guns; it allows them to seize the contraband right there without going back to the magistrate judge for another warrant, which would be onerous and lead to possible destruction of the new evidence while they got the new warrant.
This is all fine and good for physical evidence, but in the newfangled Internet age we have digital evidence, digital search warrants (e.g., for child porn on someone’s hard drive), and digital searches and seizures. Up until now, police could get a warrant for your hard drive on one subject, and then look for evidence of any other crime and use that against you. The Ninth Circuit today threw all of that out the window by eliminating the “plain view” doctrine for digital searches and seizures. The upshot is that the police can only look for and seize the evidence that the warrant was directed to, i.e., if they have a warrant for, say, evidence of computer fraud, they can’t nail you for criminal copyright infringement if they find evidence of that on the drive. The rather complex Ninth Circuit rule is ostensibly meant to solve a glut of pretextual computer data searches where the police would get a warrant for one crime when they were looking for evidence of anything and everything else.
This seems like a huge win for data privacy in the Internet age, but it only applies to the Ninth Circuit right now (i.e., CA) and I’d bet dollars to donuts that the highly police-protective Supreme Court will take a big shit on this ruling when it comes up for cert. Until then, this is another illustration of how courts are increasingly our last line of defense for civil liberties (which, as I’ve said, is bleakly sad).
The fetid corpse of the legal profession, and what to do about it
I’ve blogged about this before, but it finally got some mainstream treatment now that the East Coast elites are feeling the pinch. Things out there are bad for young lawyers graduating from what is colloquially called the “T14,” the US News top 14 law schools. Unsurprisingly, things have been bad for the other 200 or so law schools below them for a while now, and there is plenty of evidence that not even lawyers with solid work experience are safe.
The problem has been self-evident to anyone who cared to see it: lots of work based on bubbles (credit bubbles, IP bubbles, litigation bubbles) that dries up when the bubbles burst. But the BIGLAW industry since the late 1990s has been unique in its hubris, with massive growth in both payrolls and salaries, driven by parasitic sucking from the teats of companies so bloated with money that they couldn’t feel the fraudulent legal bills funneling and pissing their money away. That, of course, has ended, the corporate teat is dry, and companies are either bringing most of their work in-house (see, e.g., GOOG) or drastically slashing legal expenditures, forcing reductions in fees and driving outcomes that cut engagements as short as possible.
I’m no mere observer here. My credentials are, to be crass, pretty fucking awesome, but it’s jarring to see the ship crumble and sink around you as the Captain throws everyone else overboard after slashing their throats. It is, to say the least, a bloodbath that was neither expected nor prepared for by most young lawyers. But it is here, and we must deal with it.
The surprising thing for me has been that no one has laid the blame for this mess in the proper place. They blame the economy, they blame bad business models, they blame lawyers who won’t change, and all of those are valid, but who created this mess of extreme oversupply and no demand? What group of idiot savants decided that it would be a good idea to dramatically increase the supply of lawyers, while at the same time allowing law firms to offshore some legal work (you can read the “ethics opinion,” LOLWHATACROCKOFSHIT, here)? Who? WHO?
The motherfucking American Bar Association, that’s who, that putrid pile of rotting diseased bloated baby boomer fucks that ordains to regulate our fair profession by “accrediting” some of the most intellectially empty and rat infested educational institutions this fine nation has ever seen. We already know that education in America has become an almost healthcare-sized scam (I HOPE WE KNOW THIS, PEOPLE), but the way that the ABA has almost wholesale and without remorse oversold and devalued our profession is mind-boggling. Instead of building a small group of quality professionals held to high ethical standards, we have a massive group of mostly morons taking advantage of the USA’s horribly cracked regulatory, tort and litigation systems to meagerly profit from waste and inefficiency. And this, by the way, includes almost all tort suits; I am vaguely a tort lawyer, so I’ve seen the inside of the system long enough to tell you, from the deepest part of my soul, that litigation is almost always a scam, and should almost always be avoided at all costs.
