Law And More

Laura Wasser et al. - Divorce Lawyers for Celebrities Have to Have PR Down Cold

Laura Wasser is one of the divorce lawyers for celebrities featured in the Vanity Fair article by Julie Miller.  

Unlike the divorce lawyers for Everyman and Everywoman, part of their job is to manage the public relations associated with brandnames in Hollywood, sports, business, and so on. For that they charge the big bucks.

Wasser, for example, bills at $850 an hour, with a required $25,000 retainer. But she has to be totally vigilant about having the news of the splitsville not being made public before the celebrities want that it released. 

The key strategy is to work out all the details early in the process. That's not easy. Celebrities are used to getting what they want.

Lawyer and star meet in private and conduct a lot of business by phone. In public are members of the media eager to pick up the scent of negative news. That's what sells, of course.

Like many PR players, celebrity lawyers release the official announcement on Friday, especially before a long weekend. Summer months are the best. The children should not be in school.

The exception is if the celebrity is leveraging news of the divorce as a comeback tactic. They will mean they will at least be covered again. Divorces play well in all kinds of media. There can be lots of speculation about what went wrong. 

Huma Abedin - The Good Wife No More

The question we have about the Huma Abedin-Anthony Weiner marriage is: What did The Good Wife get out of it?

In the television series, Alicia Florrick was able to save her job when a desperate first-year associate. That wasn't the end of her ability to tap into her husband Peter's contacts. On the side, she had the bonus of a romantic run with her boss Will. Being The Good Wife paid off well.

Hillary Clinton, known to be a mediocre politico, continues to have instant access to Wild Bill's insight about the game.

But that isn't the only question, of course.

We wonder why a glamour player like herself married Weiner in the first place.

Also, why did she participate in that negative documentary film about Weiner's failed campaign to be mayor of New York City? She came across as a cold politico. 

Well, this marriage seems a wrap. We doubt if the couple is seeking to resolve problems in therapy.

 

"Little Men" - Thumbs its nose at New York cliches, including lawyers are evil

A death in the family changes a lot.

The old-world grandfather had leased the store in Brooklyn under his apartment to a single mother seamstress from Chile - for peanuts. At his repast after his funeral the teenage son of the seamstress and his son's own teenage son become instant friends. Meanwhile, his daughter will start the process for jacking up the rent beyond what the current tenant could ever pay. Like much of Brooklyn, that neighborhood is gentrifying. 

The conflict over the rent could have turned out to have been the usual New York story, involving lawyers and a likable victim. But it is played out through the minds and hearts of the two boys. Also, the tenant Leonor is hardly sympathetic.

She talks sentiment, not business. That's even though she is a businesswoman. Also she is cruel to the son of the kind man who was so generous to him for so many years. That son is a failed actor, supported by his successful wife who is a psychotherapist. However, he and his wife authentically love each other and he is a good parent. There doesn't seem to be undue tension in the household about her being the breadwinner.

Well, Leonor gets evicted. The boys drift apart. But both seem to have gotten through that crisis, as do most of us. And that is the sweetness and light of the narrative: We all remember a similar development among adults which, at the time, unhinged our little adolescent worlds. 

"Indignation" - The times before students had rights

The film "Indignation" captures the era of college life before students had rights.

It was 1951. A faith-based college in Oho mandates chapel attendance. Free-thinker blue-collar Jewish student from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, resents that. He hires a proxy to simulate attendance. For that he is expelled from college, which means being drafted to fight in the Korean War. There he dies. 

Today, that wouldn't have happened. And even a blue-collar kid would know to hire a lawyer if it did. 

The film is based on a novel by Philip Roth, who chronicled the life of Jews in America. So, of course, it has the meme of how members of a minority group struggled with making a place for themselves - professionally and socially. 

Messner tries to avoid that issue. Maybe that was part of why he was headed to destruction. The world plays a major role in the playbook we have to follow. He should have known better than to enroll in a fundamentalist Christian college. 

IP Battles Nothing New - New Film Features 1887 Lawsuit between Edison, Westinghouse, with Paul Cravath as Lawyer

IP has always meant money. Big money.

That dates back to the 1887 epic lawsuit over the the patent to the lightbulb. The opponents were Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. Defending the latter was Paul Cravath. Yes, that's the Cravath associated with the iconic law firm Cravath, most recently famous for disrupting associate compensation in BigLaw.

In Abovethelaw, lawyer-journalist, Kathryn Rubino, reports that a movie is being made about Cravath. Essentially, it's derived on the book "Last Day of Night." Cravath will be depicted by Eddie Redmayne. 

Such a movie, if it becomes popular, can end the image of innovation as sweetness and light. No pun intended. The raw reality is that every innovation which can be applied to commercial use potentially involves lots of money. Capitalism rears its ugly head. And lawyers have lots of business. 

Mark and Megan Short - Scenes from a Marriage

The story of the apparent suicide-murder in the Mark/Megan Short household is tragically familiar. Behind the facade of middle class or upper middle class life can be escalating conflict in the marriage. 

Sometimes there are obvious red flags which outsiders can notice. Law enforcement where the Short family lived in Pennsylvania was aware of "domestic issues."

