Which firm recently found out that one of its partners was involved in a sexist email scandal, and is doing absolutely nothing about it?

21 May 2014 at 11:51 AM

Biglaw, Email Scandals, Gender, Partner Issues, Rudeness, Sexism, Sports, Women's Issues

Biglaw Partner Avoids Punishment For Participation In Lewd, Crude, Sexist Email Scandal

By Staci Zaretsky

‘Have spent all day fending Edna off my graphite shaft.’

We already knew that Biglaw firms aren’t exactly the most friendly places for women. We already knew that some male lawyers are still quite miffed that women invaded their good old boys’ clubs. What we didn’t know was that some Biglaw firms would go so far as to essentially sign off on their partners’ extremely sexist views.
Which firm recently found out that one of its partners was involved in a sexist email scandal, and is doing absolutely nothing about it?

The firm in question is DLA Piper, which may want to consider opening a DLA NO MA’AM outpost. Earlier this month, one of the firm’s sports law partners in the London office was caught exchanging incredibly lewd, crude, and sexist emails with one of his clients, Richard ­Scudamore of the U.K. Premier League.
The Sunday Mirror first covered the story on May 10, without naming the lawyer involved. A little more than one week later, that lawyer has been named thanks to reporters over at the Am Law Daily. Say hello to Nicholas West, whose DLA Piper bio has been completely wiped clean of his credentials.
Here’s one of West’s darling email exchanges with Scudamore, leaked by the Sunday Mirror:

Nicholas West

In one crude email exchange the lawyer bragged to ­Scudamore: “Have spent all day fending [Premier League planning and projects director Peta Bistany, aka “Edna”] off my graphite shaft. She is terribly relentless isn’t she?!”
The football chief and father of five who lives with his wife Catherine in a £1.8million home in Cirencester, Glos, replied: “Terribly! Must keep her off your shaft… graphite, sausage meat or flimsy sponge.” Yesterday a Premier League source said the pair claim to have been referring to golf clubs. The lawyer also told Scudamore to “save the cash in case you find some gash”.

DLA Piper launched an inquisition against West after catching wind of his involvement in this extravaganza of crude comments, but ultimately decided to do nothing. Here’s more information from Am Law Daily:

A DLA spokesman told [said] that while the firm had determined that West’s actions represented “a failure to meet the high professional standards in which we take pride,” no further action will be taken.
“We have accepted Mr. West’s assurances that these emails are not reflective of his beliefs and values and that there will be no recurrence of this behavior,” the firm said in a statement.
West released a statement of his own in which he “sincerely apologize[d]” for his actions and admitted that he had “let myself, my firm and its clients down.”
“I have an obligation to uphold the highest professional standards and I give my assurance that this will be the case going forward,” he added.

Here’s what seems to be a more accurate translation of West’s statement: “I let myself, my firm, and its clients down by getting caught. I have an obligation to uphold the highest professional standards, and because I am a lad with true honor, I give my assurance that this will be the case going forward because I won’t be so daft as to put how I really feel down in writing ever again. This is so f’ckn easy! Go United!”
It’s good to know one of the top law firms on the planet doesn’t want to discipline its partners for engaging in sexist behavior — but then again, perhaps DLA Piper feels that Nicholas West’s own embarrassment is good enough. Either way, this can’t be good for public (or pubic, amirite Nick?!) relations.
DLA Clears Partner Caught Up in Sexist Email Furor [Am Law Daily]
England football supremo Richard Scudamore made sexist slurs in a string of emails to soccer pals
[Sunday Mirror]

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Biglaw, Email, Email Scandals, Emails, Gender, Nicholas West, Partner Issues, Partners With Issues, Peta Bistany, Rudeness, Sexism, Sports, Sports Law, Women's Issues

31 Dec 2013 at 3:37 PM

Admin, Announcements, Asians, Bar Exams, Biglaw, Bonuses, Celebrities, Divorce Train Wrecks, Law Schools, Magic Circle, Money, Partner Issues, Pro Se Litigants, Racism, Rankings, Reality TV, Sexism, Small Law Firms, U.S. News, Videos, Women's Issues, YouTube

