Big Pork demands that Neighborhoodies cease and desist selling this hot, tasty shirt at once, lest the public become confused about which animal does, in fact, constitute an appropriately pale substitute for chicken.

Mind you: this is the same guy who breathlessly reminded the American legal system that Eric Dane is on the Emmy Award-winning Grey's Anatomy in his lawsuit against us for posting a tape of Eric Dane trying to spice up his marriage in a threesome with his now-preggers wife and a madam. Heh. It was awesome. It's here. You should watch it.

But now Marty's ready to make a mess out of more people's lives by dragging them through prolonged legal engagements that aggressively create rifts between people with a common purpose: in ours and McSteamy's, to bring stories to The People. In the case of Kate and Jon Gosselin: for the children. Marty Singer is about to fuck up some children.

But it takes three to tango (as we learned). This wouldn't be so awful without the help of Singer's awful client (the child-exploiting Kate Gosselin) and their awful defendant (the sleazy walking Ed Hardy lifestyle line that is Jon Gosselin). These people are awful! Don't they have eight kids somewhere wondering why their parents are being such complete meanies/absentee, hyper-aggressive, moneygrubbing scary breeding units? Because they are. Basically, it goes like this: Jon Gosselin went on Larry King to tell Kate to put the divorce proceedings on hold. He made TLC shut down the production of the show. And sometime before that, took all but $1,000 out of a shared money market account of Kate and Jon's.

Now Kate wants the money back in there. Furthermore, Singer is alleging that Jon's lawyer is a crook.

Singer says Heller has done this before, citing a New York Supreme Court decision which says Heller directed one of his clients in a divorce to "withdraw everything that's in the bank" so the money could be used to pay his fee. And then there's this ... Singer blasts Heller, noting that the New York Supreme Court "addressed charges that you violated 'thirty-eight counts alleging multiple violations of the disciplinary rules,' and charges that you 'had engaged in a pattern of misconduct involving misrepresentations, deceit, abusive treatment of clients, fee gouging, neglect and willful failure to return unearned retainers to his clients' in matters which involved your 'mishandling of the matters of twelve separate clients.'"

Damn. Talk about being able to sniff out your own kind (Ahmadinejad). Lawyers! God bless 'em. Good to know Singer's keeping busy with a client list full of America's most savory famous types. I gotta admit, though, I am curious to hear what Jon intended on doing with the scrilla (besides paying lawyers). Maybe he was broke. Maybe Jon just wanted the money to get in on the next McSteamy key party? Maybe he's gonna invest in web startups, har har! Who knows. Either way, Singer wants a piece of it. Somewhere, eight children hate him.

The estate of Edward L. Masry, the lawyer Erin Brockovitch clerked for and played Girl Friday to (resulting in the largest single class settlement in American history, against Pacific Gas & Electric), sued Masry's former place of employment into Chapter 11.

Masry & Vititoe—sans Masry, who died in 2005—claim to have spent over $3M defending themselves against charges from Masry's estate, stemming from a decision that awarded control of a trust to Masry's kids, away from his wife. The trust held interests in the firm. Also, Masry kinda promised some people some money that they never got, and now that he's dead, they're coming out of the woodwork.

"Not only did a number of litigants come forward alleging that Mr. Masry had promised them certain assets and cash from the firm, additionally, his own estate and heirs instituted claims which have caused the firm to spend its resources, in time and staff, defending such claims," the firm said in an Aug. 24 motion seeking cash collateral in order to keep operating.

In the saga of Erin Brockovitch, the namesake single mother of three starts uncovering facts about Pacific Gas & Electric. She sniffs around with Masry (played by Albert Finney) some more, finds out PG&E are poisoning people. Two acts and a romantic subplot with Aaron Eckhart later, Masry & Vititoe win said $333M settlement. Since the 1996 PG&E suit, Vititoe's done pretty well in the field of "stick it to the man" law, but the cost of their suits weighed them down. Right now, they're claiming monthly operating expenses of $670,000. $8M in yearly overhead might hurt if there's none of the Man's Money coming through the pipeline. Council for the firm claim that they're gonna be fine, and that Vititoe's clients won't be affected. That's probably not what their creditors think.

