2009 Roundup, Part Three: Harvard Scrounges Up Enough Cash to Buy Coffee
January 7, 2010
After I posted about the guy who set a hand grenade on the jury box during a closing argument, Ken of the excellent Popehat blog reminded me of the hand-grenade paperweights once sent by a law firm to 500 potential clients as part of an unfortunate marketing effort. A partner later conceded the paperweights looked "pretty realistic." The Santa Clara bomb squad thought so, too.
Even worse marketing: in November, Dave Wieneke noticed that a defense firm specializing in (among other things) defending those accused of sexual assault or domestic violence was using website pictures that appeared to show women and young girls in distress, including one picture showing a girl with a hand covering her mouth. Not surprisingly, this generated some unwanted attention, and the pictures have since been removed.
Last month, the North Face Apparel Co., maker of fine clothing for outdoorsy people, sued a Missouri teenager who started a business he said was meant to mock those who buy North Face's expensive products. The resulting complaint was captioned (more or less) North Face v. South Butt. The lawyer for South Butt's founder, Jimmy Winkelmann, said the big company's demands were unacceptable. "Little Jimmy doesn't have enough money in his left pocket to pay for a six-pack of Coca-Cola," he said, much less pay what North Face's "silk-stocking law firms" demanded.
Harvard Law School's Dean of Students, Ellen Cosgrove, announced in November that free coffee would be made available to students all day long at Lewis Hall, to compensate for reduced availability elsewhere. The school cut back on its free-coffee program earlier in the year, citing budget problems, but Cosgrove said faculty complained that angry students had been stealing the free faculty coffee. The law school's share of Harvard's endowment is approximately $1.7 billion.
