Solicitor General Donald Verrilli had a challenging week in front of the Supreme Court. Few lawyers ever appear there. Mr. Verilli had to do it three times in three days. Some commentators took Mr. Verrilli to task for his performance on Tuesday; others read the tea leaves as signalling that the Affordable Care Act is headed for the ICU.
What I will say is that Mr. Verrilli had the tough end of this argument, and that you should never assume the opinion of the Justices will correlate to the tone of their questioning. Don’t count out the SG just yet.
Mr.Verrilli allegedly prepared for these arguments in a secure Washington DC hotel, dining on salmon for the putative benefits of Omega-3′s on the legal brain.
But perhaps Mr. Verrilli should have retained the services of one Ray Lewis of the Baltimore Ravens. If anyone knows how to mount a stout defense of anything, it is Mr. Lewis. At the least he would have fired up Team Verrilli Sunday night; upon reflection Mr. Lewis could have been motioned in pro hac vice, and given the final three minutes of the government’s time on Wednesday.
My reasoning? I submit this as Exhibit A: Ray Lewis talking to the men’s Stanford Cardinal basketball team, right before they took the floor Tuesday night in an NIT matchup against UMass. Stanford won, and the team ran through a concrete wall after the game rather than using the locker room door at Madison Square Garden:
We get one opportunity in life. One chance in life … to do whatever you’re gonna do. To lay your foundation. To make whatever mark you’re gonna make. To leave whatever legacy you’re gonna leave. Leave your legacy.
All he has to do is to flip Justice Anthony Kennedy, after all.
Lawyers can learn three things from Mr. Lewis: (a) be brief, (b) be passionate, and (c) it’s easier to do (a) and (b) when you are standing less than a foot away from a high-wattage powerpoint projector.
It also can’t hurt to “Low-Five” the Nine Justices before you start your argument, either.
This week a New York Supreme Court judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by disappointed, jobless New York Law school graduates. The New York Times has the details. A copy of Justice Melvin Schweitzer’s opinion is here (PDF) and linked and embedded below.
After all the arguments about misleading job prospects, Justice Schweitzer sums it up thusly:
The lawyers involved in this litigation are undeterred; one, David Anziska, offered this reaction:
“We always expected for many of these issues to ultimately be resolved on an appellate level,” [...] “Moreover, we fully intend to soldier on and to sue many more law schools in the forthcoming weeks and months ahead.”
This opinion will enlighten other judges faced with these flimsy claims; here is a copy of Venable LLP’s memorandum in support of the motion to dismiss.
You have to feel for law students who hit the market as the Great Recession was grinding along the years 2008-2011 (2012?). Heck, you have to feel for law students entering law school right now.
Yet there never have been any guarantees coming out of law school. You like your odds better the higher-ranked the school you graduated from. And these plaintiffs went to New York Law School! They had to know there would be less of a door-opener feature to their diploma.
What all law students need to know is that there is nothing more off-putting than a lawyer who acts “entitled.” Entitled to a great job just because of the brand on the diploma, entitled to better work assignments, entitled to taking shortcuts to career success because “I didn’t go to law school to spend time doing X.”
There’s a joke that circulates among all lawyers who did not go to Harvard Law School. Surely you’ve heard it.
How do you know that lawyers you meet went to Harvard Law School? They tell you.
Over time, prospective law students will understand more clearly that law is hard, law is different now, law is not going back to hefty signing bonuses and multiple six-figure offers landing in your 3L apartment mailbox.
The truth is, for 98% of law students, the law after graduation was never like that anyway. To figure this out you don’t need a plaintiff’s lawyer to cobble together a lawsuit. You just needed to talk to a real lawyer or two before you accepted that admission from Random Law School.
That scarlet L? Here’s one:
Apple is a juggernaut; currently the most valuable company worldwide by market cap (over half-a-trillion USD): it also has over $100 billion in cash on hand.
It wasn’t always that way. For many years Apple was an also-ran in computer sales. Apple’s Mac line was seen as too expensive, and this premium pricing policy made some think that Apple would stay a nice little tech company always in the shadows cast by Microsoft, Dell, and HP.
When Apple branched into consumer products such as the iPod and the iPhone, the “premium pricing” tag was still there. I have heard some lawyers explain their firm’s pricing strategy in similar terms, sometimes even invoking Apple directly. They use words like this: “We are not for everybody; people are willing to pay more for quality.”
But an interesting thing has happened with the iPad. Apple not only created a new category of a tech gadget, they priced it aggressively as well. One recent article explained it this way:
Apple’s size, and the fact that the iPad shares components with the highly popular iPhone, means that the company can buy crucial parts such as processing chips and display screens at lower prices. Any company that wants to make a tablet computer that matches the iPad’s $499 starting price has to endure higher costs.
So the latest iPad is offered at a price competitors can’t match feature-for-feature (and have similar margins). And Apple doubles-down by offering the prior model at a discount, further knee-capping the wanna-be competition.
If we move back to the law firm analogy, I understand that tech products and legal services present different delivery challenges and market opportunities. Nevertheless, what if certain law firms started to offer defined services for a lower block rate to their best customers? This could be for off-the-shelf information plucked out of knowledge management systems or owing to enhanced productivity gained from experience managing outsourced work.
What clients know is this: even at the best law firms, not all work, and not all lawyers are equal. Communicating the willingness to pass savings onto the best clients for certain work positions a firm as a leader, rather than a member of a fraternity that’s showing its age.
Apple is taking a long-term view of market share and customer satisfaction. Such a simple strategy. Perhaps that’s why it appears so radical and refreshing.
Personal data privacy is an interesting issue for lawyers. For some, it’s part of their corporate practice. For most, it’s a confusing technological jumble, something they want to trust to someone else.
