“Did they know it was your last day?” my editor asked, laughing.

I had just told her that the Court of Appeals drug possession opinion I was writing about mentioned both Cheech and Chong (Judge Harrell‘s majority opinion) and Mr. Mackey from South Park (Judge Greene‘s dissent). (An aside: bets on whether Judge Greene himself or one of his clerks inserted the Mr. Mackey bit?)

Anyway, it was a nice treat on my last day to write about an opinion full of pop culture references. So if you’re out there somewhere, Judges Harrell and Greene (I wouldn’t ordinarily assume that they read this blog, but if Judge Greene watches South Park, anything is possible), thanks for making my last day as a legal affairs writer for The Daily Record that much more fun.

The Vault rankings of law firm prestige are out. The Vault rankings are based on surveys filled out by 15,000 law firm associates who rate firms on perceived status. No matter how you feel about rankings, these are an interesting read because they include some of the associates’ comments about the firms.

No firm based in Baltimore made the list, but several large firms with a major presence here did. Here’s are their rankings and a sampling what Vault and associates said about them.

• Hogan & Hartson (the survey was done before Hogan merged with the British firm Lovells earlier this year) ranked 28 this year, down from 25 last year. Vault comments, “As one would expect of the largest and oldest BigLaw firm with roots in Washington, D.C., Hogan & Hartson’s Beltway influence runs deep” and notes that Chief Justice John Roberts is a Hogan alum. Associates called the firm “lifestyle-friendly” but also “legends in their own minds” and criticized Hogan for “stealth layoffs.”
• DLA Piper ranked 53, down from 44 last year. Vault comments, “Some love it, some dislike it, but generally associates agree that recent salary cuts have lowered morale.” Associates said things like “competitive and diverse,” “amazing pro bono opportunities” and, somewhat bewilderingly, “extra large pizza with no toppings.” Associates also said the firm is too big. One senior associate told Vault, “Within 12 months, I have gone from my friends saying “wow” when I tell them I work at DLA Piper, to them snickering and asking me why I haven’t left yet.”
• McGuireWoods‘ ranking is unchanged from last year, at 82. Vault says, “McGuire attorneys enjoy the rewards of working at a big-market firm in small-market settings, entering friendly offices in the morning and heading home to their families at night.” Associates made comments like, “good firm; good people,” “old school, boring,” “less pressure than many other similar-sized firms” and “favoritism toward anointed associates.”
• Venable comes in at 83, up from 85 last year. Vault comments, “Venable LLP is a mid-Atlantic force that, until the capital markets meltdown, had defined itself by aggressive expansion.” Associates said, “very nice mid-Atlantic practice,” “quirky,” “strong pro bono commitment” and “bonus and compensation system allows firm to rationalize less-than-market salaries for certain associates.” There’s also a comment from a Baltimore corporate associate: “In Baltimore, we do fairly sophisticated work. It’s not Wall Street, but the projects are interesting and challenging. My practice group covers a lot of people and a lot of different sub-specialties, so it can be hard to find your place when you start. It is difficult to see what the future of the group is. While it’s not written anywhere, if you bill 2000 hours people are pleased.”

Happy Monday! Here are a few law links to start your gonna-be-another-hot-one week.

On a personal note, this will be my last blog round-up, since I will be wrapping up five great years at The Daily Record this Friday. The round-up will be taken over by Danielle Ulman, who will also be moving from covering finance, energy and biotech to covering the business of law. She’ll do a great job!

• “One part charisma, one part skill and a dash of improvisation is the recipe for success,” “Be careful who you smack with a steel chair, because he will probably be your tag-team partner next week,” and other law career lessons from pro wrestling. HT: ABA Journal.
• Would you tell another lawyer that she looks inappropriate?
• Could soldiers who believe homosexuality is wrong seek conscientious objector status as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell ends?
• With Justice Stevens’ departure, Justice Breyer looks ready to lead the opposition, former Daily Record-ite Lawrence Hurley writes.
• There’s never been so much riding on passing the bar exam, argues a bar review teacher.
• But she’s so darn sassy!

