I’m proud to announce that the winner of last week’s Cartoon Caption Contest…

… is Counselor Steve Pirates, who captioned, “The ill-fated decision to attach a Kremlin-style onion-dome to the antennae became further proof of DePaul’s need to aggressively seek J.D. candidates with an engineering degree.”

A solid caption. Sure, Counselor Pirates didn’t have much (i.e., any) competition, but still, yes, a solid caption.

In other news, just a quick tip, you shouldn’t drop bottles of olive oil on your wine glasses, especially not when the wine glasses are on the counter because the glass gets all over the counter AND all over the floor.

In still other news, my bathroom is incredibly clean this week, and I wanted to show it off.

In still yet other news, this is how I’ll look on the Lawyer Boy jacket flap:

Lastly, has anybody seen Cyborg Sandy? I thought I left her by the elevator….

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Got a random question, for you LSB readers. Are you single and living in St. Louis?

Here’s why I’m asking: LawSchoolBlogger.com guest poster Counselor Elliott…

…recently parlayed his iPhone commercial success into a commercial for JackFoundJill.com, a dating service for St. Louis singles.

Pretty random, right?

(Elliott’s the one in the hot tub at the 21-second mark…the other guy in the hot tub just won 2nd place in Bravo’s Make Me a Super Model.)

The big question: how will this help/hurt counselor Elliott’s legal career?

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I’m great at lying—for better or worse. I’ve been performing magic my entire life, which is to say, I’ve been deceiving people my entire life.

(I bent the fork with my mind, by the way.)

I regularly look people right in the eye and say, “Now, I have no idea what your card is,” when I know that their card is the three of clubs…because every card in the deck is the three of clubs.

I keep my deception separate from my law school career, but last week in Negotiations, I was encouraged to merge the two.

We had a simulation in which I was playing the role of a landowner who wanted to buy an easement running through a neighbor’s property. I was planning to develop the land and build 8 condos on it….but if the owner of the neighboring land found that much out, they’d likely refuse to sell me the easement or charge me an arm and a leg for it; they didn’t want a lot of traffic running through their land.

The point of the assignment was to get the easement for as little as possible…only I wasn’t allowed to directly lie about my plans to develop the land. (The Model Rules of Profession Conduct prevent that.) I was encouraged to provide half-answers and dodge questions and that sort of thing.

Long story short: I struck the best deal in the class. By far. Here are some bits of conversation from my deal.

Land Owner: What are you going to use the land for?
Lawyer Boy: If we strike a deal today, I can promise to use it for only residential purposes.

LO: How much traffic will there be on my road.
LB: Is traffic a big concern for you?
LO: Sure is.
LB: Me too. My last house was on a main road and there’d be cars going by at all hours…

During the post-negotiations wrap up, the professor, who had been monitoring all the negotiations, said, “Mr. Lax, you were doing everything you could to avoid the issue at hand, and it seems as though you succeeded in doing so.”

I hope my time spent doing magic will help me in my legal career…but I also wonder whether it might get me into trouble one day…

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This week’s Cartoon Caption Contest is a bit different in that the cartoon we’re using is not explicitly legal. Basically, this is a cartoon that got cut from my upcoming memoir, LAWYER BOY: A CASE STUDY IN GROWING UP (St. Martin’s Press, July). Counselor Steve Katz drew it…

…and now it needs a subtitle, so your thing.

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So…I just got a cease and desist e-mail from Kenyon & Kenyon LLP telling me I could no longer blog under the name “LawSchoolBlogger.” Being April 1st, I assumed this was an April Fools’ Day joke set up by one of my classmates. Long story short: it wasn’t.

Here’s what happened: I just got off the phone with Kenyon & Kenyon attorney David Darschlaw, who told me that a guy named Phillip Roth, who owns and operates LawSchoolBlog.com, owns right to the name “LawSchoolBlogger” too.

My dad says he’s not so sure that Roth has a valid claim against me, but that this is a battle not worth fighting. So right now, I’m not sure whether I’ll continue to blog under a different name or whether this order is maybe a sign that it’s time for me to stop blogging and focus more on school, the Bar Exam, and promoting Lawyer Boy.

