How many news cycles can this story dominate?

Scott, this scandal has officially joined the list of Things That I Hate -- in no particular order:

1. Flatbread;
2. The Case That Dare Not Speak Its Name;
3. Any current or former lovers of Drew Barrymore;
4. Metadata;
5. Flavored vodka;
6. Jeremy Piven and/or Brett Ratner;
7. Pesto wraps;
8. Certain Herald TV critics (Glenn was right about V however -- it rocked).

Oh the melodrama:

Rothstein mused that he had three options -- kill himself, live life "on the lam as a fugitive'' or go to prison and risk being killed there because he had made enemies, said the law firm's co-founder, Stuart Rosenfeldt, according to the website. Rosenfeldt talked to Rothstein, urging him to "choose life.''

I bet that's the first time a George Michael T shirt saved a high-powered lawyer from suicide.

Scott seems to possess a perfect storm of characteristics -- talented yet narcissistic, delusions of grandeur, persecution complex, excessive displays of wealth even by South Florida standards, megalomania and a sense that the entire world revolves around him -- in other words, your typical successful South Florida trial lawyer.

Consider the stories coming out -- private elevators, a car fetish, carrying a gun in an ankle holster, blowing $10 million a month.

Indeed, look at the comments section of Bob Norman's "Jewish Avenger" story -- there is definitely something not right about the way Scott engages Norman.

Are there some chemical or other disorders at work here?

Now that he's down, it seems everyone has a negative Rothstein story -- yet some of these folks sat on their feelings or refused to act on them, no?

Roger Stone now says Scott "never added up"; Bill Scherer says "[w]e all wondered where the money came from"; Michael Goldberg says Scott's spending "made no sense." Sunshine Charlie says "I think everybody heard rumors."

My friend Brian Tannebaum wonders how in this recession a firm can go from seven lawyers to seventy and no one questions why or how?

He relates a story of how he drove 40 minutes to meet with Scott for lunch, only to be totally stiffed:

I never met Scott Rothstein. He ducked out a few minutes before our lunch a few years ago. His secretary telling me and his colleague, who set up the lunch: "he went to lunch." There was no further inquiry as we were not entitled to even be standing by his office, an "off-limits" area of the firm. Instead I went to lunch with some other lawyers in the firm who felt they needed to take pity on me for my wasted 40 minute drive, all of them telling me in response to the unprofessional behavior of their king: "I'm not surprised." "That's Scott."

These out-of-control legal types, of which I know many, all have enablers -- those who justify, excuse, or clean up the mess left by the large lives of the bosses they serve, and who not coincidentally benefit from being near to the flame.

Now we know that a seventy lawyer firm, with only two equity partners, really only had one -- as Stuart Rosenfeldt apparently had no signatory authority on certain firm accounts and there is suddenly only $500k left in the firm's operating account.

Judge Streitfeld called Rosenfeldt "clueless" about the firm's finances at a hearing yesterday. Stuart has since invested a large chunk of his own money to keep salaries paid and the firm afloat.

There are lots of victims here, including many many fine lawyers at RRA, but a few of us in the South Florida legal and business communities should probably step up and acknowledge we could have been a bit more proactive on what some apparently suspected all along.

I had some time on my hands yesterday, so I went ahead and did a Jay Z-White Album-style mashup of the Congressional testimony on Iqbal yesterday and John Lennon's seminal Plastic Ono Band album from 1970 -- it starts with a gong and a raspy-voiced John primal screaming "Mama don't GOOOOOOOOOO!!, Iqbal stay home" and ends with Lennon cooing to Arlen Specter "Rule 8 and me, that's reality."

I think it came out pretty.....what, was I the only one to think of that?

But can you believe a group of Congresspeople actually got together yesterday on the Hill and discussed Iqbal, which has already been cited 2700 times in federal court:

"The Iqbal decision will effectively slam shut the courthouse door on legitimate plaintiffs based on the judge's take on the plausibility of a claim, rather than on the actual evidence," Nadler said. The bill will be similar to one introduced earlier this year in the Senate by Sen. Arlen Specter (D., Penn.) but will spell out the new standards more specifically.