I read an interesting article today on the Financial Post’s Website called, “10 body language mistakes women leaders make.” The author is Carol Kinsey Goman, identified as “an international keynote speaker, executive coach, and management consultant.” She writes:

If a female wants to be perceived as powerful, credible, and confident, she has to be aware of the nonverbal signals she’s sending. There are a number of behaviors I’ve seen women unknowingly employ that reduce their authority by denoting vulnerability or submission.

Goman writes that women, among other behaviors, tilt their heads and nod too much, wait their turn when speaking, shake hands too delicately and emote too much.

I was struck by the idea that half the population (or at least half the population of leaders) is making “mistakes” in body language. Aren’t we using a male-centric standard of evaluating leaders here? If women were the majority of leaders in business, government and law, wouldn’t the more typically male body language behaviors be considered “mistakes”? I can easily envision a power structure under which interrupting, shaking hands in the bone-crushing way that suggests you’ve got something to prove and sitting emotionless while a deal partner speaks would be considered rude, mistaken behavior.

Certainly, most of the behaviors Goman criticizes are not inborn. Powerful women learn to temper their behaviors to make themselves less threatening to men, less likely to be called the dreaded b-word. (Remember Hillary Clinton’s “spontaneous” tears during the 2008 primary campaign?) It’s admirable that Goman dreams of a world where female leaders can interrupt, stop ending sentences with implied question marks and skip the hair flip. But to call out women leaders for making “mistakes” that really amount to adaptations is just blaming the victims.

After The Daily Record studied access to court records, we spoke with various court officials about our results. In the cases where we had experienced treatment or policies the officials found objectionable, they assured us these things would not happen again.

The best example of this was our conversation with Chief District Court Judge Ben Clyburn, who told us he was doing away with the per-day file limits imposed by many district court locations.

It may be a little early for everyone to have gotten the message yet, though. Sun cops reporter Justin Fenton just tweeted to let me know that the Eastside District Court just tried to tell him he could only see three files a day.

Fenton protested that this isn’t district court policy, and the counter clerk on duty made a phone call and gave in. As of now, he’s waiting to see the seven files he requested.

I’m willing to give the courts the benefit of the doubt while they get up to speed with Clyburn’s new policy. Old habits die hard. But I would be curious to hear from others who frequently request files from court clerks — lawyers, reporters, community activists. Are you seeing changes yet in the number of cases you can see, the process for requesting them or the treatment you’re getting from clerks?

Ben Rosenberg of Rosenberg Martin Greenberg had a pretty strong reaction to contributor Joe Surkiewicz’s column in this week’s Maryland Lawyer section. Surkiewicz, the director of communications at Maryland Legal Aid, wrote about the tremendous need for more volunteer lawyers.

Rosenberg, co-chair of the Legal Aid’s Equal Justice Council, which works to fund Legal Aid, called me Monday afternoon to enthusiastically second Surkiewicz’s message.

“As a result of a number of factors, all of which have sort of come together in sort of like a perfect storm, the demand for legal services to the underrepresented and people who can’t afford legal representation has exploded, while at the same time what we had thought of as a stable funding source has imploded, and that’s the IOLTA funding,” Rosenberg said.

Interest on lawyer trust accounts goes to support legal representation for the needy, but when those rates plummeted, the money dried up.

“The only logical and possible source for that, to fill that need, has to come from the private bar,” Rosenberg said. “Who else is there? No one else is qualified to do it. While the lawyers in Maryland have done a good job up to now, everyone needs to do a better job.”

“People view things like this in terms of, it’s someone else’s problem,” Rosenberg continued.

But really, he said, lawyers are officers of the court, and with that comes the responsibility of making sure people who need civil representation get it.

The “gold standard” for pro bono work is 50 hours a year, but Rosenberg concedes that that’s a lot. Commit to handling at least one matter, he advises.

Where to start? Call the Maryland Volunteer Lawyers Service to find out what opportunities are available, and, if you need additional training, the Pro Bono Resource Center, Rosenberg said.