Above the Law’s Top 10 Most Popular Posts of 2013

By David Lat

As 2013 draws to a close, let’s look back at the 10 biggest stories in the legal profession over the past year. This is an annual tradition here at Above the Law, which we’ve done in 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009. We’ll fire up the old Google Analytics machine to get data on our most popular posts, based on pageviews, and share the results with you.
Before turning to specific stories, let’s look at the top general discussion topics here at ATL. For 2013, our most trafficked category page was Biglaw, which bumped Law Schools out of the top spot — a spot that Law Schools held from 2010 through 2012. Now that the word is out about the perils of getting a law degree, leading to plummeting applications, perhaps it’s time to move on from the “don’t go to law school” narrative.
After Biglaw and Law Schools, our third most-popular category page was, as usual, Bonuses. This wasn’t a terribly exciting year for bonuses — there were no spring bonuses, and Cravath and its many followers paid out the same bonuses as last year — but people still want to know the score.
Our fourth most-popular category page was small law firms. Small firms, including boutiques, are an area of increasing focus and readership for us — and also where many of the job opportunities are these days.
Moving on from the topic pages, what were the 10 most popular individual posts at Above the Law in 2013?

Here are our top 10 stories for 2013, in ascending order of popularity, measured in pageviews.^[1] Click on the title of each post to be taken to the original story.
10. The Racist Law Firm Ad Update — The Maligned Law Firm Speaks: After a racist law firm advertisement went viral, we played a role in clarifying the situation. We published a statement from the law firm in question — McCutcheon & Hamner, a small personal-injury firm in Alabama — denying its involvement in producing the highly offensive YouTube clip.
9. Did Lamar Odom Cheat On Khloe Kardashian With A Lawyer? Reality TV star Khloe Kardashian recently declared that she’s “excited for this year to be over” — just like her marriage to NBA player Lamar Odom, which ended in 2013. A contributing cause: Odom’s alleged affair with a gorgeous California lawyer, Polina Polonsky, who allegedly asked Odom to help her review client files. Oy!
8. Nationwide Layoff Watch: Major Cuts Come To Weil Gotshal: The Kardashian-Odom split wasn’t the only soap opera that generated headlines this past year. People tuned in for As The Weil Turns — upheaval at the high-powered law firm of Weil Gotshal, kicked off by large-scale layoffs in June. The following months witnessed a slew of partner defections, especially in Texas (although the firm maintains that this is strategic and intentional shrinkage). Can Weil stop the bleeding in 2014?
7. Breaking: Cravath Announces Year-End Bonuses; Let the 2013 Bonus Season Begin! The bonus announcement of Cravath, the extremely prestigious and profitable law firm that sets the market for Biglaw bonuses, always lands in the top 10 stories (last year it was #5). This year, Elie Mystal and I argued over whether the bonus glass was half-empty or half-full.
6. Which State Has the Most Difficult Bar Exam? Professor Robert Anderson of Pepperdine Law developed a methodology for ranking bar exams by toughness. Which state’s test took the top spot? Hint: it wasn’t New York (which didn’t even make the top 10).
5. Lawyer: Apple Should Protect Me From My Porn Addiction: Blocking web users from accessing porn: there’s an app for that? Well, if not, there should be — or so claims lawyer Chris Sevier, who filed a pro se lawsuit that, as Joe Patrice put it, “seeks damages and injunctive relief against Apple for making devices that can display porn, or as the rest of us call it, the Internet.” More recently, Sevier sued President Obama for alleged involvement in the Duck Dynasty debacle.
4. The 2014 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Lawyers love rankings — and U.S. News’s closely watched law school rankings are the biggest game in town. As law schools fight over a shrinking pool of law students, a law school’s position on the prestige totem pole is more important than ever.
3. Biglaw Memo From Top Firm Advises That Women ‘Don’t Giggle,’ Don’t ‘Show Cleavage’: Clifford Chance, a member of the elite Magic Circle, is one of the world’s top law firms — not just in profits and prestige, but also in generating juicy memos. Last year, its famous Law Firm Mommy Memo took the #3 spot; this year, the firm holds on to third place, with a controversial collection of “Presentation Tips For Women” that Staci Zaretsky described as “one of the most sexist Biglaw memos we’ve ever seen.”
2. The ATL Top 50 Law School Rankings (2013): The U.S. News law school rankings might be the biggest game in town (for now), but they aren’t the only one. In our inaugural law school rankings, we stripped out dubious factors like library size or money wasted spent per student to focus on what really matters: employment outcomes, i.e., jobs for graduates. Based on the great traffic and reader feedback we received, our rankings were a huge hit, and we’ll be doing them again in 2014.
1. A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter: The cease-and-desist response heard round the world, this rip-roaring rebuttal — a delicious combination of snark and substance — went viral. What could be more satisfying than watching a bullying lawyer get a taste of his own medicine? The letter kicked off a trend of awesome C&D responses — see, e.g., here and here.
We hope you enjoyed this look back at the 10 most popular stories of 2013. If you have a favorite Above the Law story from the past year that didn’t crack the top ten, please feel free to give it a mention in the comments.
And now for a brief programming note: Since Wednesday is the federal holiday for New Year’s Day, we won’t be publishing much (if at all) between now and Thursday, January 2. Happy New Year, and we’ll see you in 2014!
[1] For purposes of this listing, intended to serve as a look back at 2013′s biggest stories, we did not count posts published in 2012 that racked up major traffic in 2013 — e.g., Cam Girl Pleasures Herself In A Top Law School’s Library.
Earlier: Above the Law’s Top 10 Most Popular Posts of 2012
Above The Law’s Top 10 Most Popular Stories of 2011
Above The Law’s Top 10 Most Popular Stories of 2010
Above The Law’s Top 10 Most Popular Stories of 2009

