Looking to leave big firm life? This week’s Job of the Week is the elusive mid-size firm opportunity. Join a firm that has grown during the recession, adding nearly 15 attorneys over the last year and a half. Great hands-on work. As always, the Job of the Week is brought to you by Lateral Link.

Position: Mid-Level Litigation Associate

Location: New York

Description: Mid-size New York firm seeks mid-level litigation associate from classes 2003-2006. Top academics and professional credentials required, as well as an accounting/financial background or significant exposure defending accounting firms or banks.

For more information about this position, please view Position #5982 on Lateral Link; current Members may can contact their personal search consultant for this or other litigation opportunities in the New York area. Membership in Lateral Link is by application only and you can apply at www.laterallink.com.

Earlier: Prior Jobs of the Week

Lateral Link – United States – New York – Business – Law

Cornell may be considered the Lady Gaga of law schools, but the school is choosing to identify itself with a different celebrity.

Cornell Law School’s website has a rotating series of promotional items, including a video of current students talking about the “geniuses” there, a link to a WSJ Law Blog post entitled “The Dream of Every Recent College Grad: To Go To Cornell Law School,” and a video of students talking about why they chose the school. And then there’s this:

That would be über tool Andy Bernard of The Office. If you click on the link to “Read More,” it takes you to an Entertonement page with some of the fictional character’s greatest Cornell lines, such as:

Creed: It’s pronounced “Colonel,” it’s the highest rank in the military.
Andy: It’s pronounced “Cornell,” it’s the highest rank in the Ivy League!

Just because your school attains pop culture status doesn’t mean it’s a good thing…

A running joke in The Office is that Andy Bernard, played by Ed Helms, went to Cornell and that he’s smug about it. It doesn’t exactly cast Cornell in the most positive light. But, apparently, the Law School is pleased that this has helped raised the school’s profile, even if it simultaneously endorses negative stereotypes about its alumni.

One Cornell law student is not happy about his school endorsing the affiliation:

1. He’s a fictional character

2. The fact that he went to Cornell is the whole joke.

3. He went to Cornell undergrad, not the law school.

4. Is this some survey that applicants took?

5. If you click the link it takes you to a weird website.

6. “Andy Bernard of Scranton (from NBC’s the Office)” Who wrote that abysmal sentence?

7. If this is how Cornell attracts applicants, it explains a lot about the types of people you meet in Ithaca.

We’re not sure whether Cornell Law School actually surveyed this year’s record number of applicants about who influenced their decision to apply.

But we can do our own survey. Is affiliating itself with Andy Bernard a good idea for Cornell Law School?

Cornell Law School Applications Increase By Record 52 Percent [Cornell Daily Sun]
The Dream of Every Recent College Grad: To Go to Cornell Law [WSJ Law Blog]

Earlier: Is Cornell the Lady Gaga of Law Schools? (Plus: celebrity comparisons for other law schools.)

Law School – Cornell Law School – Law – United States – Education

We often get excited about the Job of the Week, but this one is particularly delicious. If we were junior litigators, we’d do 100 trips up and down the Santa Monica stairs just to apply to this spot (which is convenient, since they are nearby).

A top-notch boutique firm, overlooking the ocean, with no billable hours and a compensation package that could be two to three times market…. What’s the catch? You have to have graduated from the top of your class at a top 10 law school. This position is a Lateral Link exclusive, so if you are interested in being considered for it, contact the good folks over at Lateral Link.

Position: IP Litigation Associate

Location: Santa Monica, CA

Description: An IP litigation boutique seeks an attorney with 1 to 3 years of experience. The successful candidate would be expected to quickly develop the skill and experience needed to run his or her own cases, draft and argue key motions, take depositions, manage client relationships, handle settlement negotiations, and participate in arbitration and trial.

Compensation will depend in part on experience level but will be market-competitive and consist of a base salary and firm-revenue-based bonus. There is no cap on the upside. Compensation may surpass market rates by a multiple of 2-3 times, depending on firm revenues. A clerkship bonus is also available.

Requirements and a link to the full listing, after the jump.

