Women from village of Maijanjaré.

CARE’s general counsel, Kent Alexander, tells the Daily Report in a story today about his first trip to a crisis zone. He journeyed through Niger, where severe drought has caused a food crisis, and saw at first hand the relief agency’s work in the West African country.

Alexander chronicled his journey for CARE’s blog in an entry called “The Real Hunger Games,” which gives a more detailed account of his impressions, plus photos.

A posse of Atlanta lawyers plus a minister are heading to Washington on Monday at the invitation of President Obama to address the high judicial vacancy rate in federal courts.

The lawyers are Stephen Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights; former State Bar president Jeff Bramlett, a partner at Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore; David Dreyer of Chamberlain Hrdlicka; and Neil Kinkopf, a law professor at Georgia State University. They will be joined by the Rev. Timothy McDonald, who is the president of Concerned Black Clergy.

The five Atlantans are among 150 supporters from 27 states whom the president has called to Washington for a strategy session with administration officials on pushing more of Obama’s nominees through the Republican logjam in the Senate.

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Robert Schapiro has been appointed Emory University School of Law’s new dean, the school announced Thursday. Schapiro, who teaches constitutional law, became the interim dean a year ago after the resignation of David Partlett.

Partlett, who’d been appointed Emory Law’s dean in 2006, continues to teach courses in torts, judicial remedies and professional liability at the law school.

Schapiro has also served as Emory University’s associate vice provost for academic affairs and as co-director of the law school’s Center on Federalism and Intersystemic Governance. He teaches courses in constitutional law, federal courts and civil procedure.

In his year as interim dean, Schapiro led an alumni retreat focusing on the major transformations in the legal profession and has overseen the launch of the law school’s new Center for Professional Development and Career Strategy, according to the announcement. The school has also unveiled a year-long juris master’s degree program for non-lawyer professionals wanting an orientation in the law.

“Emory has never had a law school dean who is as credentialed in so many different ways, whether it’s his academic performance, clerking at the U.S Supreme Court, or the quality of his scholarship,” said Ben Johnson, the chair of Emory’s board of trustees, in the announcement.

Schapiro received his B.A. from Yale University in 1984 and then his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1990, after earning a master’s degree in history from Stanford in the interim. He clerked for Judge Pierre Leval of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and then Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court. He worked as a litigation associate at Sidley & Austin in Washington before joining the Emory Law faculty in 1995.

Ken Britt, the longtime executive director of Alston & Bird until his 2009 retirement, is running for the state House of Representatives seat to be vacated by Democratic Rep. Kathy Ashe—and his Alston colleague of many years, Ben Johnson, will serve as his campaign chair. Johnson was Alston’s managing partner for more than a decade, until retiring at the end of 2008.

Britt decided to run for the District 56 seat after Ashe announced earlier this month that she will not run for reelection, after serving in the post for more than 20 years. The district includes the neighborhoods of Ansley Park, Sherwood Forest, Midtown, Home Park and Georgia Tech.

Britt, who has lived in District 56 for 15 years, is a longtime community and political activist, in addition to being a former law firm leader. Alston established the Kenneth F. Britt Award for Community Service when Britt took early retirement in 2009, in honor of his activities over the years. In a 2008 profile with the Daily Report on becoming co-chairman of the board of the Human Rights Campaign—the nation’s largest LGBT rights group—Britt joked that his de facto title for years was “openly gay executive director of Alston & Bird.” He said then that the AIDS crisis galvanized him into activism in the mid-80s and led to him coming out in his professional life.

He has helped out behind the scenes on several local political campaigns, but he’s never run for office himself. “This would be a natural next step for me, given my lifelong engagement in local, state and national politics. The new district includes great Atlanta neighborhoods with big plans and big needs,” Britt said in a statement.

He was chairman of Alex Wan’s successful 2009 race for Atlanta City Counsel and served as treasurer and campaign advisor for Joan Garner’s election in 2010 to the Fulton County Commission. He was a member of the 2010 Coordinated Campaign Committee for the Democratic Party of Georgia and served as a legislative volunteer during the 2011 legislative session, working with Cathy Woolard.

There are four openly gay candidates in the Georgia House, according to Georgia Voice: Reps. Karla Drenner, Simone Bell, Rashad Taylor and Keisha Waites. All are Democrats.

Emory Law School is hosting a symposium on Friday challenging the notion that the most convincing evidence comes from eyewitnesses. Speakers include law officers, policy advocates and criminologists, who will explain factors leading to misidentification by eyewitnesses and outline ways to improve identification accuracy. They will also discuss the impact of shrinking state budgets on policy reforms to improve evidence collection.

