Lawyer Helps Smithsonian Find Secret Message on Abe Lincoln’s Gold Watch

We've had so much bad news in the legal industry recently (layoffs announced nearly daily) we thought we would lighten things up a bit and share this tidbit, courtesy of ABA Journal:

On the day the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, in a salvo that began the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln's gold pocket watch happened to be in a repair shop in the Washington, D.C., area.

So, the watchmaker later told his family—and, in 1906, the New York Times—he wrote a secret message on the inner workings. Passed down through the generations in the watchmaker's family, the story intrigued Douglas Stiles, his great-great-grandson, who practices real estate law in Waukegan, Ill., near Chicago. Stiles found the old New York Times article, and alerted the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, which was given the watch in 1958, recounts the Washington Post.

The rest of the story can be found here

Laid-Off Lawyers and Other Professionals

Excellent post today on WSJ.com, "Laid off lawyers and other professionals"

Writer E. Kinney Zalesne discusses the broad impact that the loss of these kinds of jobs have on the economy both locally (in cities such as San Francisco, New York and Boston) but also nationally. It is rightly pointed out that these are unprecedented times given the shift of labor in our work force (the move towards professional positions - especially among women).

An excerpt:

We don't know how deep this recession will be and how much of this class will be wiped out. At first the idea of "laid-off lawyers" seems like the butt of a joke. "About time they got theirs," many people will say to themselves. But it's not a laughing matter to the hundreds of thousands of people and their families in all the professions who worked and studied hard to get to the next level in life, only to have their jobs and careers wiped out along with so many others.