Lesson: lawsuits beget lawsuits?

Brockovitch, meanwhile: doing fine. She opened up her own consulting shop to help investigate cases like the PG&E one that made her famous. She's also got a sass-tastic website.

Julia Roberts is filming Eat, Pray, Love, Albert Finney was great in Big Fish, and Brockovitch director Steven Soderbergh's going crazy filming porn stars and hanging out with Benicio Del Toro in the Bolivian jungle.

Happy endings, for all, we guess, except for Masry's namesake firm. Maybe if they just went balls out in shilling the fact that they were, you know, the legal eagles from Erin Brockovitch, they'd be doing better. Or they could call in a favor to Soderbergh? Either way, this commercial, wow. Clearly, none of that $8M yearly overhead went to making it. Shit, the estate of Uta Hagen could sue them for grievances against the dramatic arts, while everyone else is at it.

Here is the situation as it now stands: Ted Martinez has been walking around New York for a year with a missing tooth because his unemployment checks aren't enough to cover getting a replacement. Students who took out a "ferocious amount of debt" in order to attend fancy law schools and go work as well paid corporate law drones for life are now questioning whether that was the right decision, since they can't get jobs. The entrepreneurial fella who wants to put an upscale bar on LA's skid row to take advantage of the entertaining "people going back and forth" outside is being forced to rethink, because "residents" would rather have a "grocery store" or something. And food prices are going up.

All of which would be only mildly alarming in a fiscally responsible nation like, say, Botswana. But here in the USA we really don't need these distractions. We'll have $9 trillion in debt over the next decade. That is, like, a serious shitload of debt. Too much debt for someone like you, a product of the American educational system, to wrap your warped mind around. Allow us to put this into perspective for you:

9 trillion seconds ago was 285,000 years ago—before the Republican Party was even created.
A stack of $1,000 bills to equal $9 trillion would be 611 miles high—higher than the Eiffel Tower.
The US government collected almost exactly $1 trillion in income taxes in 2006. In order for the government to collect enough to pay off $9 trillion, your tax rate would have to rise by 900%—even higher than the current middle class tax rate.
In order to have the league's payroll add up to $9 trillion, every single player on every single Major League Baseball team would have to be paid nearly $8 billion per year—even more than Derek Jeter is paid.

Think about it.

[Pic of a mere $1 trillion via]

Above the Law describes our examination of whether Wurtzel's apparent claim to be a lawyer in an interview last week violates New York law as "parsing," and that's the best word for it: We never thought the cops were going to treat her like some common Harvard professor and haul her off to jail. But we love the law almost as much as Elizabeth, so we looked it up, and it sure seemed to us like you can't go around calling yourself a lawyer if you haven't passed the bar.

One of the experts Above the Law asked flatly disagreed, saying Wurtzel's "casual reference" to herself as a lawyer was kosher. Another, NYU Law School's Stephen Gillers, was willing to entertain our complaint:

Wurtzel's statement is sloppy. It is subject to two interpretations. If she is not admitted anywhere, the kinder interpretation would be that she is happy being useful "like a lot of young lawyers [are, even though I am not one]." But I think the more natural reading is that she is happy being useful "like a lot of [other] young lawyers."

Nonetheless, giving the wrong impression in a casual remark is not going to get Wurtzel into trouble when she applies to the bar (assuming she hasn't already done so and eventually does).

And everyone knows that sloppy attorneys are the best kind! We're curious what Gillers would make of this description Wurtzel offered of her professional status, in Elle magazine in May (and flagged by commenter PICKLES_IN_MY_TUNA):

These days, I am a stable adult professional—a practicing attorney, capable of common sense—but I still know how to live life on the edge.

That doesn't sound sloppy so much as a direct claim to being a practicing attorney. Anyway, the bar exam is tomorrow, and we second Above the Law's wish of the best of luck to Ms. Wurtzel. We still harbor the occasional desire to throw it all away and go to law school, and we've essentially guaranteed, karmically speaking, that we're going to fail the bar many times over.

