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 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]