A little bit of shameless self-promotion: Res Ipsa got picked up on The Wall Street Journal today!
Traditional law school wisdom dictates students who want the best prices should buy their books from half.com and then sell them back on amazon.com. There is an even better way to handle books purchases and sales: bigwords.com.
Bigwords.com is a price aggregator that takes into account the condition of books you want to purchase, how quickly you need them, and then searches for the best way to purchase all of your books taking advantage of shipping discounts, coupon codes, and other promotions. It searches sites like half.com, abebooks.com, amazon.com, and hundreds of others.
Using bigwords.com is extremely easy, especially if you have the ISBN numbers for the books you need. After finding the book you want, add it to you bookbag and then repeat the process for the rest of your books.
Now for the good part: once you have added all the books you need to your bookbag, hit “start price comparison.” The site will then search every possible combination of bookstores and provide you with the lowest bottom line, after taking into consideration shipping costs to your location and all available discounts. If you are selling books, it will show you which sites command the best prices.
From there, just follow the step by step instructions to check out from each of the vendors using the discount codes, if any, provided. For a semester’s worth of books, bigwords comes in a couple of hundred bucks lower than the school book store and anywhere from $20 to $100 lower than the prices at a single vendor site like half.com.
1 University of Houston Law Center 1.79%
2 SMU Dedman School of Law 1.81%
3 The University of Texas School of Law 2.13%
4 Texas Tech University School of Law 2.99%
5 South Texas College of Law 4.45%
6 St. Mary’s University School of Law 4.99%
7 Texas Southern University—Thurgood Marshall School of Law 6.99%
8 Baylor University School of Law 7.23%
9 Texas Wesleyan University School of Law 10.15%
Compare these to the best and worst law school attrition rates:
The highest attrition rates can be found at:
1. Whittier (51.5% 1L attrition, #161 in U.S. News)
2. Touro (37.4%, #171)
3. Golden Gate (36.9%, #174)
4. Western State (32.6%, not ranked)
5. Jones School of Law (32.3%, not ranked)
The lowest attrition rates can be found at:
1. Yale (0.0% 1L attrition; #1 in U.S. News)
2. Stanford (0.0%, #2 in U.S. News)
3. Ohio State (0.0%, #32 in U.S. News)
4. Arizona (0.0%, #38 in U.S. News)
5. Case Western (0.0%, #63 in U.S. News)
Sources: Above the Law, Tex Parte, SMS, and lsac.org
Finals are over! Here’s to the summer and the end of the 2L year!
First-Year Memories:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8ABhatAfsA]
Funny Law Review Articles:
The Contribution of the Infield Fly Rule to Western Civilization
Baseball’s Infield Fly Rule is one of the most hotly contested topics in American law today…
Law School Attire: A Call for a Uniform Uniform Code
Style of dress matters, and clothing in American law schools should reflect good, traditional values. A tie with regimental stripes has a lot more class than a polo shirt or any other form of “pimp chic.” Legal-academic attire should complement the majesty of the law. In short, we need a uniform uniform code (UUC) to regulate law school attire.
Law.alltop.com is a one stop shop for legal news. It features a wide array of legal blogs; everything from the serious to the famous and even the funny.
There are a couple of things I really like about law.alltop.com. First, it allows you to preview the stories by hovering over the headlines. Second, it allows you to remove feeds that you are not interested in. Both of those features make for more efficient browsing and the site provides a great way to stay on top of legal news.
Alltop.com is the creation of author, entrepreneur, and investment banker Guy Kawasaki who wrote The Art of the Start, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, and Selling the Dream. He is also the founder of Garage Technology Ventures, the company behind some really great websites, like Fool.com (the Motley Fool financial planning site) and Pandora.com (the Music Genome Project).
My thanks to Mr. Kawasaki and to alltop.com for including Res Ipsa on your legal news website!
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Rank |
Firm |
Partner Profits |
| 1. | Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz | $4.95 million |
| 2. | Cravath Swaine & Moore | $3.30 million |
| 3. | Sullivan & Cromwell | $3.06 million |
| 4. | Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges | $3.01 million |
| 5. | Simpson Thacher & Bartlett | $2.88 million |
| 6. | Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft | $2.73 million |
| 7. = | Cahill Gordon & Reindel | $2.60 million |
| 7. = | Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison | $2.60 million |
| 9. | Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy | $2.53 million |
| 10. | Kirkland & Ellis | $2.48 million |
|
Rank |
Firm |
Revenue |
| 1. | Skadden | $2.17 billion |
| 2. | Latham & Watkins | $2.01 billion |
| 3. | Baker & McKenzie | $1.83 billion |
| 4. | Jones Day | $1.44 billion |
| 5. | Sidley Austin | $1.39 billion |
| 6. | White & Case | $1.37 billion |
| 7. | Kirkland & Ellis | $1.31 billion |
| 8. | Greenberg Traurig | $1.20 billion |
| 9. | Mayer Brown | $1.18 billion |
| 10. | Weil Gotshal & Manges | $1.17 billion |
Source: The American Lawyer
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Based on Gross Revenues in Texas in 2007-2008: 
- Jones Day $161.8 million
- Weil, Gotshal, & Manges $140.4 million
- Hunton & Williams $90 million
- King and Spalding 82.2 million
- Mayer Brown $64.2 million
Notably, Hunton & Williams is a newcomer to this exclusive club. Up $60 million from last year’s gross of $30 million, the increase in Hunton & Williams’ revenue reflects the earnings of the nearly one hundred attorneys hired by the firm from the former Jenkens & Gilchrist.