So what can we do about it? Here are a few things that the ABA needs to do, and I do mean needs:
- Immediately unaccredit all but the top 50-75 law schools, leaving, generally, 1-2 law schools per state. And top 50-75 is being generous, it really ought to be top 40. We have a serious oversupply problem, and that problem needs to end. Will this kill large swathes of the education megaindustry? Fuck yes, and thankfully so. The students at these schools are participating in a scam of the highest order, and we owe them, and existing lawyers, both the truth and the action of brutally and mercilessly ending the oversupply problem.
- Push for national bar examinations and reciprocal national licensing from day one. The idea that the bar exam tests any level of competency at all is pure fallacy; it tests your ability to memorize a flotilla of law in isolation that means almost nothing in practice, and to do so specific to a particular state in the span of two months. State-centric bar exams glorify entrenched state bars, and do nothing for job seekers looking for legal work outside of their licensed states until they have practiced for five years (so-called reciprocity). It’s an artificial barrier to competition and also impedes free movement in the legal labor market. Law is global and national these days, not local, and, in any case, you can look all of that shit up.
- Push for a “bar examination” that ties licensing to sponsored apprenticeships. Supply can be tamped down both by admitting fewer law students and by licensing fewer lawyers. The best way to license a practicing lawyer? Make him act as an apprentice, like architects. An apprenticeship process will also, if implemented correctly, guarantee that the lawyers who are trained/licensed are also the ones who will be employed.
- Push for tort reform, especially malpractice, personal injury, and intellectual property. Torts are a legal construct from lawyers to drum up business for themselves. Every once in a while you’ll see a worthwhile and meritorious case, but for every one of those, there are a hundred fraudulent or borderline fraudulent cases that churn through our pathetic legal system, ruining lives to line lawyers’ pockets. End the nightmare by pulling malpractice and personal injury suits entirely out of the tort system into national insurance pools (e.g., worker’s compensation), and reform tort “bubbles” like IP that are currently sucking the life out of our most innovative private employers. If you want your profession to be honorable, stop being a bunch of greedy assholes and fix the system.
- Provide extensive job training in non-legal fields, both during and after law school. Most lawyers find themselves doing “something else” at some point in their careers and never looking back. “Something else” is usually business-related, anything from business strategy to investment banking. Of course, we’re woefully unprepared for any of those tasks because law school is all about cases from 1805 where some dickfuck shot another dude’s fox. If you want a solid profession, train a group of polymaths who can provide both specific legal assistance and strategic help through the (amazingly) still-valuable lens of a lawyer.
I don’t think these are controversial suggestions for any young lawyer, but the still-living zombies running the profession will laugh at them. So, here’s what we do:
- Boycott the ABA and all bar associations. Don’t pay a dime for any “association” or group involving these dinosaurs.
- Loudly and proudly tell your friends, their friends, their children, everyone you come into contact with, not to go to law school. This is a no-brainer. As I’ve advised before, unless you are absolutely born to be a lawyer, don’t bother going to law school unless you get into Yale, Harvard, or Stanford. That’s reality folks, $150k-$200k debt isn’t worth it otherwise.
- Start your own practices, at low low rates. You want to fuck over the old guard? Beat them at their own game. Do free/cheap legal work for your friends, start building your own practice, and untether from the dry BIGLAW nipple. 1500 hours a year of work at $100 per hour (far far far less than clients get my services for now) is a very comfortable life.
- Network with other disgruntled lawyers. It’s a lonely world and we’re all fucked, let’s drink/hug/fuck it out.
As for me, I’m pretty much set on going into porn and fucking my way to success in the 2010s. Either that or I’m going to blog for a living (there’s still a niche for curmudgeonly doomsayers, right?), that would at least be more “authentic” and align better with my “personal brand.”
Hey, Look What Tumblr’s Done With All Its Money68 million pageviews in July alone, three times as many uniques as last year and 12 times as many pageviews.
Show me an investor that wouldn’t be ecstatic with those numbers. I’d say that’s money well spent.
