Publisher's Notebook

WILLIAMSBURG–Walmart sometimes takes a beating. How many items have you read where a local preservationist group has banded together to keep a Walmart from being built on some site?

The company, on the other hand, has become a national leader in promoting diversity in the legal profession and at law firms.

Jeff Gearhart, the general counsel for the Arkansas-based retail giant, was the luncheon speaker May 21 at the southeast regional conference of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association held in Williamsburg. The commonwealth’s local chapter, APABA-VA, hosted the affair, which drew about 80 lawyers from Maryland to Florida.

Diversity is important to Walmart, Gearhart said. It’s “not only the right thing to do,” he said, but it makes business sense. The company applies a diversity credo to its own legal hiring, and it has attracted top-flight talent as a result, he noted.

The company also believes in putting its financial clout as a client to work. Gearhart said that a few years ago, Walmart officials reviewed the firms across the country it was using to do its various legal tasks. They looked at firm rosters and who was staffing their cases in their 100 most frequently used firms. Then they fired 40 of them and went looking for firms that practiced what Walmart preached.

Next on Walmart’s radar: Flex time for attorneys, particularly women lawyers. Gearhart said that Walmart believes in providing adjustable hours to employees to allow them to juggle work and family. A comparable review is coming to see how the firms they use treat flex time. Any firm that handles Walmart’s work might want to listen hard to the company’s views on same.

I was watching a baseball game the other day on TV when a batter popped up a pitch.

“Infield fly rule,” one of the announcers was quick to say, as if that explained it all.

You can look it up: The Infield Fly Rule comes into play if there are fewer than two outs and there are runners at first and second or the bases are loaded. Any playable pop fly within the infield is an automatic out. Why? It would be easy for the infielder to say, oops, my bad, and let it drop, then pick up the ball and start a quick double play on baserunners who thought the ball would be caught. (See picture for how this might look).

Since a number of conditions have to converge, you don’t hear the Infield Fly Rule called very often. But watching this game made me think of something I heard back in law school — that some guy actually once wrote a law review article on the Infield Fly Rule.

Yep, there was a note published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review in 1975 entitled, “The Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule.”

It starts off, rather elegantly, with the line, “The Infield Fly Rule is neither a rule of law nor one of equity; it is a rule of baseball.”

For eight well-footnoted pages, the author slyly discusses the rule with the high tone and seriousness of purpose one finds in most law review articles. But he is, remember, talkin’ baseball.

The guy who wrote it, according to the New York Times, was William Stevens, who died two years ago. Apparently no one had ever had fun in a law review article before Stevens; one observer said Stevens’ little baseball note started “a cultural revolution.”

Well, a revolution among those who write law review notes, anyway.

U.S. News & World Report published a handy list last week: “5 Do’s and Don’ts for College Students Using Social Media.”

While aimed at college kids, this quick and basic primer on tools such as Facebook and Twitter is useful to (A) parents with a kid in college who may not get it yet, (B) law students or new graduates who may not get it yet or (C) younger associates at law firms who somehow got that far without getting it yet.

If you fall into category (A), feel free to send the link to this post to your kid. If you fall into category (B) or (C), you better keep reading.

The U.S. News piece said as many as 79 percent of recruiters look to the Internet for info on applicants. They want a sense of who a job applicant is…what’s she like beyond the strong resume she filed. Job applicants all too often are unaware that they’re being watched by potential employers. That young woman with the stellar resume may have posted Facebook pictures of herself chugging beer at a frat house. Given the generally crummy hiring scene (for new law graduates, it’s as bad as it’s been in a generation), it’s a buyer’s market.

You can look at the full U.S. News article here. But this is the quick version of their list:
1. Do create positive content
2. Don’t post questionable photos of yourself anywhere on the Internet
3. Do Google yourself
4. Don’t post negative status updates or tweets
5. Don’t make your online presence all about you

Most of all, be careful how you present yourself. A tip of the cap to our colleague Dave Rhea, the multimedia editor at Oklahoma City’s Journal Record, for first flagging and blogging about the U.S. News item. Rhea notes in his post that employers are all over the Internet, looking for scoop on prospects.

Drunken snaps from that debauched Spring Break trip to Florida may become, sadly, what he calls an FIL (a Future Income Limiter). So are neck and hand tattoos, Rhea says, but those are topics for another day.