In-house counsel are often on the side of drafting privacy policies for their employers that allow for the appropriate use of consumer and web site visitor data.
In-house and outside counsel also have a hand in drafting those terms of use that we all never read and click “accept,” denoting we have. It’s almost a charade, worse than old-school small print on the back of used-car dealer’s installment sales agreement.
In addition, there are many examples of companies saying they will protect personal data, and then not doing so. Is it an oversight, a technical glitch, a lone hacker, or something else? Who knows, and I don’t want to link to any of these reports to single anyone out. It happens almost weekly. Some companies don’t even know when it’s happening.
Yesterday the Obama administration announced the outline of a data privacy “bill of rights.” The official report is here; major companies are trying to get out ahead of the issue; some observers think that the proposal doesn’t go far enough.
I think most people would expect lawyers to be conversant with these issues, thinking that protecting people from privacy intrusions is like securing financial assets or real estate investments. Indeed, lawyers who work on this issue for clients probably view it much differently when the privacy being potentially invaded is that of their teenage daughter. The New York Times covered some of this recently, as did NPR on how companies are tracking you on the web, right now, and how little you can do about it.
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Since many of the most successful Internet-based businesses are based on collecting information and selling it, or using it as a basis for advertising, you can expect a real fight over federal data privacy initiatives.
In the coming years, I think many lawyers will have to follow this issue and understand what’s going on. That will help represent corporate clients, and it will be essential in understanding what’s going on with their own data, and that of family members. It may even be an added-value service offered to individual clients who want or need help in this area.
I honestly think if most lawyers knew what was going on with their own personal information, they would see data privacy in a different, and more immediate, light.
On the Internet, the saying goes like this: when something is free, you are the product.
On Tuesday, why data privacy presents unique issues for corporate counsel and why traditional methods may not work, legally or practically.
Sometimes when we look at someone for a position, we see our pre-conceived notions more clearly than a person’s potential. While there are probably examples of this in the legal space, there is a more vivid one, right now, drawn from the world of sports.
A strike-shortened NBA season has been brightened considerably by the unlikeliest of players: Jeremy Lin of the New York Knicks. He had no scholarship offers out of high school, and was undrafted in the NBA after starring at that bastion of basketball, Harvard.
Mr. Lin knocked around with at least two other NBA franchises before landing with the Knicks this year. That team was actually close to cutting him from the squad earlier this month before injuries and other circumstances forced the hand of head coach Mike D’Antoni to play Mr. Lin.
And has he ever answered the call: in his first six games, Jeremy Lin set an NBA record for scoring in a player’s first six starts. The Knicks have only one loss since he has been the starting point guard. Pundits wonder whether Knicks team chemistry will still be intact when star Carmelo Anthony returns to the floor, perhaps tonight. Mr. Anthony may make more in one week than Mr. Lin makes in a year.
We have all had “can’t miss” hires miss, and “long-shot” people in new positions excel. I see three lessons for lawyers in the story of the amazing Mr. Lin, particularly for those with legal management responsibilities:
1. Don’t always go for the easy hire. The school that is the default #1 choice for many top tier law firms, Harvard, is apparently one of the last on the radar for the NBA. Only in pro basketball can going to Harvard seemingly be a mark against you. There are many great lawyers who didn’t attend top tier schools. It definitely takes a more inspired search and unusually engaged interviewing.
2. Look beneath the surface. It’s 2012 and you expect people to look beyond race, ethnicity or heritage these days. Some question whether that was the case with Mr. Lin. There have been precious few Asian-American NBA players, and his parents were not athletes as far as I can tell. They emigrated from Taiwan and appear to be all of five foot six. There may be valid explanations for why Mr. Lin didn’t catch on prior to now, but many teams are reflecting on how they missed Mr. Lin, particularly two teams (Golden State and Houston) who let him slip away.
3. Everyone has hidden talents. For whatever reason, Jeremy Lin’s success at Harvard was seen as not projecting well to the NBA. But at the high school and college levels, Mr. Lin showed leadership and clutch, almost intuitive game management. The sort of stuff that’s hard to teach. Have you ever run across a lawyer with an enviable pedigree but rather pedestrian skills to move beyond legal acumen to business results? Lawyers who can do that have a three point shot, when the game is on the line.
Unfortunately even a feel-good, underdog-triumphs-against-long-odds story gets complicated eventually. There was a hubbub this weekend regarding a phrase appearing on ESPN media outlets that was derogatory about Mr. Lin. When asked about this matter yesterday, Mr. Lin replied thusly:
“ESPN has apologized,” he said. “I don’t think it was on purpose or whatever. At the same time, they’ve apologized, and so from my end I don’t care anymore. Have to learn to forgive. And I don’t even think that was intentional, or hopefully not.”
Grace as well as wisdom. Things that don’t show up in a transcript or LSAT scores.
Mr. Lin put this potentially distracting issue to rest after he scored 28 points and had 14 assists as the Knicks beat the defending champion Dallas Mavericks Saturday night. I would guess that the Knicks are glad they gave him a chance, even if they really stumbled into it.
When we are looking for the best lawyer for an opening, it helps to look beyond the standard “position requirements” and see whether you can find someone special where others aren’t looking.
There’s one last lesson from Jeremy Lin that is there for those on the other side of the recruitment or promotion table: if you are given “a shot,” really make the most of it. Part of Mr. Lin’s true talent seems to be in solid self-confidence, an ability to put errors behind him, and treat a new possession as a fresh start. But the secret sauce from where I sit is that Jeremy Lin makes those around him better.
And in the star-focused league that is the NBA, or the Am Law 200 for that matter, people who perform well and help others do the same are really rare indeed.