This article is needlessly myopic. Tumblr has something that Twitter doesn’t (which I can’t find a good metric for, but I am sure it’s there): stickiness. People expend a lot of attention on Tumblr because of the community-oriented aspects, which is precisely what they’ve been building out by focusing on hiring people to support and grow that community (incidentally, I think they’ve put too many eggs in that basket, but whatever). I guarantee that investors are lined up around the block to buy off pieces of Tumblr given how solid the user base is, and I’d also guess that they’ve hardly spent any of that $4.5MM yet and will sink most of it into infrastructure and technology tweaks that will be rolled out with the next major Tumblr rev.
Not to mention the demographics, which are pretty juicy in the 18-30 year old range.
Now, the question is how to monetize that, but even little old me has some ideas, so I imagine something advertising-related is in the works. Talking about memes and funding is sort of, intentionally, missing the point just to sensationalize the story. Journalism! We has it!
Hello! Watch my wonderful video editing skillz in action as we present to you The First BlackBook Tumblr Swag Giveaway. If you want to see all the little print, uh, just email me, but the contest, the two ways to win, and the prize are all in this video. Our prize (and your best hint) originated from a wonderful charity called The Yellow Bird Project. You can read more about them, the prize (which comes out in a week!), and more over here.
Good luck!
Can’t you just use Shazam and beat this game in like 2 minutes?
How did my Star interview go? I’m going to say not well.
For some reason, despite knowing that I was interviewing with the executive editor, Martin Gould, for a senior reporting position, I was expecting the kind of interview I usually went on for internships. You know, the kind where you sit across from a braindead editorial assistant with shiny, shiny hair, nodding and smiling and saying that YES, you love making photocopies, and writing about celebrity gossip sounds like so much FUN omg.
Instead I got an interview with someone who wanted me to have actual opinions. This threw me off. Sample question: “Why did you go into this kind of writing? Why aren’t you out there trying to get your Pulitzer? I’m sure your professors at NYU steered you towards more serious journalism.” And: “You said in your cover letter you want [yearly salary redacted because it’s too low]? Are you sure?”
Oh, and this: “You worked at Page Six Magazine? What kind of investigative experience do you have?” To which I said, um, Page Six Magazine didn’t really do investigative journalism? And if they did, they certainly didn’t let the interns near it? And then I said something about having experience interviewing and researching, and this one time I had to ask Jeffrey Chodorow about his feud with Frank Bruni?
His follow-up question: “So what if I sent you on a plane tomorrow to Pennsylvania to research the Jon and Kate story? What would you do?” My initial response was, you’re just sending me on a plane? Did we call their publicists first?
Eventually I said I’d ring some doorbells and see what their neighbors knew, but I don’t see how I could possibly get this job. It’s a shame, because working for an editor like that seemed kind of awesome.
You might want to point him to some of your blog posts and online writing if you haven’t already, especially now that it sounds like they wanted to see how “hungry” you were in comparison to how technically good your writing is. One assumes that people will GOOG you and find the good stuff, but preemptively pointing it out can’t hurt. And haven’t you done trip reports and event reports and such that would reflect (vaguely, perhaps) on investigative ability? I’m sure I recall reading a few.
3 notes (via anastasiafriscia)
I know logically that not all American “Conservatives” are lunatic ideologues but it’s nice to read it in print every know and then.
I think conservative anger is misplaced. To a large extent, Obama is only cleaning up messes created by Bush. This is not to say Obama hasn’t made mistakes himself, but even they can be blamed on Bush insofar as Bush’s incompetence led to the election of a Democrat. If he had done half as good a job as most Republicans have talked themselves into believing he did, McCain would have won easily.
Conservative protesters should remember that the recession, which led to so many of the policies they oppose, is almost entirely the result of Bush’s policies. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession began in December 2007—long before Obama was even nominated. And the previous recession ended in November 2001, so the current recession cannot be blamed on cyclical forces that Bush inherited.
