Law And More

New York Corruption: Making of a great musical (starring character named Preet Bharara)

"Corruption, corruption, green shoots of it throughout New York.  Preet Preeet has been a very busy guy." 

Those could be some of the lines from the greatest musical about New York.  As Christians believe, corruption is part of the human condition. Therefore the theme would capture the attention of the elite, the middle class, and even the homeless.  Everyone would want to take a peek at how public leaders have been allegedly been, oh horrors, self interested to the point of breaking the law. There is plenty of material for the playwrites.

THE NEW YORK OBSERVER reports that U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara predicts there will even be more corruption cases pursued then there have been.  Among the alleged miscreants has been New York state senator John Sampson.

I love corruption.  I was brought up on it in Jersey City, New Jersey when Mayor Hague politics still dominated.  Nothing got done directly.  If you wanted your street cleaned on a regular basis you had to implore the parish priest who knew someone who had a nephew working in City Hall.  Favors, money, but probably not sex were given in exchange.  Those were the good old days when things got done.  No one went to jail. 

Preet Bharara's Former Spokesperson Ellen Davis Now with Sard Verbinnen

Let's cut to the chase.   The public relations firm Sard Verbinnen has been representing SAC for about a decade.  SAC is headed by Steve Cohen who is being dragged in front of the grand jury by U.S. Attorney Preet Baharara.  Lawyers who had been English majors might describe the relationship between Baharara and Cohen as something out of the novel "Moby Dick."

Until recently Baharara's spokesperson has been Ellen Davis. Now, reports BLOOMBERG BUSINESS WEEK, Davis has joined Sard Verbinnen.  However, she will not be involved with any of the public relation firm's business involving SAC.

The worlds of law, media, and public relations should be buzzing right now about this newest development in the most compelling story about suspected insider trading since former pillar of the establishment Rajat Gupta was hauled into court. 

Rajat Gupta: Mirror for examining our own less interesting screwups

Sure, Rajat Gupta's appeal for a new trial is this week. So, he's back in the news.  THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE has a major feature which presents little new but which gets read.  The article doesn't get past the enigmatic fortress Gupta has build for himself and is able to remain behind a drawbridge that's drawn down and a moat stuffed with alligators. Maybe the media as well as us plain-vanilla gawkers will give up on trying to figure the guy out. 

Instead, we might shift perspectives and ask why his story continues to resonate.  My hunch is that he mirrors our universal tendency to screw up. Only he had the opportunity to do it on grander, more public scale than most of the rest of us.  His downfall, as the cliche goes, is Shakespearean. 

However, his seeming weaknesses are all too familiar.  For example, his hunger for more (he was only a millionaire longing to be a billionaire) made him vulnerable.  Machiavellian Galleon head Raj Rajaratnam moved right in on that. 

Between professional identities, after he left McKinsey, he seemed to get lost.  For us, that starts right after college and we often get stuck in adolescence.  Most of my crimes against myself and society came from that immaturity.

And, he seemed to over-value his education and intelligence  As we see with all the unemployed and underemployed lawyers, Ivy credentials and the gray matter are increasingly worthless in an economy which keeps changing.  Best-selling author Nassim Nicholas Taleb provides insight on exiting that black hole in "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder."

We need the Guptas because their reversals, even if temporary, provide the platform for doing autopsies on our own screwups.  

Caroline Kennedy: On jury in Manhattan Supreme Court for dealing crack trial

Jury experts can crunch and interpret the Big Data research on this one.  Will it help or hurt Nelson Chatman, accused of dealing crack, to have on his jury Caroline Kennedy?

Breitbart reports the Kennedy is sitting on that jury in the state supreme court in Manhattan.  What we know about this member of the Kennedy family is that she has a JD.  Her cousins have had a history of problems with illegal substances.  And, the family ideology tends to be liberal.

Jodi Arias: Is asking for death penalty tactic to be ruled too crazy to be put to death?

After guilty in the first degree was announced defendant Jodi Arias requested the death penalty. 

That's what sensationalist publication the NEW YORK POST reports. And that could just be the tactic she uses to save her life. Lawyers can prove that she's too crazy to be put to death by the state.  After all, she explains her desire to die as the wish not to stay in one place (prison) too long.  That doesn't sound sane since human beings are wired for survival.  And, hey, traditional prison life isn't the worst way to spend the rest of one's life. It sure beats the Cleveland House of Horrors where the three missing women had spent a decade.

What follows this verdict and penalty ruling could be a lot more interesting legally than the high-profile trial itself.

Amanda Berry, et al. - Do Americans expect too much from police?