The complete article is available here. (Texas Lawyer)
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Yesterday, in In re Babcock & Wilcox Co., the Fifth Circuit held that firms cannot bill full hourly rates for travel time when the time is not spent working. The suit arose after the New York law firm of Caplin & Drysdale sought over $5.6 million in attorney’s fees and $745,000 in expenses following the firm’s role as appointed counsel in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The bankruptcy court denied 50% of the full hourly rate for travel time not spent working. This amounted to a reduction of over $135,000. The amounts included travel expenses billed at the full hourly rate, which Elihu Inselbuch, a partner at Caplin & Drysdale, testified was standard practice among New York law firms. The district court affirmed the bankruptcy court’s decision to limit the billable rate for the non-working travel time.
On appeal, the Fifth Circuit evaluated the reasonableness of the compensation, considering the time spent on the case, the rate charged for the services, whether the time was beneficial or beneficial, the complexity and nature of the issue, and how the rate charged compared to the rates of other comparably skilled practitioners.
In its opinion, the three judge panel pointed out that despite Caplin & Drysdale’s claim that billing full hourly rates for travel time was standard practice, “the other law firms involved in this bankruptcy were not objecting to the award of 50% of their hourly rate for non-working travel time.” The Fifth Circuit found that Caplin & Drysdale “did not make a sufficient showing with respect to how other comparable firms billed non-working hours.” In fact, the district court had found the firm did not even identify any other comparable firms.
The Fifth Circuit’s decision addressed the narrow issue before it: whether the time spent traveling but not working could be billed at the regular rate. While upholding the reduction of such fees by 50%, the court emphasized the decision was only to be applied to time spent traveling but not working noting that under a similar rule followed by the Northern District of Texas, the fee guidelines “provide[d] that travel time is compensable at one-half rates, but work actually done during travel is fully compensable.”
Held: The bankruptcy court’s limitation on the rate for travel time not spent working was upheld.
Opinion: Per Curiam: Higginbotham, Benavides, Dennis
Special thanks to Stu’s Views for allowing the use of his comic. Be sure to follow the link and check out the rest of his work.
On Monday, in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the Supreme Court upheld the Indiana law requiring voters to have a government issued photo identification card in order to vote. Suit was brought by opponents of the law who claimed that the requirement to have a photo identification card created a substantial barrier for voters have government issued photo identification.
In the 6-3 decision, the Court held the burdens associated with the voter identification requirement did not amount 
to a constitutional violation. Justice Stevens writing for the majority noted, “[o]n the basis of the record that has been made in this litigation, we cannot conclude that the statute imposes excessively burdensome requirements on any class of voters.”
Writing for the dissent, Justice Souter compared the requirement to the poll tax overturned in 1966. “If this court’s decision in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections stands for anything, it is that being poor has nothing to do with being qualified to vote. . . The calculation revealed in the Indiana statute crosses the line when it targets the poor and the weak.”
The majority led by Stevens rejected this argument, commenting, “[t]he inconvenience of making a trip to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, gathering the required documents, and posing for a photograph surely does not qualify as a substantial burden on the right to vote, or even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.”
Held: The voter photo identification requirement did not violate the Constitution.
Plurality Opinion: Stevens, Roberts, Kennedy. Concurring: Scalia, Thomas, and Alito.
Dissent: Breyer, Souter, Ginsburg
Charming and surprisingly funny, at 72, Scalia seemed to be twenty years younger and in the best of health during his interview that aired today on 60 Minutes. “Nino,” as he is affectionately known, is only child and was born to his Italian immigrant parents. Scalia grew up in Queens, New York and eventually earned his own way into Harvard through persistence and hard work.
In his first-ever major television interview, Scalia provided insight into his position as an originalist, someone who believes that the Constitution means what the drafters originally intended for it to mean. He does not believe in a “living Constitution” that evolves with the times and needs of the citizens. Instead, he believes in an “enduring Constitution” and that change should take place through the legislature, not
“activist judges” who try to find rights in the Constitution that simply can’t be found in the Constitution. The only other originalist on the Court is Clarence Thomas.
His ideological position has forced him to make decisions that contradict his own socially-conservative beliefs. For example, in Texas v. Johnson, Scalia joined the majority ruling that flag-burning was protected by the First Amendment. Scalia commented, “If it were up to me, I would throw that bearded, sandal-wearing, flag-burner in jail.”
Commenting on torture, another hot-button issue, Scalia commented that defining torture would be a challenge. He said that he, like most everyone else, was against torture, but not “everything that is hateful and odious is covered by some provision of the Constitution.”
On being a close friend of his liberal benchmate Ginsburg despite their opposing views, Scalia commented, “I attack ideas, I don’t attack people, and some very good people have some very bad ideas. And if you can’t separate the two, you got to get another day job. You don’t want to be a judge, at least not a judge on a multi-member panel.”
Scalia’s new book, Making Your Case, the Art of Persuading Judges, will address how lawyers should address the Court. His co-author is Bryan A. Garner, the editor of Black’s Law Dictionary and author of The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style.
Update: Bryan A. Garner speaks out about the book on the West Blog. Tune in. (mp3 podcast)