Speakers include Steve Saloom from the Innocence Project, Clayton County sheriff Kem Kimbrough, LaGrange police chief Louis Dekmar, Liz Markowitz, who is a Fulton County Public Defender and Jennifer Dysart, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

One of the organizers, Reade Seligmann, was one of the three defendants falsely accused in the 2006 Duke Lacrosse case. He is now a second-year law student at Emory.

The conference is free and open to the public. It will take place from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Emory Law’s Tull Auditorium at 1301 Clifton Rd. Attendees are eligible for three free CLE credits. To register, click here.

Rich Merritt reports that a contract gig doing e-discovery just ended after the client replaced Merritt and other attorneys poring through thousands of pages of documents with “an algorithm that can do a better job than 250 of us could do.”

Merritt made a stir locally when he published his coming-of-age memoir, “Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star,” while working as a contract attorney at Powell Goldstein (now Bryan Cave). He moved to New York soon after, and for the last few years he’s supported himself as a contract attorney while pursuing his writing aspirations.

“Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star” tells Merritt’s story of accepting himself as a gay man on his journey from a small town in South Carolina to the Marines to a career as a lawyer. He published a novel, “Code of Conduct,” based on his eight years serving in the Marines after the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” law took effect, and is currently at work on his second novel.

“When I gave up my lucrative job on the partnership track, in exchange for a stress-free day job to support my writing habit, I never expected to be put out of work by mathematics,” Merritt writes on his blog. “Sophisticated search algorithms can tell if a document is responsive to a request more thoroughly and much more quickly than person reading the document. And an algorithm’s eyes don’t get blurry.”

Computer programs that can search electronic documents more effectively than human lawyer eyes will have effects up the legal food chain, Merritt predicts, since fewer contract and staff attorneys reviewing e-discovery mean fewer billable hours for the firms employing them. Ultimately, he speculates, this could mean the crumbling of the American skyline–but you’ll have to check the blog post to learn why.

One of the law schools being sued over its employment statistics just had its motion to dismiss denied Wednesday, according to Above the Law. Jesse Strauss and David Anziska, the New York
lawyers behind the suits, told the legal gossip blog today that Thomas Jefferson School of Law’s motion to dismiss got tossed.

They also announced that they plan to sue 20 additional schools. Team Strauss/Anziska, as Above the Law has dubbed the litigators, has filed suit against 14 law schools so far. Above the Law has the list of the 20 additional schools. None are in Georgia.

New York Magazine has an interesting story profiling the three lawyers behind the suits accusing New York Law School, Thomas M. Cooley Law School and a dozen other schools of making misleading claims about job placement rates for their graduates. More suits are in the offing. The teaser says it all:

Whereas, many legal degrees are no longer worth the paper they’re printed on; and whereas, the institutes issuing those J.D.’s might be inflating their job-placement rates; and whereas, a lot of unemployed graduates feel cheated out of the lives they thought they’d been promised; now, therefore, be it resolved: They had no choice but to sue.

McKenna Long & Aldridge has completed its merger with California firm Luce Forward, Hamilton & Scripps, it announced Tuesday.

The deal gives the combined firm, still called McKenna Long & Aldridge, one of the largest real estate practices in California and critical mass in the California legal market. It adds Luce Forward’s 124 lawyers in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco to the 116 McKenna already has in those three cities, as the firm bets on a comeback in real estate.

Luce Forward, based in San Diego, reported a 17.7 percent drop in revenue last year to $83.5 million and its profits per partner slid 20.7 percent to $535,000. McKenna reported a revenue increase of 1 percent, from $276.5 million to $279.5 million, and a 4.3 percent increase in profit per equity partner, to $965,000 according to surveys of large firm finances performed by the Daily Report and  its San Francisco-based affiliate, The Recorder, for The American Lawyer magazine.

With the completion of the merger, McKenna Long & Aldridge has 575 lawyers and public policy advisors in 13 offices, including five in California.

Patrick Millsaps has become the chief of staff for Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign, after starting out as the campaign’s deputy general counsel in Iowa in December. Millsaps is a partner with Georgia firm Hall Booth Smith & Slover and former chairman of the Georgia Ethics Commission.

Millsaps planned to stay on the campaign trail only through the South Carolina primary—until Gingrich made him chief of staff last week, according to an announcement from Hall Booth. “It’s great having a Georgia native help out on the campaign trail—he reminds me of home, and the good people of Georgia,” said Gingrich in the statement.

“We are thrilled to have Patrick join our team. He brings to the team an ability to think critically in tough situations and provides insight and advice on how to best move forward strategically,” Gingrich said.