After almost three years working in the Obama administration’s Justice Department, Karol V. Mason has returned to Alston & Bird.

Mason, a bond lawyer who chaired the firm’s public finance group, left the firm in April 2009 to accept a post as a deputy associate attorney general. She had worked on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, serving as a member of its national finance committee and raising funds in Georgia.

She returns to Alston as  a partner and is a member of the firm’s real estate finance and capital markets group, according to an announcement from the firm. Mason will primarily work out of Atlanta but will also have an office in Washington. Her practice focus is public finance and project finance as well as guidance in government investigations.

Mason spent 26 years at Alston before joining the Justice Department and is a former chair of the firm’s partners committee. “It has always been our hope that Karol would return to the firm after completing her public service, and we are proud and excited to have her back among our ranks,” said Alston’s managing partner, Richard R. Hays in a statement.

The Emory Public Interest Committee is hosting its annual EPIC Inspiration Awards ceremony at 7 p.m. on Feb. 7. EPIC raised more than $150,000 last year for summer grants to Emory Law students to do public service work. The event is the group’s primary fundraiser and requires a $35 donation.

This year’s honorees are Norman L. Underwood of Troutman Sanders for his lifetime commitment to public service; Jan Pratt, who retired last year from her post as director of Emory Law School’s field placement and pro bono programs; and Susan C. Jamieson, who founded the Atlanta Legal Aid Society’s Mental Health and Disability Rights project 25 years ago. Jamieson won a landmark 1999 Supreme Court ruling for disability rights, Olmstead v. L.C., representing two women in a Georgia mental institution who wanted to live in the community.

To attend, contact Sue McAvoy at smcavoy@law.emory.edu.

A crowd of about 50 people braved the rain Friday afternoon, January 20, to voice their anger and concern over corporations having the same rights as individuals. They marched from Woodruff Park to the Richard B. Russell Federal Building for a “rally to end corporate personhood” as part of Occupy the Courts, a nationwide event.

“There is a huge amount of corporate money buying elections, and it’s a threat to our democracy,” said Linda Thomas, a retired schoolteacher from Marietta who joined the march to the federal courthouse. “A lot of people think that if they work hard they are going to be OK—and that’s just not the case,”

People in 131 cities protested in front of their local courthouses on the eve of the second anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Thomas supports Move to Amend, which wants to amend the Constitution to revoke corporate personhood. The group’s local chapter co-sponsored the action with Occupy Atlanta. “Under the best of circumstances, it’s hard for a working-class person to run for election. With Citizens United and the huge amounts of money being poured in by the corporations, it’s impossible,” she said.

“I think politicians running for office should be like NASCAR drivers and wear their corporate sponsorships on their backs,” said Ben Speight, a member of the Teamsters Union who spoke at the rally.

“And their spare tire on their back,” piped up a voice from the crowd to laughter and cheers.

One elderly woman made a cake with icing saying “End Corporate Personhood” that she offered to her fellow protestors, a mix of young and old.

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Law School Transparency has fired another salvo in its battle to make law schools more accurately report job placement information for their graduates. The group, founded in 2009, charged that “the vast majority of U.S. law schools are still hiding critical information from their applicants” in a study assessing the job placement information posted by the 197 ABA-accredited law schools on their websites.

The study, released Jan. 17, charges that law schools are providing job placement information that is often misleading:

–Only 17 percent of the 197 schools specify whether new graduates with jobs are employed full-time or part-time and only 10 percent say whether the jobs are long-term or short-term, the study found.

–Only 49 percent of schools provide salary information—and 78 percent of those provide it “in ways that mislead the reader.”

–Fully 51 percent of schools do not indicate how many graduates participated in their employment survey and returned a questionnaire. Since unemployed graduates are less likely to respond, this skews actual employment rates.

Chicago legal recruiter Mike Evers doesn’t mince words in his hiring forecast for 2012. Evers’ advice for unemployed attorneys is to broaden their search into smaller markets–and consider changing careers. “The market as a whole will not digest the enormous oversupply of litigators and generalists,” he warns.

There are plenty of “highly pedigreed generalists” seeking work, he says, but in-house legal departments want subject-matter specialists. Evers says in-house jobs are opening up only when someone leaves or retires. “Most of the demand will be about plugging specific holes.”

Labor and employment firm Fisher & Phillips has opened offices in Boston and Memphis, for a total of 27 flags on the map nationwide.

“We go where our clients want us and both Memphis and Boston are important markets to our clients,” said the firm’s chairman, Roger K. Quillen, in a statement.

In Boston the firm recruited Joseph W. Ambash from Greenberg Traurig. Ambash represented New Process Steel in a 2010 Supreme Court case ruling that the National Labor Relations Board cannot function without three members. He also represented Brown University in an NLRB case which held that graduate students are not employees under the National Labor Relations Act. He has served as chief negotiator in collective bargaining agreements in the public and private sectors, according to the firm.