Author Margaret Morganroth Gullette:

"We need an expanded civil-rights movement with an anti-ageist edge, to combat all the exhibitions of alienation and disgust and to entirely renovate our culture's funny bones."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/margaret-m-gullette/isnt-euthanasia-funny-the_b_3838273.html 

Isn't Euthanasia Funny! The New Yorker Seems to Think So

Posted: 08/29/2013 6:01 pm 
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Comedy; Age; Culture; Gender; Cultural Change; Ideology; Racism; Sexism; Ageism; Age Politics; "The Walrus And The Carpenter"; Trollope's Fixed Period; Orwell; Swift; Oedipal Complex; Hate Speech;, Media News 

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In " The Tribal Rite of the Strombergs," Jeremy has to kill his father because for the first time ever his father has lost at Scrabble. He himself will club his father to death. Several of the elders ask to be offed. "Eat my weakened body," his father says. "For I have become too old to live." He undresses and prostrates himself before his son, his "naked, flabby arms stretched out in supplication." The entire arc of the father consists of humiliations, gleefully rendered. 

This is written by a young man, so maybe it is some Oedipal twitch. But since killing all the failing older people one after another is the joke, the victims here are women as well as men. They fed his aunt to a horse. His mother shoved his grandmother onto an ice floe when she forgot the name of a TV actor. "Bathe me in sacred oils," she commanded. "And cast me out to burden you no more." Equal-opportunity ageism. 

The reluctance of the younger adult children -- "glossy" eyes, scanty protests, seems (ahem) insincere. Lewis Carroll nailed this, in the tears of the Walrus as he was eating the little trusting plump oysters in Alice in Wonderland. 

"I weep for you," the Walrus said: 

"I deeply sympathize."

With sobs and tears he sorted out

Those of the largest size,

Holding his pocket-handkerchief

Before his streaming eyes.

Satire is a difficult genre, as Swift and Orwell knew. "It would have been more satirical if the son insisted his father give up his life after losing at Scrabble. This is closer to what happens every day," Dorothy Miller, a writer and independent scholar wrote to me. "An 'older' person forgets her glasses, a name, etc. and several people view this lapse as a symptom of aging, which can lead to mistrust or disregard for the person since she/he is 'losing it.'" In the academy as elsewhere, younger people are told that they can get jobs only if midlife people leave them. But that's okay because the midlife scholars are deadwood. (Jeremy's father's latest book "wasn't his most original." It was a "retread.") Perhaps Jeremy should have surreptitiously checked his father's will before he pointed out that Dad could have used his "Z" to win the game. Who are the author's satirical targets except the histrionic elders who are willing to die prematurely? In fact, no study shows that the long-lived wish to have died younger. 