It’s graduation season, and all across Virginia, indeed the country, schools will be holding commencement ceremonies, conferring degrees and welcoming new members of the community of educated individuals.

Some law schools graduate their students with everyone else, and some schools hold a separate ceremony. Doesn’t seem to be any real pattern.

At Washington & Lee, for example, the law school had its ceremony last week. American Bar Association President Carolyn Lamm was the commencement speaker.

Back in 1985, Sen. John Warner was our law school commencement speaker. I remember that he railed against a lawyer with a license plate, “I Sue 4 U” and not much else.

After seeing that Lamm, who practices in DC, was at W&L, I wondered who else was giving the address at other law schools.

U.S. District Judge James R. Spencer spoke at the University of Richmond law ceremonies, also held last weekend. A very quick Google search, and here you have a couple this weekend: Former Pennsylvania Gov. and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge is at Penn State. U.S. Sen. Scott Brown goes back to his alma mater, Boston College law. And retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor will speak to the law class at the school where she is chancellor, William & Mary.

The following weekend? The U.Va. law school also has tapped a U.S. Senator who is an alum, U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. At Vermont Law School, former Gov. Howard Dean will give the commencement address. Whether he’ll scream at the end has not been announced.

About 40,000 people will graduate from law school this month and next, and according to the Wall Street Journal, they face one of the worst hiring markets for new lawyers in a generation.

One of the problems is supply and demand. Law school enrollments and graduation rates have steady reasonably steady. But law firms and a host of other employers have cut hiring during the recession.

Judge Barbara Milano Keenan, formerly of the Supreme Court of Virginia and now of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, has some advice for more senior lawyers: Don’t be afraid to try something new, even at a later stage of your career.

Keenan (right), the featured speaker at yesterday’s Richmond Bar luncheon and Law Day celebration, spent more than 18 years as a member of Virginia’s high court. She said that now that she’s a federal judge, she feels like a “newbie.”

Speaking of her new job, she noted that the analysis is the same, but the subject matter is all new, And that’s exciting at the age of, well, she allowed that she turns 60 this year.

And she counseled the more senior members of the audience that you can indeed do something different even at “a respectable age,” she said, to chuckles in the audience.

Think of something fresh and “put a new twist on your career,” she urged.

Last week Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli made the rounds at his office, passing out lapel pins with the Great Seal of Virginia on them.

Well, not exactly the Great Seal as we know it today. The commonwealth’s current seal (at right) features Virtus, the Roman symbol of virtue, standing over the prostrate body of Tyranny. “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” is the motto, translated “Thus always to tyrants.” Oh, one more detail: Virtus had a bit of a wardrobe malfunction. Her left breast is exposed.

The Cuccinelli pins were more modest: Virtus is covered up. The pins apparently drew their inspiration from a prior version of the seal.

Pundits previously had a field day at the AG’s expense when he advised our colleges that they had to remove protection of employees for sexual orientation from their rules; Gov. Bob McDonnell moved quickly to squelch that with an executive order. With the cover-up pins, the wags had new material to work with.

Where was Cuccinelli when former U.S. AG John Ashcroft was mocked for covering up bare-breasted statues in Washington a few years back? As an aside, classical art always has featured, even celebrated, nude human figures. What’s next, one wonders. Boxer shorts on Michelangelo’s David?

“The image on my office lapel pin is similar to that of a large antique state flag that hangs in the Virginia Capitol,” Cuccinelli said. “That is where I got the idea for my pin. I liked this particular image and thought it would be something unique for my employees.”

A terse e-mail from the AG’s spokesman yesterday noted that the cover-up pins, paid for by Cuccinelli’s PAC, are no more. The AG said, “I cannot believe that joking with my staff about Virtue being a little more ‘virtuous’ in this antique version has become news.”

He added, “This is simply a media-made issue that has become distracting to the work of my office.” Ah, not the first time a politician who stepped in a pile blames the press. “I am going to end this distraction by discontinuing future use of the pin,” he said.

Cuccinelli ran a smart and disciplined campaign for AG last year. True to his word, he said he wouldn’t dodge a fight; he’s taken on the Obama administration on a number of issues, from health care to environmental protection. But in his first few months in office, he’s also shown the capacity for a tin ear, picking unnecessary and divisive fights, such as the sexual orientation issue or this pin brouhaha. At least by squashing the pin problem so quickly, maybe he’s displaying an important talent: Knowing when to punt.