News Roundup 12.10.09

We could tell you the context in which Larry Flynt used the phrase “boob element” when testifying in front of a Los Angeles judge this week.  Or we could just let you guess.  [LA Times]

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A hairy naked Republican who once posed crotch-and-center in Cosmo has won the Republican nomination for the late Ted Kennedy’s US Senate seat.  Cue the rolling.  As in “over in his grave.”  [Gawker]

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Actual headline from the AP: “Florida woman accused of hitting man with raw steak.”  Yes, yes—you’re welcome. According to a County Sheriff’s Office report, the man told deputies that 53-year-old Elsie Egan “repeatedly hit him with the uncooked meat and slapped his face after he refused a piece of sliced bread. The man said he wanted a bread roll.”  [AP via Forbes]

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At least a few second-year associates are getting $70,000  bonuses this year.  Yes, you read that right.  No, the bonuses don’t involve a time machine.  And no again, they’re not coming from where you’d think.  [Above the Law]

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Singer, writer, producer and child porn connoisseur  R. Kelly has announced that he’s working on a memoir that will “tell it like it is.”   The autobiography is scheduled for release in 2011 and is as of yet untitled.  Hm.  We have a few suggestions.  [A.V. Club]

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Think you might be laid off soon?  Try to nab a quick jury duty gig as soon as possible.  Just ask this Miami security guard who was just awarded $150,000 after she served a three-day stint as a juror in a South Florida murder trial—and was promptly fired by her employer.  Bring on that civic duty!  [Miami Herald]

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News Roundup 12.2.09

Leave it to a lawyer to come up with the least sexy name imaginable for a law-firm version of a casting couch.  Behold: the “Couch of Restitution.”    Really, if you’re going to go through the effort of offering to accept sexual favors in exchange for legal fees—as the recently suspended Couch-coining lawyer in Michigan just did—at least come up with a snappier name for it for when you get busted.  [ABA Journal]

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Johnson & Johnson heiress Casey Johnson has been arrested for grand theft for stealing jewelry, shoes, underwear and clothes from a supermodel ex-BFF—oh, and for leaving a used vibrator in her bed.    [Gawker via NY Post]

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In an apparent attempt to polish up the firm’s (lucite-heeled) white (patent-leather platform) shoe image, a recent lawsuit has revealed that the powers that be at Seyfarth Shaw sent around an email to all Los Angeles partners imploring them to “hustle for cash like you’ve never done before.”   [Above the Law]

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Love getting all your daily news through Google?   Well, then you’re probably not going to love this.  [NY Times]

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In a shocking, disturbing twist, news is just starting to leak that Obama party-crashers Tareq and Michaele Salahi may actually have lied about other public events in their lives, including their “signature social event,” the Land Rover America’s Polo cup, which apparently was neither sponsored by Land Rover nor as profitable as they claimed.  See?  Aren’t you glad you were sitting down?  [Washington Post]

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If you were hoping to connect with a few sex offender types on Facebook or MySpace, you’re now out of luck, thanks to NY Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo.  [NY Mag Daily Intel]

News Roundup 10.28.09

How badly do you want to go to the World Series?   Badly enough to post an ad on Craigslist offering sex for World Series tix—only to get arrested hours later when the cops “answer” your ad?  Well, then you don’t want to go nearly as badly as this diehard Phillies fan.  Slacker.  [NBC Philadelphia]

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The New York Times offers new insight into the inner workings of law firm managers’ minds when they decide who gets laid off and who get to stay.  According to a “Washington lawyer friend” of the op-ed columnist,  ”[L]awyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.”  Funny, that’s JUST how it went down in my firm.  What’s the billing code for “imagining” again?  [NYT]

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Fraud?  By the Church of Scientology?  The group that routinely pressures its members to fork over as much money as they can afford and believes that an intergalactic warlord named Xenu is responsible for infusing us all with soul pieces?  I know, we didn’t believe it at first either.  But rest assured, at least in the eyes of the Paris court who convicted the cult church of fraud on Tuesday and fined it more than half a million euros, Scientology’s got some ’splainin’ to do.  [WSJ Law Blog]