Update: We asked Wurtzel for her comment. Taking a break from studying from the bar exam, she emails:

This is my understanding: if you graduate from law school/receive a JD, you are a lawyer; if you are licensed, you are an attorney. That's what I've always been told.

Not too many nice things to say about the Bar Exam. Every year, some very gifted people fail it (Hillary Clinton, Kathleen Sullivan of Stanford Law School)—and every year, a lot of real idiots pass it. Hard to know what to make of that ;-)

Wurtzel granted an interview recently to Bitter Lawyer, talking about how much she loves the law and how awesome it is being a lawyer and working at David Boies' law firm. Except she's not a lawyer! At least not in New York, where it seems to be unlawful to claim to be a lawyer if you haven't passed the bar exam. Which she hasn't.

From the interview:

Did you want to practice law?

I thought I might want to teach. Yale Law is kind of like a mini Ph.D in a lot of ways, so I thought maybe I'd become a professor.

That was close. Wurtzel didn't quite claim to be practicing law in answering that question—she just let it slide. But then:

What's been your best professional moment since graduating law school?

I don't know if there is one that I can really point to. I'm working on the Prop 8 case right now, and I'm very proud of that. But mostly, like a lot of young lawyers, I think I'm just happy when I do something that's valuable to somebody.

Whoops! It sounds to us like you just called yourself a lawyer, Elizabeth. Let's have a look at the law, shall we?

Part 520.1 of the Rules for the Court of Appeals for New York says, "A person shall be admitted to practice law in the courts of the State of New York only by an order of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court upon compliance with these rules." Among those rules is this, Part 520.7, which says "no applicant for admission to practice in this State shall be admitted unless the New York State Board of Law Examiners shall have certified to the Appellate Division of the department...that the applicant (1) has passed the written bar examination prescribed in section 520.8."

OK! So that means that you haven't been admitted to practice law in the state of New York unless you've passed the bar. (There are other ways for career attorneys to get admitted that don't involve passing the bar, but they don't apply to you, Elizabeth.) So, have you passed the bar? There have been two New York bar examinations since you graduated last summer: One in July of 2008 and one in February 2009. Your name doesn't appear in the published list of those who passed either test. Nor does it appear in the New York Bar Association's list of members.

So: You haven't passed the New York bar exam. Which means you haven't been admitted to practice law in the state of New York. And according to Section 478 of New York Judiciary Law, that means you can't claim to be a lawyer:

It shall be unlawful for any natural person to practice or appear as an attorney-at-law or as an attorney and counselor-at-law for a person other than himself in a court of record in this state...or to hold himself out to the public as being entitled to practice law as aforesaid, or in any other manner, or to...assume, use, or advertise the title of lawyer, or attorney or...equivalent terms in any language, in such manner as to convey the impression that he is a legal practitioner of law...without having first been duly and regularly licensed and admitted to practice law in the courts of record of this state, and without having taken the constitutional oath.

We're no lawyers, but that sounds like you shouldn't go around giving interviews about how awesome it is being a lawyer until you pass the bar. The next one is next week. Good luck!

You just wonder, sometimes: Hillary Clinton seems like a reasonable and smart person who is trying very hard to be good at her job, so is she embarrassed by her continued association with amoral, universally reviled hacks like Lanny Davis and Mark Penn, men who did more than almost anyone else to make her presidential campaign into a sad, unfunny joke?

So, yes. Lanny Davis. He does some "crisis management" work, which is a thing we can't even call a "necessary evil" because honestly it is not necessary, just inevitable. He is a senior adviser for the crazy-right-wing Israel Project and a lobbyist for the government of Pakistan. He is everything bad about Democrats, dating back to his days as a young Yale graduate working for Ed Muskie, to his support of Joe Lieberman against that terrible insurgent real Democrat, to, finally, his insisting that Hillary Clinton would surely win the election once she got 200% of the Mighigan and Florida delegates counted, which she should get, because Barack Obama is a cheater, and he's mean.

