Somebody’s Mom: Why do you spend so much time making jokes on the internet? Do you think anybody is going to hire you with that digital footprint?
A slew of Akiva Cohen’s coworkers prepared to rip Elon a new one:
People tend to mind their Ps & Qs the most on LinkedIn, but the wise know that each social media site is a potential interview opportunity. Rather than just retweeting and liking like the rest of us, Akiva Cohen managed to sift gold from a muddy Twittstorm several years back:
Here’s one way to build a legal team: Interview graduates from the top law schools or firms, then hire the most qualified.
Akiva Cohen, a trial lawyer at a small New York firm, tried a different way: Spend way too much time on Twitter, talking trash about other lawyers’ cases, then hire the people who post the smartest, most biting comments.
Now that is a good “prove your smarts” interview strategy! I would have appreciated if Cohen opened up his hiring prospects to people who preferred penning articles to Tweets, but I digress. Pettiness, much like compounding interest, is a miraculous human phenomena that has encouraged many a person to invest in things that ought be invested in. Cohen pulled from a pool of people who were very invested in pointing out and arguing against really bad legal arguments. Which, to anyone who knows the rules of the internet, makes perfect sense — why wouldn’t you use Cunningham’s Law to screen for talent? Thus began the Threadnought, much to Elon’s future chagrin. Backed by sharp legal reasoning and spite, well, read for yourself:
Soon, Mr. Cohen and his small team, all scattered around the country — in Hawaii, Colorado, Washington State, Long Island — were representing more than 200 former Twitter employees in two lawsuits and arbitration. The cases involved mountains of work against an adversary with seemingly bottomless resources, with no money coming in unless or until they prevail.
But if Mr. Cohen felt daunted by the task, he did not show it. “To be clear, Elon, you will lose, and you know it,” he wrote in an opening letter to Mr. Musk, outlining his clients’ demands. And “deposing you will be a joy.”
If Cohen decides to give up the law at any point, he’d make a killing writing one-liners for Bond villains. Not literally, but you know.
When it comes to losing money over firing Twitter employees, Elon’s incompetence has been impressively consistent. An average man-child would have stopped at firing the people who were very clearly on the “DO NOT FIRE” list or realized that they shouldn’t be calling the shots after they fired and mocked Iceland Monitors 2022 “Person Of The Year” for being disabled.
It isn’t looking too good for Elon’s hardcore team right about now. Or Twitter, for that matter. And to think, all of this could have been avoided with a combination of actually knowing defamation law and treating your employees well.
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.
