Category Archives: Odds and Ends

 

September 4th, 2007

America’s Newest Law Student – A Coney Island Freak

“Eak the Geek” starts law school today. After 15 years as Coney Island sideshow performer, where he specialized in eating nails, he starts today at Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Michigan, according to this report in AM New York.

Money quote: “I know it sounds weird, but I want to be a freak lawyer …I hope to have a little office in New York and work with the alternative people … all the so-called riff-raff, to give them legal representation that is not judgmental.”

And the good news is that he has a blog. OK, it’s on MySpace, but still, the potential is there for a new and unique window into the world of law.

 

August 31st, 2007

My Brother’s Screenplay is a Finalist!

Excuse me while I boast:

Congrats to brother Dan! His screenplay, Tranquility Base, just became a finalist at the PAGE International Screenwriting Awards. There are 100 Finalists spread over 10 categories (his is Sci-Fi/Fantasy).

Not bad considering there were 3,411 entries. Way to go bro!

About the script:
Tranquility Base is the story of astronauts stranded in space in 2040. The action moves between the International Space Station, a Space Transport Plane, and a Moon Base Biosphere, as 15 astronauts struggle to secure the six available spots in the self-sustaining environment of the Moon Base. A combination of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Survivor, Tranquility Base examines the challenges man faces when his desire to help others conflicts with his instinct for survival.

So, who knows a good agent?
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About PAGE:
The PAGE International Screenwriting Awards competition was established by an alliance of Hollywood producers, agents, and development executives. Our goal: to discover the most exciting new scripts by up-and-coming writers from across the country and around the world. And due to the success of our winning writers, the PAGE screenwriting contest is rapidly becoming one of the most important sources for new talent within the Hollywood community and worldwide.

It’s a Catch 22. While producers and agents continually complain that they can’t find good material, talented writers who live outside Los Angeles and have no “connections” within the movie industry find it virtually impossible to penetrate the barriers of the Hollywood system. Our objective is to bridge that gap – giving new screenwriters the opportunity to get their scripts into the hands of industry professionals, and also serving as a much-needed resource for Hollywood producers, agents, and studio execs who are searching for quality material.

 

August 30th, 2007

New York Bar Examiners Still Can’t Find Complete Essay Answers

A month after taking the New York bar exam, many students still stand in limbo after the New York State Bar Examiners informed some that their essay submissions are incomplete. The missing essays for the July 2007 had been written on laptop computers.

According to New York Lawyer, “the board hired to provide software to take the bar exam, appear to have incomplete essays from about 400 people who sat for July’s exam.” (see: Son of a Glitch!: Hundreds of NY Bar Exam Takers May Have Had Essay Answers Fouled Up by Software, free reg.)

Test takers have been emailed and asked to send back-up data that they may have from the test.

I had previously recounted my own experience in taking the exam in 1985, when the results of 500+ people taking the test in the passenger ship terminals on Manhattan’s west side disappeared. The vast majority had to retake the missing section.

And so, it appears that a high-tech replay of that infamous incident may now be in full swing.

Addendum:

 

August 27th, 2007

Above The Law Tablawg In New York Times Over Nixon Peabody Song Story

Above the Law, which fashions itself as a legal tabloid, has been chronicling the lack of humor at Nixon Peabody, one of those BigLaw joints that thinks it’s a lot of fun to work at. They first created a song for themselves (so that’s how those legal fees are spent) and then had a hissy-fit when it was leaked to ATL’s David Lat who posted it online.

Some folks are their own worst enemies, as they threatned Lat on intellectual property grounds for publishing it, and then saw the song lampooned by another with a fair use parody. Lat’s tablawg now lands in today’s New York Times in the business section, so that all their clients can now see what they are doing.

Nixon Peabody has blown the one great rule of the digital age: Don’t say, write or create anything that you don’t want to see in the newspapers. And blown another rule about making dumb threats, which they can then be mocked for.

Hey, its August, which means slow news, and a chance to claim “tablawg” as my own creation since Google turns up zero hits on the word. Widespread use is not anticipated.

Late August also happens to be a perfect time to resign if you are an embattled attorney general.

 

August 24th, 2007

Are Westlaw and Lexis Dying?

Will Westlaw and Lexis be going the way of the dinosaur? A new website to find legal opinions may do just that.

From Thomas Swartz at the New York Legal Update:, noting that the information on the new site will be easy to use, free, searchable, free, fast, and of course, free,

Columbia Law School and the University of Colorado Law School have launched a new Web site called AltLaw.org. AltLaw.org contains nearly 170,000 decisions dating back to the early 1990s from the U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Appellate courts. The site’s creators, Columbia Law School’s Timothy Wu and Stuart Sierra, and University of Colorado Law School’s Paul Ohm, said the site’s database will grow over time. [More at the link]

The future may not be so bright for those companies when their bread and butter is delivered free to the legal world.