He is just bad, for the country. And not just our country! He is now being bad for Honduras, where the military recently seized power, on behalf of the business elite, who were worried that some of their wealth might be redistributed to that nation's poor. (Yes, yes, the President wanted to have a Constitutional Referendum about term limits which means he was basically morphing into CASTRO before their eyes.) So these business leaders, who just installed their own, hand-picked president hired a powerful lobbyist with ties to the Secretary of State, by the name of Lanny Davis!

"This is about the rule of law. That is the only message we have," Davis said, adding that Zelaya "was acting unconstitutionally and illegally" when he pushed for a voter referendum to change presidential term limits.

Yes, the military frog-marching the democratically elected President to a waiting plane, seizing power, and arresting journalists, all on behalf of the moneyed class, is a very good way to go about this "rule of law" stuff.

Whelan, a serious and respected legal mind, has been on a tear against Sonia Sotomayor, because at the end of the day, he is just a partisan hack who blogs for the National Review.

So this blogger named publius approvingly linked to some other blogs that criticized a dumb argument Whelan made, and then publius called Whelan "a smart guy with outstanding legal credentials" who "enjoys playing the role of know-nothing demagogue." Beyond the pale!

Whelan's thoughtful response to that unconscionably vile rhetoric was to respond with a post outing publius as John Blevins from the South Texas College of Law. Publius had been blogging for years under the pseudonym in order to protect his job (he is pre-tenure) and so as not to upset the more conservative members of his family, but when you are mean to Ed Whelan, you pay the price, Blevins.

Because Whelan is a very mature and reasonable person, as his emails to Blevins demonstrate.

Three cheers for Ed Whelan, Protector of the People's Right to know! (Specifically, the people's right to know the identities of random liberal bloggers, not so much the people's right to know what he, as a member of Bush's OLC, advised the president regarding the legality of torture.)

Uh oh, trendy hipster movie alert. Twee darlings Ryan Gosling (Lars and the Painfully Whimsical Script) and Michelle Williams (Dudes Doin' It, Wyoming Edition) are set to costar as wistful lovers in a movie melancholicly titled Blue Valentine. Imagine the twinkly music and the shaky-cam shots of mournful streets blurring into focus and, perhaps, the voiceover! [Variety]

Ohh dear. Are you sitting down? Can I get you some tea? Here, have one of these cookies. OK, hon, I have some bad news. You know how much you wanted David E. Kelley to have a new show about lawyers on TV? And remember how it looked like his Kristin Chenoweth show, delightfully titled Legally Mad, was going to be that show? Well, love, unfortunately... Oh, this is so hard. Wait, what's that? The idea of another one of Kelley's aggressively quirky horrid lawyer shows on the air makes you want to burn the Earth down? Oh, well. Me too. So, fuck it. It didn't get picked up. Neither did Lauren Graham's sitcom. Yeah. Drink? [Variety]

Still have a hankering for the heady days of Hawaii Five-O and Magnum P.I.? You know, butt-kickin' crime-fightin' in the balmy bliss of America's most beautiful colony. Well, Jerry Bruckheimer has heard your late night whimpering and is coming to your aid. His Honolulu set procedural Cooler Kings has been greenlit by A&E. The show is about a group of Igloo salesmen who decide to solve mysteries on their lunch breaks. Right? [Variety]

Speaking of A&E, Kevin Costner would like to take that wolf up on its offer of a second dance and head back into the West...ern genre. He's in talks with the net to produce, definitely, and act in and direct, maybe, something about the post-Civil War wild wild West. Sort of like that TNT series from a while back except, we'd imagine, with less Skeet Ulrich. [THR]

Simon Baker the Mentalist will soon be dealing with a mental case. He's playing a lawyer out to expose Casey Affleck as the small town sheriff turned horrid murderer that he is in Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me. The Winterbottom factor makes me intrigued, though the presence of Jessica Alba as a hooker and Kate Hudson as a schoolteacher girlfriend gives me pause. [THR]

Oh, cute. Dermot Mulroney is directing a movie. He was so good on The Practice. [THR]

Anybody in their right mind would take the deal that Skadden, Arps offered to its lawyers: a third of their salary in exchange for taking the year off. But while Heather Eisenlord, of Skadden's banking group, takes off to "teach English to monks in Sri Lanka," North Carolina chicken farmers will be suffering financial distress! Their chickens offered them not paid vacations, but bankruptcy. "I paid a lot of money for these chicken houses, but they aren't worth a nickel right now," said one chicken farmer, as a single rooster crowed in the distance, mournfully.

