Today a U.S. District Court in San Francisco begins examining the legality of a planned U.S. government crackdown which, if implemented, will, among other things:make the cost of your produce skyrocketparalyze the few remaining active sectors of the U.S. construction industryshut down restaurants and make the cost of your next roof repair tripleAt issue is the recently announced plan to step up enforcement by the Social Security Administration of so-called "no match" letters, the process by which the SSA notifies an employer when the Social Security information submitted by an employee does not match federal records.   Essentially, employers have now been placed in the position of "immigration police", and the crackdown will devastate sectors of the economy hi…

The headline with the biggest font on the front page of this morning’s WSJ is captioned: "A Stingier Job Market Awaits New Attorneys."  The piece is pretty significant and well researched, attributing the glut in lawyers to a variety of factors. The critical component is demand: more young Americans want to become attorneys in the U.S., and in response more universities opening new law schools, which are big money-makers.  After giving us a couple of colorful examples (including a recent Seton Law grad earning $50K in Manhattan who calls his law degree "a waste"), the article then moves on to discuss the economic climate in the big law firms, concluding that "the prospects for big-firm lawyers are growing richer".  My favorite line in the articl…

The headline with the biggest font on the front page of this morning’s WSJ is captioned: "A Stingier Job Market Awaits New Attorneys."  The piece is pretty significant and well researched, attributing the glut in lawyers to a variety of factors. The critical component is demand: more young Americans want to become attorneys in the U.S., and in response more universities opening new law schools, which are big money-makers.  After giving us a couple of colorful examples (including a recent Seton Law grad earning $50K in Manhattan who calls his law degree "a waste"), the article then moves on to discuss the economic climate in the big law firms, concluding that "the prospects for big-firm lawyers are growing richer".  My favorite line in the articl…

Whether you are an in-house attorney at a busy corporation or in private practice, you can probably relate to this scenario:  your paralegal — with whom you have a codepenency rivaling that of the most dysfunctional sitcom couple — is finally off for a week-long vacation he/she planned a year ago.  Your desk is full of sticky reminders and your Outlook calender is peppered with a rainbow of conference calls, kid’s soccer practice, cases due, and client follow-up calls.  You arrive Monday morning, optimistic but wary…and then all hell breaks loose.By the time you are able to track the overnight you sent for the last minute filing (not your fault but the client’s fault), you have 12 half-intelligible messages from the new receptionist, who isn’t quite as detail-oriented as…

Went to visit my 85 year old mother for lunch and when I showed her the new blog, she said (translated from Spanish):"Wow, that looks very interesting…and complicated…and who’s the young man in the picture, your boss?…"As Hootie and the Blowfish complained…"Time…why you punish me…?"…

This morning’s Wall Street Journal features a provocative editorial by Peter Berkowitz, a professor at George Mason University’s School of Law.  Berkowitz, a senior fellow with the Hoover Institution, is an astute observer of trends in American education.The editorial piece, entitled "Our Compassless Colleges" asks a simple but important question: is it unreasonable to expect U.S. colleges to define curricula intended to produce "educated human beings?"  Mr. Berkowitz specifically analyzes what we know as "liberal" education, as in the general education requirements college students must work their way through before focusing on their major.  He delves into this pretty profoundly, but he sums up his point like this:"A university that fails …

Today’s Miami Herald screams the main front page article loud and clear: "IMMIGRATION CRACKDOWN"Drive through the urban portions of Miami, my de facto hometown (well, since I left Cuba at the age of four) and you will see them, lunch buckets in hand and hard hats perched on their noggins.  An army of undocumented aliens has built this city these past few years, obvious yet invisible, critical yet irrelevant (to many), as essential as they are collectively incognito.Along Miami Beach, they wait on tables, clean hotel rooms, and manicure lawns.  Entire teams of indocumentados descend upon our golf courses and corporate parks, neighborhoods and public property to mow, trim, and clean up what the rest of us take for granted.  They make up an invisible underclass, the b…

From the August 22, 2007 Wall Street Journal:"The hourly rates of the country’s top lawyers are increasingly coming with something new — a comma"Quietly and without much fanfare, leading law firms have been steadily increasing their hour billing rates and the WSJ’s timely article broke the silence, creating an online avalanche of outrage and disbelief via blogs and editorials from diverse sources.  Everyone seems to be asking: "How on earth can attorneys possibly justify $1000+/hour billing rates??"Well, Microsoft may have perhaps put it most succinctly: “This is grossly excessive by any measure, and truly proves the maxim that human greed has no bounds…"That comment, triggered by $4702.50/hour billing rates from plaintiffs’ counsel in a Wisconsin antitru…

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday on companies which are "getting creative" to deal with U.S. visa bottlenecks.  I eagerly started reading to see what creative juices were flowing in the pretty uninspired world of immigration compliance.  I was disappointed to see that, in reality, it was nothing more than the "same old, same old":"parking" employees in overseas jurisdiction at great expense while their skills are desperately needed by the U.S. enterprise.encouraging critical technical professionals to pursue unneeded advanced degrees to "buy time" in F-1 student status till H-1B visa numbers become available.Rescinding job offers (and leaving critical positions unfilled) until visas became unavailable.As the WSJ concludes, all of …