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Legal Guides
Mar
30
New York Times photojournalist and Cambodian “Killing Fields” Survivor Dith Pran died today of pancreatic cancer, reports Douglas Martin of the New York Times.
Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died in New Brunswick, N.J., on Sunday. He was 65 and lived in Woodbridge, N.J.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, which had spread, said his friend Sydney H. Schanberg.
Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians – a third of the population – were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation.
The Khmer Rouge were the Cambodian communists.
Mar
30
Just a quick reminder that Indiana’s Voter Registration closes April 7, 2008 for Indiana’s primary on May 6, 2008.
Link to Indiana’s Voter Registration Form VRG-7 (pdf).
Mar
30
Why Did Hillary Clinton Keep Repeating The Bosnia Tale?
Filed Under Election 2008, Hillary Clinton | Leave a Comment
The New York Times’ Frank Rich asks why Hillary Clinton kept repeating her Bosnia war story — even after it had been shown to be exaggerated.
MOST politicians lie. Most people over 50, as I know all too well, misremember things. So here is the one compelling mystery still unresolved about Hillary Clinton’s Bosnia fairy tale: Why did she keep repeating this whopper for nearly three months, well after it had been publicly debunked by journalists and eyewitnesses?
Even worse for Hillary Clinton, argues Frank Rich, is that news today doesn’t just flow from the major media where it is easier for a candidate to control the spin, but from the bottom up via the internet.
But politically and culturally we’re not in the 1980s — or pre-YouTube 2004 — anymore. An unending war abroad is upstaging the old domestic racial ghosts. A new bottom-up media culture is challenging any candidate’s control of a message.
What does it say about a candidate that she’d keep repeating a “fish tale” despite multiple reports that it wasn’t true?
Mar
30
Overseas Legal Salaries Rise With Outsourcing
Filed Under economy, law, outsourcing | 2 Comments
Interesting news from the world of outsourcing jobs that Americans used to do.
Lawyers in India are receiving increases in their starting salaries as a result of legal outsourcing.
According to Legal Blog Watch, associates starting at Indian law firms will earn slightly less than $30,000.00 per year now.
To compete with foreign firms, large domestic Indian firms have been forced to increase pay, either through salary hikes, end-of-year bonuses or promotions. New associates earn around 12 lakh rupees per year, while senior and principal associates may earn anywhere between 35 and 80 lakhs (one “lakh” is the equivalent of 100,000 rupees, so according to this currency converter, a new associate earns the equivalent of $29,887, while a senior lawyer makes $199,252.
Indian legal salaries are not quite up to the level of starting legal salaries in America, but they are getting closer — meaning that cost savings gained by sending work overseas might lessen as overseas salaries near those for United States workers.
There is still an incentive for large law firms to send work overseas because of the cost savings over employing someone in the United States, especially when some big city law firms are paying their upper echelon starting associates $160K+ per year. (The median salary is $62,000 per year).
Writes Bill Henderson in Empirical Legal Studies, the average starting salary at a small law firm is $50,000 as of 2006.
Let’s face it: $40K to $55K per year is just not enough to pay down the avg. $85,000 debt (especially as interest rates climb) and still enjoy any kind of lifestyle that a professional degree is presumed to confer. The national median starting salary for a 2 to 10 lawyer firm is $50,000. There are a lot of struggling alumni out there. And do we really need more law schools? For many, getting a JD is a very risky financial proposition, especially when you factor in bar passage.
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