"The Tribal Rite of the Strombergs" also fails as satire because it is displays only one family's cruelty, when anthropology demonstrates that it is entire cultural systems that generate bias. Anthony Trollope set his dystopian novel, The Fixed Period, where everyone will have to die by the age of 68, in a new country called Brittanula. More grimly up to date, the justifications the New Yorker piece gives for suicide or "euthanasia" are all versions of real charges made now, repeatedly, against midlife and older people. If you don't know all these petty, erroneous, or mean-spirited charges, this piece will teach them to you, one after another. Aunt Susan (fed to horse) fails a young person's request for help because she has lost all contacts at Bravo: She's too old to date anyone there anymore. Jeremy's uncle is shamed and dies because he uses an unfashionable server (AOL). ("Mort's wrinkled face flushed with shame.") There's a lot to cringe at here. 

I winced often while reading the New Yorker piece, not because I identify with these caricatural parents, but because I know that ageist stereotypes do a lot of harm to younger people too. The humor lets the guilt pass for reading about besting and killing elders and laughing, or thinking with pleasure about your future inheritance, or feeling disgust when you see a bald head or condescend to a 50-year-old woman who can't wield any kind of workplace power. People are shamed for being slow adopters only if they are old. If they are young Luddites, they are treated as skeptical show-me types. Older people -- especially women -- can be ashamed for having wrinkles or not dating. This social pressure has been a theme of feminism for decades.

Our current age culture indeed deserves scorn. "The Tribal Rite of the Strombergs" appears in 2013 against an American backdrop of offensiveness, ignorance, and careless disregard. The right wing claims that older people are a "burden" through the deficit, Social Security, and their pensions. Women live longer than men; we are poorer and get even poorer the longer we live, so we need more assistance and are thus likely to be used as butts. Some with cognitive impairment and a chronic condition are permitted to die. Older people are being invited to refuse medical treatment so as not to "burden" Medicare. Shame may cause people to refuse medical care they might otherwise want. (The author may have believed his allusion to the Eskimo on the ice floe was a satire on the "duty-to-die" crowd. That was one of the few times I could see our culture through the joke and felt he could name the values he intended to satirize.) 

The New Yorker likes to shock, but usually in a PC way -- (on the cover, Michelle and Barack do a fist bump, a rabbi and a black woman kiss). So why does a piece like this get accepted? "Shouts and Murmurs" makes some space for the Saturday Night Live vibe, often egregiously incorrect. "Cougar" jokes are the sexist-ageist equivalent of "little moron" or "Polish" jokes, updated to the tastes of men fantasizing they may stay young forever. The author of "The Tribal Rite of the Strombergs," Simon Rich, writes for SNL. For many people, ageism (a term invented in 1969 by Dr. Robert Butler) still does not exist in conscience in clearly focused ways. Stephen Katz, a historian of gerontology and a professor at Trent University, suggests that the larger problem of unconsciousness may be generational. Rich, "considered to be one of America's best but youngest comic writers, represents a generation so distanced from aging and old age, that the old are sources of 'material' to lampoon." Yet simultaneously, undergraduates, male and female, are now studying ageism along with other intersectional prejudices, and graduate students and junior faculty are writing the next books that will challenge the Otherness of old people. 

Some Humor Gets Lame
The first people to attack racist, homophobic, sexist "humor" etc., were time and again seen as missing the point. Even 50 years on, it is necessary to explain what's not funny. Ellen Goodman -- still distributing her clever and well-researched "Equal Rites Awards" -- singled out ad humor for sexism. Her "Mad Men Award" went to two senior execs "for their ad bragging about Figo's trunk space. They showed women bound and gagged and stuffed into it. Ho. Ho. Ho. We send them a pickup truck full of renovated funny bones."

A feminist gerontologist, Kate de Medeiros, comments, "If he were killing his father for any other reason than being old -- political beliefs, sexual identity, disability that is not related to older age -- there would be disgust and an outcry. I can't image having a humor section based on a woman being stoned because she didn't cover her face properly. The fact that this topic falls under the purview of a joke is really appalling."

Humor can sometimes help us to change, but it often reinforces cruel ideology. Sometimes the ideology is dying or contested, like racism. So an author can assert he is kicking it as it dies. But ageism is worsening, not dying; and there is scarcely anyone contesting "funny" hate speech. We need an expanded civil-rights movement with an anti-ageist edge, to combat all the exhibitions of alienation and disgust and to entirely renovate our culture's funny bones. 


Margaret Morganroth Gullette is the author of prize-winning books, including Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America (Eric Hoffer Book Award) and Declining to Decline ("best feminist book on American popular culture"). She is a Resident Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center, Brandeis and writes frequently for national and international audiences .

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