Either way, this will be my last post on “LawSchoolBlogger.com.” So let me say, thank you so much for all the time you’ve spent on this blog. Thanks so much for reading, and thanks so much for all your great comments. In writing them, you’ve actually helped me a lot with lots of things.

That’s all for now.

-Rick Lax

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Counselor Rachel, who drew the above cartoon, just wrote me this email:

After a tough decision, the winner of the caption contest is Counselor “…” for his/her short and sweet line:

“Oh this? They said on the Style Network that Justin Timberlake is bringing barrister back.”

Though Steve Pirates and Sarah get honorable mentions, the above caption won for its brevity and use of the word “barrister.” It has such a nice ring to it.

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On Friday I signed up to take the Bar Exam in the great state of Illinois.

If you plan on robbing any Chicago convenience stores or slipping on any Chicago (THERE, SANDY!!!) sidewalks, please wait at least nine months…at which point I will have taken and hopefully passed the Bar and MPRE exams.

On Saturday I went to Neil Strauss’s book reading.

Strauss wrote THE GAME: PENETRATING THE SECRET SOCIETY OF PICKUP ARTISTS, which recounts how the author rose to fame within the PUA (pickup artist) community and “sarged” (scored) some of the most beautiful women in southern California.

After the reading, I sarged Strauss’s mom.

Well, sort of. She and I talked for about an hour. I didn’t get her phone number…or her e-mail, but she did take mine and she said that she’d send me a message. We shall see.

Kidding aside, she and her husband were some of the cooler people I’ve met in Chicago.

On Sunday I got to work on my final law school paper. It’s about the James Frey scandal and the lawsuit that followed.

Basically, a bunch of MILLION LITTLE PIECES readers got together and sued Frey’s publisher, Random House for fraud. The case settled for a couple million dollars.

What do you think? Did Random House commit fraud in publishing a memoir that contained fabrications and advertising the book as “brutally honest”?

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Wills, Trusts, and Estates class was canceled. Of course, I didn’t figure that out until after I showed up for class and nobody else was there.

I called my friend and asked if class had been canceled. She said that it had been and that our professor said so at the end of last class. So I opened up my notes from last class and read, “NO CLASS NEXT WEEK!!! DON’T FORGET!!!”

I showed up to class ten minutes early because I had nothing else to do, I hung around the classroom to see if anybody else might have forgotten…which would have made me feel a little less incompetent.

Finally, two minutes before class was (not) set to begin, somebody showed up and said, “Where is everybody?”

“Class was canceled,” I said.

“Really? I don’t remember Prof. O saying that.”

“Who’s Prof. O?” I asked.

“Wait a second. I’m on the ninth floor, aren’t I? Wrong floor! Never mind!”

She had meant to go to room 805, not 905…leaving me the only student in a class of 100 who had forgotten about the cancellation.

(By the way…I’m reading through the Cartoon Caption Contest entries…I think y’all can do better….)

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Greetings, Counselors! And welcome to part 5 of Law School Blogger’s 10-part series: Shameless Ripping off The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest Game.

For those of you new to the blog, here’s how it works: I provide you a drawing and you come up with a funny caption for it. In a few days, I’ll decide who wrote the funniest caption, and then the winner wins absolutely nothing whatsoever. Sound like fun? Yes? Yes.

Today’s drawing comes from LSB cruiserweight commenter Counselor Rachel, and here it is:

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I just wrapped up my last-ever spring break.

(Real lawyers don’t get spring break—right?
It’s a student thing—yes?
Yes.
Moving on…)

Here are the photographed highlights:

First I became a superhero: Black Suit Man.

Then I hosted a fancy dinner party.

Derek the Djembe player stole an unbaked brownie bite.

Counselor Elliot scolded him.

And I was left to clean the mess.

A few days later, I let Cyborg Sandy read Lawyer Boy.

And she liked it so much that she insisted on having her photograph taken with the author.

One day I wandered around the city and got lost in the rat race.

I found myself at Schubas, where Tally Hall was playing to a sold-out crowd of teenagers…

…many of whom were clumped together in the least-threatening mosh pit I’ve ever seen.

After the show, Zubin in Blue and I in my tie thought about whether we should get something to eat.

We decided that we should.

And now I’m back in school. Got a 22-page Negotiations paper due tomorrow, actually. I encourage you to write words of encouragement below.

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