Would your managing partner wear lederhosen for a marketing video? If not, maybe you work at the wrong firm.
To celebrate a name change and its 50th birthday, the firm now known as HansonBridgett has put together the video below, which shows a group of lawyers at the firm marching down Market Street here in San Francisco as part of a band. Managing partner Andrew Giacomini, who also plays bass drum in the video, said the firm "called on the creative skills of people who work here" to put the project together. Here's what they created:
What does it mean? I don't know (but I like it). No one knows. "That's the beauty of it," said partner Garner Weng in a press release on the firm's website. "If you're wondering," Weng said, "there is a specific message we were trying to deliver -- but it's a secret." I'd guess that at least part of the message is, "it doesn't suck to work here," and that is something that should not be underestimated.
Management of Skadden Arps, I think the ball is in your court. What are you willing to wear?
In this outstanding clip edited from MSNBC's coverage, O.J. Simpson's attorney Yale Galanter is assisted at a press conference by a gentleman who seems to have recently joined the team. It appears that Galanter will provide the legal talent, and New Guy will provide the moral support.
New Guy, as you may know, is actually Tony Barbieri, a comedian who plays a character named "Jake Byrd" who tries to insert himself into celebrity events like he's done here. I know this not because I watch "Jimmy Kimmel Live," where "Jake Byrd" frequently appears, but because I research my stories, unlike, apparently, the New York Times, which got fooled by Byrd during the Michael Jackson trial, and had to run this correction:
Editor's Note: May 6, 2004, Thursday
An article on Saturday about a hearing in which the entertainer Michael Jackson pleaded not guilty to felony charges involving sexual abuse of a teenage boy described fans who came to see Mr. Jackson. They included a man who identified himself as Jake Byrd, an employee of a tropical fish store in Chino, Calif. After the article appeared, a publicist for the ABC television show ‘‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’’ said the man was actually an actor playing a recurring character, a rabid Jackson fan named Jake Byrd. The publicist would not reveal the name of the actor, known for stunts that insinuate him into news coverage.
I was hoping this was an actual crazy guy who just wanted to get on camera, but this is still pretty darn good. Anything that increases the circus quotient of an O.J. criminal case is good news for me.
Consider using only one hand to stuff the cash into your pockets. The robbery will take a little longer, but if the alternative is setting your gun down on the counter, it's worth the extra time.
As the surveillance video of the incident shows, some convenience-store clerks may be so rude as to grab the gun and turn it around to point at you. This is a severe breach of robbery etiquette, but should it happen your only options are probably surrender or flight. The worst choice is probably what this gentleman did, which was to first flee, then rush back into the store to try to take the gun back from the now-heavily-armed victim. Not only are you unlikely to get the gun back, the commotion may give someone time to write down your license-plate number.
Neither man was injured during the incident. The robber was tracked down in a nearby apartment and arrested.
A civil-rights lawsuit by 78-year-old Harold Lischner against the township of Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, has generated a couple of interesting motions in limine.
It's also now generated a blog post that may be the first document anywhere to use the adjective "interesting" to describe a motion in limine. For non-attorney readers, this is a motion to exclude evidence -- you know, the blue thing the defense attorneys are always handing somebody on "Law & Order."
For readers under 12, or those not convinced that this is going to be interesting, here's a clip of Sesame Street's "Law & Order: Special Letters Unit," in which the squad tries to locate the letter "M," and frequently invokes the "chung chung" sound (that's what the Muppets call it).
Anyway, Lischner, a doctor and a professor at Temple University, was charged with disorderly conduct in 2003 for protesting a GOP fund-raiser attended by the President in Upper Darby, described by the Philadelphia Inquirer as a "traditionally Republican township." Lischner, one of about 50 protesters, carried a sign with the punchy but wordy slogan, "Withdraw our troops from Iraq. Give the $87 billion to the Iraqi
governing council and UN for immediate relief and repair of the
destruction we caused." The sign was described as "torso-sized," which I would think means the words would have been too small to be read by anyone not already in the group of protesters, which would seem to defeat the purpose. I guess it depends on whose torso we're talking about.
Whatever the problem really was, police repeatedly told Lischner to put the sign away and leave. When he didn't, he was arrested for something called "defiant trespass," but was actually charged with disorderly conduct. He was acquitted of that charge, and later sued the township, alleging that his civil rights had been violated. This led to the interesting motions in limine filed by the township's attorneys to exclude evidence from the trial set to begin on Monday, July 23.
First, they moved to exclude any reference at trial to the message on Lischner's sign, or the person at whom it was theoretically directed -- the President of the United States. They argued that these facts were irrelevant, or alternatively, and more comically, that any relevance they might have would be outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice to the defendant township -- specifically, that jurors will associate it with President Bush. Because the President has "the worst approval rating of an American president in a generation," the township's lawyer wrote (italics his),
"President Bush's identity, in and of itself, presents the danger that the jury will favor plaintiff . . . ." Holding that these facts were relevant to the question whether there was probable cause to arrest Lischner, the court denied these motions.
Second, the township moved to exclude any argument by Lischner that his First Amendment rights had been violated, since he was only alleging a claim under the Fourth Amendment for unlawful seizure. The judge did preclude Lischner from asking for damages for a "violation of the First Amendment," but he rejected the township's other claim -- to preclude any reference at all to "free speech" or the "First Amendment."
The irony of a motion asking that someone be ordered to keep quiet about "free speech" does not seem to have registered with anybody. The judge did not mention it, either, but did hold that these concepts were still relevant to Lischner's claim that there was no probable cause to arrest him, and to the damages he may have suffered. Chung chung.
Barring some kind of settlement over the weekend, the trial will begin Monday morning. Maybe Upper Darby should seek a continuance, given that success in Iraq is just around the corner.