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Not surprising:  There’s been a rash of break-ins to celebrity homes in Los Angeles recently, including the lairs of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Orlando Bloom.  Surprising: Those responsible for the alleged robberies are a band of teenage girls obsessed with clothing and jewelry.   According to police, the enterprising ladies “studied” celeb magazines, television shows, and websites to pick out what clothing they wanted, cased the homes and stole their chosen items.  Ah, who says the American teens never study?  [Fashionista]

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Lady lawyers:  Bad at rainmaking or good at…realizing that the time you spend rainmaking could be spend making (more) money for yourself in a job that doesn’t expect you to work 3,000 hours a year?  [Above the Law]

News Roundup 10.1.09

No.  We’re sorry, but we can’t agree with you.  In the wake of his latest legal efforts, we refuse to say that Jon Gosselin of Jon & Kate Plus Hate fame is an incredible douchebag.  Because that would be an insult to incredible douchebags the world over.  [Popsquire]

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And you thought convicted Ponzi schemer and ex-lawyer Marc Dreier was to blame for defrauding investors out of $380 million.  Oh, naive soul.  Turns out, the Hamptons were to blame all along.  [NY Post]

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Cristina Warthen, the former high-end hooker who worked her way through Stanford Law on her back and later pled guilty to tax evasion, has been sentenced to one year home detention and ordered to pay $243,000 in back taxes and fines.  In other words, she got laid in law school about seven thousand more times than you did, got paid for it, and has just been ordered to hang around her house for a while.  On an unrelated note, how’s that sweet big-firm associate gig working out for you so far?  [Valleywag]

News Roundup 9.18.09

Think of the saddest, most pathetic sexual nadir you ever reached.  Did it involve purchasing virtual sex toys like a ”sex bed,” a digital bed with built-in sex position animations, for your Second Life avatar to use online?  Or better yet, did it involve suing other virtual sex toy makers who are peddling knocked-off versions of your high-end online kink to Second Lifers?  Well, then, at your worst, you still have light  years more game than these folks.  Pun intended.  [MediaPost News]

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Just what every girl dreams of: A new recently leaked book proposal by John Edwards’s former aide claims that the adulterous Edwards once calmed his piece-on-the-side/ babymama, Rielle Hunter, by promising her that after his wife finished up her bout with cancer and died, he would marry Hunter in a rooftop ceremony in New York with an appearance by none other than the Dave Matthews Band.   Who says romance is dead?  [Gawker]

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Speaking of romance, good news, all you lawyer boys out there: Gold digging ladies of leisure still want to date you!  According to self-proclaimed “high-end matchmaker” Samantha Daniels, her lady clients have been broadening their scope lately regarding the types of guys they want to buy them be set up with.  According to Daniels, whereas ladies “used to immediately say, set me up with someone in finance, they’re now going back to the traditional professions as well. They’re asking for lawyers and doctors and business owners — the type of guys their grandmothers used to tell them to look for.” [Fortune via CNN Money]

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This 22-year-old Georgetown law student is NOT dating Rihanna.  Really, he swears he’s not.  Repeatedly.  And with such flair.  [Above the Law]

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Oh, John Thain.  You slay us.  That remark you made—you know, the one where you said that, if you “had to do it over again,” you’d furnish your office “in Ikea,” instead of spending $1.2 million on choice pieces like a $35,000 toilet—is part of what makes you just so damn fun.  A spokeswoman for Ikea, Mona Astra Liss, even offered to show the the former CEO of the exploded Merrill Lynch & Co. around his local IKEA anytime, offering to “show him a wealth of furniture choices for home and office” and to “feed [him] Swedish meatballs, too.”  Wouldn’t hold your breath there, Mona. [Bloomerg]

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And you thought the paralegal sitting outside your office had it in for you.  Let’s just hope he doesn’t know Irby Walker, the South Carolina criminal defense attorney who’s been charged with solicitation of a felony for allegedly trying to hire a hit man to kill another attorney with whom he formerly shared a law office. [ABA Journal]