Our sister paper in Missouri (subscription required, sorry), reported on a forthcoming study about legal secretaries. What I found most interesting about the story, but not at all surprising, is that secretaries prefer working for male lawyers:

In written responses, the secretaries described female attorneys as emotional and demanding supervisors who “have more to prove” and “put on airs.”

It’s true that women attorneys do have more to prove, [study author Felice] Batlan said. They also tend to have more domestic and family demands than male attorneys, so may have less time to socialize with their legal secretaries, she said.

Batlan said the secretaries also may have used male attorneys’ behavior as a yard stick to judge the behavior of women attorneys.

“A woman working for a man is naturalized,” she said. “It’s what’s expected. It seems ordinary.

“Working for a woman exposes some very complex class dynamics.”

I wonder whether the secretaries’ attitudes toward female bosses is related to the perception that successful, smart, assertive women are, um, the B-word. Certainly, this perception is not limited to men. Women can be one another’s harshest critics.

I also wonder what we would learn if someone surveyed both male and female attorneys about their relationships with their secretaries. I find it hard to believe that a secretary’s preference for working with men would not be obvious to her bosses.

According to the website of a church board which lists accused Legal Aid embezzler Benjamin “Bennie” King Jr. as a member, he was employed at the Baltimore City Comptroller’s office. That’s where he went after leaving his 30-year job as CFO of Legal Aid, from which he and an accomplice allegedly skimmed $1.1 million.

But Comptroller Joan Pratt tells me that King no longer works for the city. He left in November 2009, citing personal reasons, she said. His lawyer, Warren Brown, says his client left the city to avoid bringing scrutiny on Pratt’s office when the charges came out.

Pratt said she had no idea authorities were investigating King. Asked if he could have embezzled from the city, Pratt said there’s no way.

“It would have been literally impossible,” she said. “He would have been unable to do that because his duties involved checking and collecting information.”

King was a special accounting systems analyst for the Municipal Telephone Exchange, which runs telephone and mail services for the city government. He was in charge of tracking expenses, reconciling accounts and verifying documents before the city paid its phone bills.

Brown says King left Legal Aid in early 2008 because he was having cardiac and respiratory problems. He is not currently working, he said.

Asked whether King did what he is accused of, Brown demurred.

“I don’t know whether he did it or not,” he said. “I’m not there; I’m one man, one place. You have to ask the government their position on that.”

“We’ll take a look at what they’re working with, what type of evidence they may have, whether they’re correct in their assessment, whether it’s worth fighting,” Brown said. “The hope is that when the dust settles and the smoke clears, it won’t really amount to much of anything, but we’ll have to wait and see on that.”

The Court of Special Appeals received a special delivery earlier this week: the original case record from the $150 million verdict in favor of 89 Jacksonville homeowners against ExxonMobil Corp. A judge upheld the award in September, at which point Exxon noted its appeal.

It took a truck to haul “27 boxes and one plastic map” to Annapolis, according to court records. A breakdown of the boxes:

• 8 contained the complaints filed by the homeowners in the mass-action suit
• 6 were marked “Alban, et al v. Exxon,” the lead case in the trial (the plaintiffs were collectively called the Alban plaintiffs)
• 5 contained exhibits
• 3 contained jury questionnaires
• 2 contained transcripts
• 2 contained “memos, appendices and verdict sheets”
• 1 contained jury selection sheets

Arguments in the case take place in September. In preparation, I’ve heard Exxon made copies of all of the exhibits at a cost approaching five figures.

If I used the terms “baseball” and “vomit-inducing” in the same sentence, you’d think I was talking about the Orioles, right? In most cases, that would be correct. But not today, when a New Jersey man “admits to vomiting assault at Phillies game,” as the headline says.

Matthew Clemmens’ guilty plea will most likely result in probation when he is sentenced at the end of July, prosecutors said.

The incident happened during an April 14 game. Clemmens and friends were sitting behind an off-duty police officer and his two children, doing the things that give Philly sports fans a bad reputation. When one of Clemmens’ friends was ejected, prosecutors said he answered a cell phone call by saying, “I need to do what I need to do. I’m going to get sick.”

At that point, Clemmens stuck his fingers down his throat and vomited on the dad and one of the daughters. (Really.)

Clemmens’ uncle offered a kind-of defense for his nephew a few days later, saying Clemmens was feeling queasy from a few extra beers and “he accidentally vomited, putting his hand in front of his mouth, and vomited on the person in front of him, which was the wrong person.”

Police are still searching for the right person.

Count Montgomery County State’s Attorney John J. McCarthy among those mourning the passing of Law & Order into syndication after last Monday’s broadcast.

McCarthy joked Tuesday that he had developed a fondness for Jack McCoy, the main  prosecutor on the long-running television show, played by Sam Waterston.

“Jack McCoy: my role model,” McCarthy said. “The hard-charging prosecutor hopefully doing some justice along the way.”

McCarthy added he regards Law & Order as “the most realistic” of television’s courtroom dramas.

“They did a pretty good job about educating the public,” he said of the program’s writers. “I thought the show was well done, well researched in terms of the law.”

But Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott D. Shellenberger will shed no tears for the program’s passing.

“I’ve never even seen the show,” Shellenberger said. “It just doesn’t interest me. I’m living law and order every day.”

Where do you think Law & Order ranks on the pantheon of other dearly departed law-related television shows, such as The Defenders, L.A. Law, Night Court, The Practice, Boston Legal and The Paper Chase?

Happy drizzly Monday! Enjoy these law links, hand-picked by yours truly:

• This is what happens to alleged would-be car thieves in my neighborhood. HT: Baltimore Crime.
• Lois Finkelstein at the Maryland Divorce Legal Crier writes about what it feels like for a lawyer to hire a lawyer. Finkelstein’s experience did not go well.
• Ron Miller at the Maryland Lawyer Blog writes about everyone’s favorite Vicodin-for-fellatio lawyer: “I think the most logical question here is how on Earth did this guy get off with essentially a slap on the wrist?”
• Maryland’s protection order laws stink, says a Ms. magazine blogger. Thanks to Baltimore Crime (again) for the link.
• A few big law firms are pushing headhunters to accept lower fees because the market is saturated with job seekers. One firm is reportedly asking the recruiters it works with to accept less for placing associates with the firm if they have been laid off from other jobs.

Call this a case of The Magnificent Seven meets All in the Family.

Judge Mary Ellen Barbera, the junior jurist on Maryland’s seven-member Court of Appeals, dissented this week from the panel’s decision that police lacked probable cause to search a drug suspect’s home despite having a warrant.

In her dissent, Barbera cited the Supreme Court’s 2003 Maryland v. Pringle decision for her proposition that the bar for probable cause belief is not “particularly high.”

In Pringle, the Supreme Court called probable case “a practical, not technical conception that deals with the factual and practical considerations of everyday life on which reasonable and prudent men, not legal technicians, act.” The court added that probable cause is “a fluid concept — turning on the assessment of probabilities in particular factual contexts — not readily, or even usefully, reduced to a neat set of legal rules.”

I know what you’re thinking: What’s the big deal? Judges quote from Supreme Court decisions all the time. It’s called citing precedent, stare decisis.

True. But how many judges have the opportunity to cite Supreme Court cases that were argued by their husband?

Gary E. Bair, then with the Maryland attorney general’s office, successfully argued in Pringle that police officers had probable cause to arrest the front-seat passenger after they found cocaine in the back armrest of the car during a traffic stop.

Bair is now an appellate-defense attorney at Bennett & Bair LLC in Greenbelt, and he and Barbera co-teach criminal-procedure courses at American University’s Washington College of Law. A main topic of the classes is, you guessed it, probable cause.

From a man at work who enjoys Men at Work, here now some news tidbits from Australia.

• The headline says it all: “Ninja students foil Aussie mugging.” Three blokes in the middle of beating a man for his iPod and cell phone fled the scene of the crime when “five black-clad ninjas” came to the rescue. The ninjitsu students were training at a nearby hall when one saw the mugging in progress. Two of the men have been arrested.
• People entering Australia must now declare at customs if they are carrying pornography. An affirmative declaration allows customs officials to search the luggage to determine if the material is legal. The move has drawn protest as an invasion of privacy by the Australian Sex Party, which notes there is no formal definition of pornography on the customs form.

Now, if you’re like me, your first thought about the second story was, “Australian Sex Party? Really?” At the risk of getting fired, I performed a quick Internet search which indicates that it does in fact exist.

G’day to everyone.

As you probably read in today’s paper, the Court of Appeals yesterday sanctioned a lawyer for exchanging a Vicodin pill for oral sex in a women’s restroom. While searching for additional information on disciplined lawyer Jeffrey Marcalus yesterday, I came across (part of) an Annapolis Capital article written shortly after his case was argued. The Capital points out that Marcalus’ attorney, Andrew Jay Graham, compared the drugs-for-sex exchange to a guy bringing a woman flowers.

Sure enough, I watched the recording of the argument, and Graham says to the judges, “Would it be different if he’d given her a $50 bouquet of flowers and he holds it out and says, ‘What’s in it for me?’ and she offers this? Does that make it prostitution? I don’t think so.”

The court is skeptical, with Judge Mary Ellen Barbera pointing out that Marcalus himself obviously thought the encounter was not so harmless, or he wouldn’t have told police officers about it in order to impeach the woman’s credibility after she made a rape allegation against Marcalus’ client.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:a new restaurant has taken the place of the former Court Towers Deli in Towson.

Nearly one month after the Perring Place Express Deli closed, the space was open for business again today under a new name: Crush Cafe. The restaurant appeared largely bare, and there was no sign to indicate its name, but I saw a customer walk in and purchase a drink.

My courthouse sources indicated the new restaurant is owned by the same people behind Crush in Belvedere Square, and that the breakfast offerings are pretty tasty. A Crush employee confirmed the restaurant’s Towson presence and said today was the new joint’s first day.

More details as I learn them. Here’s to hoping Crush Cafe can hang around longer than one of Murphy Brown’s secretaries.