BugMeNot.com–Bypass Compulsory Web Registration.
A few useful works:
- Working with Contracts: What Law School Doesn’t Teach You, by Charles M. Fox (PLI)
- A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting, by Kenneth Adams (ABA)
- The Elements of Legal Style and The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style by Bryan Garner
Following up on recent posts about humorous voicemails and emails, here’s another humorous voicemail. The story behind the voicemail is explained here, and in the letter below.
Mr. Kinsella:
I stumbled over this website courtesy of an article about the
recent humorous voicemail and couldn’t resist writing you to share something amusing that happened to our company.
Our Austin-based company, Despair Inc., produces cynical humor products- including parodies of motivational posters
called Demotivators.
Anyway, our logo features the 🙁 emoticon–which we
obviously did not invent but nevertheless submitted a trademark request for to the USPTO.
To our surprise (and our IP lawyer’s amazement), we received a
trademark for the symbol in printed matter class of goods.
As a joke, we wrote a fake press release about how–in light of our trademark on the 🙁 symbol–we planned to sue several million individuals who had used the symbol in email of late.
It was mostly meant as a rip on frivolous IP lawsuits. But
because of some clumsy reporting and overzealous netizens, it ended up becoming a gigantic outrage to many thousands of people who missed the joke.
The most amusing contact we received came in the form of a late-night voicemail from someone who sounded very drunk.
http://www.despair.com/frownies.html The voicemail is linked in the page above. It is expletive-laden and frequently incoherent–but provoked gales of laughter and ultimately, the desire to share the joke with others.
We bleeped out the expletives–as we’re a pretty family-friendly
website–but even without them, it’s a very amusing and
confusing listen, though admittedly, for a somewhat select audience.
Hope you enjoy it.
Cheers,
Justin Sewell
Despair, Inc.
Bay of One Hundred Fires, the new novel by retired Houston attorney (and my former mentor) J. Lanier Yeates, is “a frighteningly realistic geopolitical thriller that cannot be put down.” Or so says one distinguished commentator–namely yours truly, who was lucky enough to read it in manuscript form.
In addition to being an attorney, “On active duty in the United States Navy during the Vietnam years, J. Lanier Yeates served aboard the guided-missile destroyer, USS Mitscher before joining the pre-commissioning unit of the nuclear-powered cruiser, USS California, where he supervised the installation of the ship’s hightech, long-range, air-search radar system.” Order your copy today–!
In Bay of One Hundred Fires, author J. Lanier Yeates weaves a chilling tale of what Saddam Hussein might have done with the deadly weapons many believed he had. [A] poor Cuban family from Cienfuegos is swept into a battle between the Navy and a global terror network. To complement its firepower and 21st century technology, the Navy calls on a young lieutenant commander and maverick CIA analysts.
The Navy has one more weapon to leverage its powerful assets: Hoss Mueller, the skipper of the re-born USS California.
Coda: More info in this press release.
Re recent posts about humorous lawyer voicemails, I was reminded of this story: Elite Firm Summer Associate Sends E-Mail Boasting Of Laziness to Partners [registration required].
Re my previous post, Chicago Sun-Times reporter Eric Herman has picked this up story and is running with it, in F-bomb-dropping attorney gets worldwide notoriety [alternative link].
Coda: others have picked it up too, including this one from The Chicagoist, Lawyers Drop F-Bombs?, which includes some decent gossip about the “victim” and interestingly, some off the cuff defenses of the angry attorney. Another discussion forum is on MyShingle.
My latest book is Online Contract Formation. It went to the printer this month, and is published this month by Oceana. It provides practical advice about legal issues related to formation of contracts through online means, from a multi-jurisdictional perspective.
Forthcoming in December is International Investment Political Risk and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide.
Re this post–this article appeared today in New York Lawyer, listing my blog as a source of the voicemail left by Winston & Strawn associate Ankur Gupta [voicemail here]. I despise incompetence so actually tend to side with Gupta.
Some excerpts from the article:
An expletive-laden voice-mail message, reproduced on blog KinsellaLaw.com, left by an associate at one law firm for a colleague at another is making the rounds in cyberspace, with young lawyers seizing on the message as a symbol of declining civility within the profession.
In the message, Winston & Strawn associate Ankur Gupta in Chicago berates an associate in the New York office of Latham & Watkins for apparently complaining about changes Mr. Gupta and his colleagues requested on a mortgage document. Mr. Gupta tells his fellow lawyer that he should save his “[f**king] breath” and that if he continues to complain about the changes, Mr. Gupta will make his “life on this deal very unpleasant” by involving his client. The Winston & Strawn associate concludes by advising the Latham associate that if he will not act as a “monkey [f**king] scribe,” his work will be given to a secretary at Winston & Strawn.
Forwarded to lawyers across the nation, the message has unleashed a firestorm of Internet message board commentary.
In my view, all this noise about “the decline in civility” is part and parcel of lawyers’ attempt to keep their profession licensed so as to keep out competition. It is arrogance to believe civility is more the domain of attorneys than “normal” people.
Update: Related posts:
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