Where is the justice? When Heather Eisenlord, god bless her, flies off to "bring solar power to remote parts of the Himalayas," countless scores of laid-off olds will be unable to find a job, because young punk "hiring managers" can't deal with someone older than them. Even though the olds are the most qualified workers of all!

Where is the justice, we ask, when Heather Eisenlord—as is her right!—spends the day at Barnes & Noble "stocking her apartment in Brooklyn with Lonely Planet travel guides," while Loganville, GA can't afford to build a park, and you can't leave your car anywhere in Laredo, TX without having it stolen, and you sure can't have nice things in Piedmont, CA, because desperate thieves break into homes for sale just to rip off the meager furnishings and trade them for bread, or perhaps a sliver of cheese?

We don't know where the justice is. But we all wish we were Heather Eisenlord. [Pic via]

Twitter cofounders Ev Williams and Biz Stone seem to spend a good deal of time dealing with fake celebrities on the service, which people use to broadcast short messages to their "followers" on the Internet and cell phones. The advice is always the same: Send an email to tos@twitter.com, or fill out a support form on Twitter's help website. Hardly an intimidating regulatory procedure which requires the advice of legal counsel.

But using email or the Web can be intimidating for old people, like Fayer's client, "Hour of Power" televangelist Robert Schuller, who successfully booted his Twitter imitator this week. So he'll probably have a booming business, despite the utter lack of need for the world's first celebrity Twitter lawyer. Here's his law firm's release:

Joe Friedberg gave Norm Coleman's closing arguments last week, and then yesterday he went on the local sports talk radio station (???) for an interview. And he gave away his whole strategy! (His strategy: lose.)

ROSENBAUM: Well, when you say quick appeal, are you confident that you are going to lose the case in front of the three-judge panel? By losing the case, I mean Norm ends up with less votes.

FRIEDBERG: I think that's probably correct that Franken will still be ahead and probably by a little bit more. But our whole argument was a constitutional argument, and it's an argument suitable for the Minnesota Supreme Court, not for the trial court. So we'll see whether we were right or not.

Hah. Soooo this is Coleman's plan: once the interminable current lawsuit is finished, and everyone in Minnesota is pissed off at him for dragging this out, he will appeal. Brilliant! Another Bush v. Gore will really make everyone feel like this was all worth it.

They should be having trouble finding judges willing to hear their appeals, but no, instead they're all just bitching about how no one wants to hire them. You know, they have an interview scheduled, but then their prospective boss googles them, and is all, "oh, you wrote the torture memo? I'm afraid we're not actually hiring right now, sorry!"

Of course this is bad for America, because lawyers should be free to tell presidents that they can do whatever they want without fear of violating any silly "laws" or "Constitutions." As Chapman University Law School Dean John Eastman explains, this "not hiring notoriously evil lawyers" thing will have a chilling effect:

"It's unfortunate, and quite frankly it's dangerous," because it could make officials risk averse, Mr. Eastman said, blaming partisan politics.

God forbid we make Justice Department lawyers reluctant to take risks! We wouldn't want them stopping to think twice about telling the president whatever he wants to hear!

John Yoo is a tenured professor at Berkeley, so he's doing fine. But David Addington? Alberto Gonzales? Those poor schmucks are basically starving on the streets.