The captivity of Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight ends.  But no one views it as a happy ending.  Likely all three will suffer emotionally for a long time.  Meanwhile, the fingers are being pointed at the Cleveland, Ohio police for not solving this missing-person mystery sooner. 

That attitude might be typically American - and relatively recent.  Here, at least in some communities, there are high expectations about what law enforcement can do.  In contrast, in South Africa the citizens are so pessimistic about the police that they are heavily armed.  That's what Mark Seal reports in the article on Oscar Pistorius in the current issue of VANITY FAIR (not online yet).  The defense for Pistorius contends that because of so much crime in South Africa and so little the police do, the athlete assumed a burglar was in the house and that's why he fired his gun, accidentally killing Reeva Steenkamp.

The Jersey City, New Jersey I grew up in during the 1950s created its own law and order, a system separate from the official one.  The police were to be avoided, not depended on.

Fall of the House of Howard Kurtz: Lessons for Legal Sector

In the end, it was media star Howard Kurtz' hyperactive professional style and lack of caring (including empathy) that did his career in, observes POLITICO. His game was unsustainable. There are lessons here for the legal sector in the fall of the house of Howard Kurtz.

The media personality's most recent high-profile error was failing to read down to the eighth paragraph of the SI Jason Collins' coming out article.  Had he done that he wouldn't have tried for a cheap shot at Collins (gotcha journalism) by contending, wrongly, that he did not reveal his long-term relationship, including an engagement, with a woman.  His attack style was devoid of human feeling.  His game seemed amoral.

For those in the legal sector who suffer in the ways that Abovethelaw.com captures daily the Kurtz methodology seems brutally familiar.  It became unsustainable as likely will much of how BigLaw operates.  For instance, hyperactive growth resulted in the bankruptcy of Dewey LeBoeuf and could have triggered the alleged overbilling at DLA Piper.  Bad treatment of human beings seems embedded in the organizational cultures.  If Charles Dickens were around he would probably profile one of those and have a happy "Christmas Carol" ending in which the Managing Partner tells everyone to go early Christmas eve, be with their families, and shut off their smartphones.  

The human reality is that human beings get mad, they get even, and then they gloat about helping do in a person or an institution.  The odds are it will be the human beings, not the slow growth in revenues, which will blow up the legal sector.

 

Murder: Takes more than plain-vanilla rage

Everywhere, we bear witness to rage.  However, in most situations we don't have to worry that the person losing it will bomb a sports event or massacre school children. 

That's what forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner says in Lisa Miller's article in NEW YORK Magazine on angry young men.  Those mass murderers harbor hate in their heart for everyone, notes Welner.  Probably none of us knows that kind of person.

Usually we encounter the simply rageful ones who primarily hurt themselves.  They shoot their mouths off and lose jobs and relationships.  They may strike a loved one and wind up in jail and a pariah in society.  They get boozed up, get in their cars, and pay thousands for a lawyer to resolve the DUI.  But the world is not significantly disrupted.

Hate is hard to conjure up.  Maybe that's because of mirror neurons or our ability to get on the wavelength of others.  Our common humanity triggers feelings of compassion.

Cupcake Bubble Bursts: Just as did legal sector

There was the $4.50 cupcake and shares of Crumbs Bake Shop were selling for $13. That was then. 

Now, reports THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, the nation is going through cupcake fatigue and shares of Crumbs have plummeted to about $1.70.  No longer are even lower-priced cupcakes flying off the shelves in bakeries across the nation as they had been. 

So, THE JOURNAL declares that the cupcake bubble has burst.  No, it isn't a sustainable trend like premium-priced microwaveable popcorn or paying a quarter of a million dollars for an Ivy League undergraduate degree.

A resourceful lawyer or law student could do a study on how the bursting of the cupcake bubble compares and contrasts with the bursting of the legal sector bubble. 

We Are Not Safe: Government powers-that-be can't tell us differently

The Boston Marathon "massacre" happened, just as 9/11 happened.

And I can project forward and see myself riding a train to Washington D.C. on business and being blown up, my all-important smartphone and laptop thrown on the tracks.  Maybe that's how it will end for Baby Boomer me and I don't have to invest so much energy lobbying for assisted-suicide.  Perhaps that's less to fear that spending the last years of my life in a nursing home, in a diaper, in and out of reality.

One thing we know and the skilled communications experts representing government figures can't tell us otherwise is this: We are not safe.  We will never be safe.  And we better get used to the idea that if we are in public space, we are open to been blown into a million bits.  There is no Superman-type magic which can intervene and make that not a possibility.