Other times, the facade isn't fractured in ways that non-family members can pick up on. 

Film-maker Ingmar Bergman understood what could and often does happen behind the facade. In 1974, he captured the fragility of the marital bond in his now-iconic "Scenes from a Marriage." Johan leaves Marianne. No, it was not expected, especially not by Marianne.

Just last night, my very traditional neighbor whose loving husband had recently died, confided in me a stunner. About 15 years into the marriage, she had left her beloved for a time. The reason was not another man - or woman. He hadn't been living up to the American Dream of building wealth for his wife and family. Betrayal has many forms. 

He didn't change. But the marriage was to continue. Could it have ended decades ago in a murder-suicide? The widow admitted that could have been possible. 

Intimacy is a high-risk undertaking. No wonder so few human beings in 2016 can take that leap into a long-term, trusting relationship.

"The Innocents" - French Film Captures WWII Horror of Nuns Raped, Then Pregnant

The pieces of this soul-wrenching French film are held together by Mathilde, a young French medical doctor.

She is pulled into assisting with a difficult birth at a Polish convent. The plot line is based on fact.

The war has just ended and the Russians had celebrated the victory by invading a convent of nuns in Poland and raping all members of the religious order over several days. Many of the victims become pregnant.

The head of the convent is determined to keep all this secret. One novice defies orders and seeks out a doctor at the Red Cross when another nun has been in labor for a while and seems to be dying. Mathilde, from a Communist background, comes.

Gradually the story unfolds. When there are multiple births, Mathilde enlists the help of a Jewish doctor and her sometime lover. Like her, he takes command and ignores the petty rules of the convent.

When it's discovered that the convent head is not bringing the babies to homes for adoption but baptizing them and leaving them in the open to die, Mathilde has an idea. She suggests that the convent take in the orphans hanging around the Red Cross. That will allow it to also keep the nuns' babies. That solution brings such joy. A photographer takes a photo of the nuns with the babies.

The Red Cross wraps up its mission. Mathilde moves on. The message from the convent is for her to have a life of joy. As with many heroic figures, happiness has eluded her. But that could change in the future, at least the nuns hope.

Joshua Komisayevsky, Petiit Family Killer, Has Death Penalty Changed to 6 Consecutive Life Sentences

The fatal Petit home invasion in Connecticut captured world attention.

Many compared it to the senseless murder of the Clutter family narrated by Trump Capote in his nonfiction book "In Cold Blood." Both were motivated by the fantasy of big money which didn't materialize. Dr. William Petit's wife and two daughters were raped and murdered.

The killers were sentenced to death. Later, CT abolished the death penalty.

As a result one of the killers recently got off death row.

Now the second one has also. That's Joshua Komisayevsky. He will serve six consecutive life sentences.  Here are the details from the New York Post.

That home invasion was one of three tragedies to occur within a relatively short time in CT. The next was the massacre of school children in Newtown. Then in a Christmas morning fire, ad executive Madonna Badger lost her three daughters and both parents.

The lone survivor of the home invasion, Dr. William Petit, recovered from the beating the murdered administered to him. They assumed he was dead. He was at all the trials.

No one assumed Petiti would be able to come back from the horror. But he did. He married. The couple had a son. And he is now running for elected office.

 

Legal Sector - Soon Enough There Will Be Rotten Tomatoes Effect

Rotten Tomatoes is the go-to site and probably the only one we check before deciding to pony up the money for a film. It aggregates all the consumer and critic reviews.

The result: 2 numbers on a scale of 1 to 100. If either or both of those numbers are low, the odds are we won't spend our money on that film. No, we don't do "further investigation" and retrieve ponderous reviews by the official film critics. Who has the time! No one.

Those numbers obviously will largely determine the success or failure of Hollywood releases. That has become such a raw reality that The Wall Street Journal did an article on it. Here you can read it.

The impact of Rotten Tomatoes is yet another example of how irrelevant the company's own promotions are. We have become folks who resist marketing, at least the traditional kind. Instead we turn to what our fellow consumers are saying, along with the third-party experts.

It is Rotten Tomatoes which shapes the branding for a film like "Dark Horse," not the film company's in-house marketing staff and outside advertising firm.  

I popped for the ticket at the Loft Cinema to see "Dark Horse" because of the numbers on Rotten Tomatoes. I never paid attention to any ads for it. Or even how the Loft promoted it.

Therefore when planning a film, Hollywood and the indies must develop a sixth sense what consumers and the experts will love. That's the voodoo they have to conjure up.

Law firms of all sizes and online legal services could find themselves subject to a Rotten Tomatoes kind of aggregating force. Users of your services and detached experts in your niches will determine the numbers. Just like Hollywood, you might find it difficult or even impossible to over-ride those numbers. 

Robert Downey Jr., Unlike Katie Couric, Makes Cut for Jury Duty - Sort Of

In L.A., actor Robert Downey Jr. was  selected as an alternate juror in a $50,000 accident case. Vanity Fair reports that he made the cut because he was regarded as a "fair guy." For his service as alternate he earns $15 a day.

In New York, Katie Couric didn't make the cut the cut for jury duty. Two days into the process, she was knocked out of the box. Some speculate it was because she asked the lawyers too many questions.