Happy Monday! Here are a few law links to start your week:

• Jessamy challenger Gregg Bernstein tells Investigative Voice that his opponent doesn’t have a good relationship with police and hasn’t insisted that her prosecutors come to court prepared for trial. Bernstein also criticizes Jessamy’s practice of barring prosecutors from calling certain officers as witnesses because of perceived integrity issues.
• “Obviously, he wants to be LeBron James’ father,” Ron Miller writes of the Washington lawyer who is claiming paternity of LeBron James. “Let’s say he is the father. Is it worth admitting you committed statutory rape and that you were basically a deadbeat dad until your kid became an NBA mega star?”
• Why are college graduates applying to and choosing to attend law school in such great numbers, even as the legal sector shrinks?
• John Stossel is ridiculously out of touch on products liability issues, writes The Pop Tort.
• “Pill mills,” in which “drug dealer[s] with… white coat[s] on” prescribe pain meds to addicts and dealers with abandon, are a scourge in South Florida.
• Please do yourself a favor and watch this collection of the worst lawyer ads out there. Watch this one too, which Walter Olson at Overlawyered feels was wrongly left out.

OK, so this isn’t strictly about law. I mean, it is insofar as it relates to the governor’s race and the governor signs things into law and both major candidates are lawyers. But really, it’s about grammar. Bear with me.

I just got a press release from the O’Malley campaign entitled, “Ehrlich’s ‘Faux’ Education Facts.” It goes on to use “faux,” in quotes, twice in the body of the press release. What the O’Malley folks are clearly trying to say is that Ehrlich’s facts are phony. What they are actually doing is casting doubt on the phoniness of Ehrlich’s facts by putting the word faux in quotes. It’s like when a store advertises, “Sale today! 50 percent off ‘everything’ in the store!” The store wants to emphasize that everything they have is on sale, but what they end up doing is making people wonder what’s not on sale.

What the O’Malley campaign should have done was used one of the two following titles: 1) “Ehrlich’s Faux Education Facts” (no quotation marks) or 2) “Ehrlich’s Education ‘Facts’” (quotation marks around the correct word).

To recap today’s lesson from an uptight grammar nerd: quotation marks are not for emphasis. Use them sparingly and wisely. And if you want a good laugh, go visit the “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks.

Above the Law has flagged a couple of lawyer jobs advertised on Craigslist recently. These positions are like any other lawyer jobs, really: Applicants need to be admitted to the bar, and they would work full-time. In one instance, they would actually be trying cases. In other words, this isn’t really internship stuff. The only difference between these jobs and others? It’s minor, really. Piddling. Insignificant, almost.

They don’t pay.

And in a sign of the times, at least one of these employers is being deluged with applicants. They’re mainly young lawyers who can’t find anything paying and are desperate just to get some experience.

As far as I can tell, there is nothing like this currently being advertised on Craigslist in Maryland, but I do wonder if there are employers here who have tried it — and poor jobless young lawyers who have applied.

Happy disgustingly hot Tuesday! Here are some law links to start your day:

• Pat Jessamy’s office is not doing all it can for rape victims, and now it’s jumping on the blame-the-police bandwagon, the always-controversial Page Croyder writes on her blog.
• Is Wall Street 2 a spinoff or a sequel to the original Wall Street movie? The answer could mean a lot of money to Michael Douglas’ ex-wife, Diandra, writes Jim Gross at The Maryland Divorce Legal Crier.
• Mary Keating at Maryland Employment Law Developments writes that the 4th Circuit has questioned the “equal opportunity jerk” defense, sending back a sexual harassment suit filed by a female doctor against her male boss, who made crude comments to men and women alike.
• Wow, following on the heels of the Mann Bracken implosion earlier this year, another debt-collection law firm has shut down.
• “The courts need to be there when the other branches let us down,” Dahlia Lithwick writes at Slate. “Nobody’s life story made that point better than Thurgood Marshall’s. And nobody reminded us of that fact more pointedly and more effectively at the Kagan hearings than Republicans on the Senate judiciary committee.”
• The Philly Phanatic has been sued. Again. Come on, how can you not love that face? (Seriously. I love the Phanatic. It’s weird.)