Poor Alberto Gonzales, after everyone in America watched him embarrass himself by pretending not to be able to remember his own goddamn name in order to avoid getting in trouble for his misconduct as Attorney General, he is particularly sad:

He recently told The Wall Street Journal that the controversy surrounding him had made law firms "skittish" about hiring him, calling himself "one of the many casualties of the war on terror."

Yes, right, who on Earth would ever be skittish about hiring this bright and likable and capable and not-at-all-fucking-asinine young man?

Seems that a fella—a law firm partner!—riding a crowded train from DC was talking on his cell phone so loud that a nearby law student overheard him, took down the details, and leaked it all to legal blog Above the Law. And he was talking about layoffs. That were secret. Shucks:

His conversation, though he stressed how necessary it was to be kept secret (ah, the irony), detailed the current plans of Pillsbury to lay off somewhere in the range of 15-20 attorneys from four offices by the end of March, including a few senior associates with low billable hours and two or three first-year associates...What's more, he was NAMING NAMES over the phone!

Ha, and then ATL blogger David Lat deviously confirmed it by emailing the lawyer, Robert Robbins, and saying his name was "Jennifer Everett," and hey, were you on the train yesterday? He was! Now the law firm has apologized. A few simple reminders:

• Shut up on the train, on your phone, and especially on your phone on the train.
• Everybody is sending everything to bloggers at all times.
• That mystery girl who emailed you out of the blue saying she saw you somewhere is definitely scamming you somehow.
• Lawyers, Law students, law bloggers: not a trustworthy one in the bunch.
• Again, just shut up.

Cyrus Mehri is the lawyer (who has sued the hell out of plenty of big corporations before), and for months his firm has been investigating the racial situation on MAD AVE. Numbers:

Blacks remain underrepresented on Madison Avenue, according to the report, “Research Perspectives on Race and Employment in the Advertising Industry,” which concluded that only 5.3 percent of managers and professionals at agencies in 2008 were black.

And those blacks who do manage to land jobs on Madison Avenue are significantly underpaid, the report said, earning 80 cents for each dollar earned by their white counterparts.

Not to mention:

Compared with the overall U.S. labor market, the advertising industry fares significantly worse on eight measures of employment for black managers and professionals — by an average of 36.7%.

Mehri wants to get the industry to make changes voluntarily, which he's had success doing elsewhere in the past. If not he will surely sue their asses.

[Ad Age, NYT]

Who wouldn't accept that? Anyhow this just goes to show that email is a terrible invention, for everyone.

When AA leaked a statement that Hernandez had written defending Dov Charney, it was a straightforward matter: this guy is a hypocrite. This bit of brinksmanship is less clear cut. Jezebel has reported on AA's side of this sexual harassment case brought by former employee Mary Nelson—Basically, the company says that Keith Fink, Nelson's lawyer, tried to get the company to give her money in exchange for her admitting her charges were bogus; then, they say, Fink reneged on the deal and tried to smear AA in the press. Now, Mark Ebner's Hollywood Interrupted has published internal emails between Fink and AA attorneys, which purportedly show that Fink tried to "blackmail" Dov Charney in this case. Without knowing the actual truth of Nelson's allegations or being intimately familiar with the law, we can't rightly say whether Fink did anything unethical here, or whether he's just being a zealous asshole, as most lawyers are expected to be. But here are the emails between AA's lawyers and Fink, in chronological order:

[Hollywood Interrupted]

"Wow, really? I had no idea. I didn't even see that. That's interesting," Ms. Wurtzel said of the report, with an awkward half-smile. "It's a weird test. I think when you go to a different school than Yale you are better prepared for it. It was definitely hard. I guess when I should have been studying, I was kind of having a good time."

So there you go, no harm done! Plus there's like another one in February, so maybe now she has more incentive to study and we're not monsters just little needlers like Nelson Muntz or something.

"What needs fixing isn't the African-Americans; it's the white guy running the agency"...

"We know the industry has had various diversity efforts over the years. However, these efforts are going to continue to fall short until they understand they're operating under a false premise — that the problem is the supply of African-American talent — when the real problem is the lack of leadership at the top and their exclusionary policies and practices."

[Ad Age]