Jeff Weintraub will lead Fisher & Phillips’ Memphis office and joined from Weintraub Law, which was formed in 1959. Craig Cowart also joins the firm’s new Memphis office from Kiesewetter Wise Kaplan Prather. Weintraub represents employers in union matters as well as employment disputes. Cowart handles employment litigation and administrative proceedings.

Arnall Golden Gregory has opened a Miami outpost devoted to the logistics industry. The firm recruited four lawyers from Miami’s Hyman, Spector & Mars—including name partner Andrew R. Spector—to launch the office. This is AGG’s second office outside of Atlanta; the firm opened a four-lawyer Washington office last January focused on privacy law.

“Arnall Golden Gregory has been working with Andrew Spector and his team for almost twenty years on matters involving the logistics industry. Combining his practice with ours was a natural evolution of the relationship,” said AGG’s managing partner, Glenn Hendrix, in a statement.

“The logistics industry has become increasingly complex and the combination of our practices will allow us to better meet the needs of the industry,” said Hendrix.

The other lawyers joining AGG from Hyman Spector are: Marc A. Rubin, Robert M. Borak and Beverly Greenberg.

Another Atlanta firm, Weissman Nowack Curry & Wilco, snagged two Hyman Spector lawyers in August to launch its own Miami office, handling community association law, foreclosures and other real estate-related matters.

If public interest law is your thing, don’t miss the fifth annual Public Interest Holiday Party tonight at Slice Downtown. Sixteen groups are hosting the party, which has grown larger every year.

David Dreyer, the chairman of the American Constitution Society’s Georgia lawyer chapter, said the bash outgrew last year’s venue. This year revelers will have the run of Slice for the evening, a pizza place at the corner of Poplar and Fairlie Streets.

Advocacy groups including the American Constitution Society’s Georgia lawyer chapter, the ACLU of Georgia, GreenLaw and Lambda Legal join legal aid stalwarts such as Atlanta Legal Aid Society, Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation, Georgia Legal Services Program and Southern Center for Human Rights.

The Federal Defender Program, Inc., Georgia Capital Defender, Georgia First Amendment Foundation, Georgia Justice Project, Georgia Resource Center and the Southern Region of the National Lawyers Guild are also hosting the festivities, along with the public interest sections of the Atlanta Bar Association and the Georgia Association of Black Women Attorneys.

The party is from 5:30 to 8:00 p.m. Slice is located at 85 Poplar St.

Those searching for just the right gift for the outdoorsman or woman on their holiday shopping list need look no further than The Little Book of Hunting & Fishing Law.

The pocket-sized book regales the reader with tales of hunting and fishing expeditions that ended up in the courts—including a case in which the exploding barrel of a shotgun triggered punitive damages and another where a city was sued after a man hunting on city-owned property shot and killed a jogger.

The small size makes this book just the thing for hunters waiting in a blind with time to kill and anglers waiting for fish to bite. It is the newest addition to an American Bar Association series that includes The Little Green Book of Golf Law and The Little Red Book of Wine Law.

The author, Cecil C. Kuhne III, is, appropriately, an inhabitant of Texas. Kuhne is a business litigator in the Dallas office of Fulbright & Jaworski.

Publicity materials do not say whether Dick Cheney’s accidental shooting in 2006 of his quail hunting partner, Harry Whittington, is included in the 128-page guide. Whittington, incidentally, is also a Texas lawyer.

Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School will open a Savannah branch next fall.

The American Bar Association has approved its application for a branch campus to be called the Savannah Law School. The target enrollment is for 95 students: 60 full-time and 35 part-time, according to an announcement from John Marshall.

John Marshall will begin hiring faculty and staff in the spring and is applying for provisional ABA accreditation. It has not yet announced a location for the branch campus.

The school will offer full-time and part-time tracks in its day program as well as a part-time evening program, which the announcement said is aimed at doctors, retired military, paralegals, law enforcement officers and others interested in a legal education.

This is not John Marshall’s first foray into Savannah. The school operated a branch campus there in the 1970s and early 1980s.

With the new Savannah Law School, students from the Savannah area and throughout the Atlantic Coastal Region can begin their legal careers closer to home, said Richardson Lynn, the dean of John Marshall and the new Savannah Law School.

Georgia has five ABA-accredited law schools: Emory University School of Law, Georgia State University College of Law and John Marshall in Atlanta, Mercer University’s Walter F. George School of Law in Macon and the University of Georgia School of Law in Athens.

The Savannah Law School is accepting applications beginning Dec. 15. Further information is available at savannahlawschool.org.