Requirements: No minimum experience is required. However, candidates with more than three years of attorney experience are not preferred for this position. No particular educational (i.e., technical) background is required. But the following are essential: top performance at a top ten law school, efficiency (we don’t bill hours and neither will you), a strong interest in patent litigation and trial work, and a visceral drive to produce top-quality work and demonstrate excellence in everything from the smallest to the most important tasks.

For more information about this position, please view Position #5948 on Lateral Link (or current Members may can contact their personal search consultant). Membership in Lateral Link is by application only and you can apply at www.laterallink.com.

Earlier: Prior Jobs of the Week

Law – Employment – Business – Lateral Link – Services

Associated Press Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier wrote Saturday about the Conservative Political Action Conference. He excoriated Mitt Romney for a vast number of distortions at his speech there. But, as is the common practice of so many in the field of journalism, where I labored for three decades, he had to add some “balance” at the end:

In these hyper-partisan times, it’s rarely good enough to respond to an unfair attack with a factual argument. Fire is fought with more high heat. And so it was this week, when liberal bloggers reacted to the CPAC distortions with false attacks of their own. On the Daily Kos Web site, one blogger noted the standing ovation given to “the self-confessed war criminal Dick Cheney.”

Whatever one might think of Cheney’s interrogation policies, the former vice president has never been charged with a war crime, much less confessed to one.

No matter. The same blogger criticized anti-liberal protests at CPAC, adding with a rare burst of evenhandedness: “Some of what went on was the same kind of silliness partisans of all stripes engage in.”

Forget for the moment that Mr. Fournier confuses anonymous with pseudonymous. That rarely evenhanded blogger was me. Anybody with 30 extra seconds of research time can discover my real name by clicking on the About link at Daily Kos. But I know full well how deadlines as well as preset narratives can get in the way of digging a little deeper.

In his haste to get his piece into print, Fournier seems to have missed the link included in the piece where I wrote the truth about Dick Cheney. The link to Jonathan Karl’s interview with Cheney at ABC News, in which the former Vice President declared:

CHENEY: I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques that…

KARL: And you opposed the administration’s actions of doing away with waterboarding?

CHENEY: Yes.

As Andrew Sullivan wrote:

There is not a court in the United States or in the world that does not consider waterboarding torture. The Red Cross certainly does, and it’s the governing body in international law. It is certainly torture according to the UN Convention on Torture and the Geneva Conventions. The British government, America’s closest Western ally, certainly believes it is torture. No legal authority of any type in the US or the world has ever doubted that waterboarding is torture. …

These are not my opinions and they are not hyperbole. They are legal facts. Either this country is governed by the rule of law or it isn’t. Cheney’s clear admission of his central role in authorizing waterboarding and the clear evidence that such waterboarding did indeed take place means that prosecution must proceed.

digby points out:

Cheney can say that he doesn’t believe that waterboarding should be a war crime but that doesn’t mean it isn’t one. And every Justice Department coming along behind him can cover up for his war crime by failing to charge him with it, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t confess to signing off on waterboarding on national TV last week-end — which, again, is a war crime. Therefore, Dick Cheney confessed to a war crime and just because our political system is too weak to prosecute him for it doesn’t mean it’s a lie to point that out.

Mr. Fournier argues that it’s the fault of lies from the likes of Mitt Romney and me that Americans are disengaged from politics, so cynical that they stop voting and don’t get involved even in their own communities. “These are consequences of cutting corners in the public square,” says he.

What exactly are those consequences? It doesn’t cost research-challenged journalists their jobs. And it obviously doesn’t affect those who cut corners on the rule of law, since John Yoo and Jay Bybee still have their law licenses and Dick Cheney gets standing ovations from those who boo the foes of torture.

By Carl Man crashes plane into IRS office in Austin, Texas.To periphrase Sarah Failin’… “How’s that Galty Teabaggy thing working out for ya?” (link borked by hosting service — see update below):So I moved, only to find out that this is a place …

Emory English Professor Sally Wolff-King recently discovered a link between Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner and an antebellum journal that could provide scholars tremendous insight into Faulkner’s works.