The proposed legislation would return pleading standards to where they were after the Supreme Court's 1957 Conley v. Gibson decision, which stated that defendants should have "fair notice" of any claim, but said only cases lacking strong evidence should be dismissed.

Hmm, I've heard of that before -- it's called Rule 8(a).

I knew Specter was old, but he's going all the way back to 1957 and Conley v. Gibson -- hail, that's pre-Mad Men old.

Not so fast, says the dude who actually argued Iqbal, who predicts Gloom and Doom, cats and dogs etc. if we go back to the way things used to be just five months ago:

If passed, the bill could raise legal fees for companies. Electronic discovery proceedings can cost millions of dollars and even tens of millions in anti-trust and other complicated cases, said Gregory Katsas, former U.S. assistant attorney general who helped represent the U.S. government in Ashcroft v. Iqbal.

Come on -- you'd have to be a pretty bad lawyer if you couldn't get a motion to dismiss granted pre-Iqbal if your grounds were that strong.

The problem is the nearly formless "implausibility" standard, which introduces a huge amount of judicial discretion at too early a stage:

"The bottom line is that the Supreme Court knows what the impact of this decision is," Johnson said. "Even defense lawyers have called the Iqbal decision an unexpected gift for the business community."

You know, I find plenty of things "implausible" -- Drew Barrymore dating that idiot from the Mac commercial, for example, but should I get to decide everything?

Ok, don't answer that.

A few years ago everyone wanted to talk about "metadata."

There were CLE seminars on it, papers, you name it.

Of course the Florida Bar got involved and the Florida Bar Board of Governors held a conference and naturally everyone got very worried about it -- so worried that several of the board members hadn't heard the word "metadata" until the meeting in which they immediately voted to denounce it.

I don't want to say it reached what I would describe as the highest level of inordinate outsized media attention --"flatbread mania" if you will, but it got up there.

Add to that the annoying obligation recently imposed by the CM/ECF system to check off your awareness of your redaction responsibilities every time you log on -- thank you, stupid bankruptcy lawyers! -- and you have a perfect storm of y2k-style paranoia brewing.

Just a few moments ago I received this email from a federal district court advising that even your well-intentioned yet totally lame redaction methods may be inadequate:

Some redaction techniques used when e-filing are ineffective, in that the text intended to be hidden or deleted can be read via a variety of techniques. And, because information about the document, called "metadata", is also stored inside the document, it is often viewable as well. Examples of metadata and hidden data include the name and type of file, the name of the author, the location of the file on your file server, the full-sized version of a cropped picture, and prior revisions of the text.

E-filers must use extra care to make sure that the PDF documents to be submitted to ECF are fully and completely free of any hidden data which may contain redacted information. The protection of sensitive data can be compromised if improper redaction techniques are used. Here are a couple of examples of sensitive-data visibility issues:

* Highlighting text in black or using a black box over the data in MS Word or Adobe Acrobat will not protect the data from being able to be seen. Changing the text color to white so it disappears against the white screen/paper is similarly ineffective.

* Previous revisions and deleted text may be able to be seen by manipulating an Adobe Acrobat file.

Listen, I'M JUST TRYING TO FILE A NOTICE OF APPEARANCE HERE!

If somebody wants to take the time to unpack my one page notice and learn that I spent half the day rewriting the first page of the brilliant graphic novelization of Kafka's Metamorphosis to include wild half-man, half-bug sex between Gregor Samsa and Drew Barrymore, so be it:

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.

“What’s happened to me,” he thought. It was no dream. His room, a proper room for a human being, only somewhat too small, lay quietly between the four well-known walls. Above the table, on which an unpacked collection of sample cloth goods was spread out—Samsa was a travelling salesman—hung the picture which he had cut out of an illustrated magazine a little while ago and set in a pretty gilt frame. It was a picture of Drew Barrymore from her January 1995 Playboy pictorial, with several well-placed tattoos and a smile that could make a man go buggy with primal animal desire. She sat erect there, lifting up in the direction of the viewer a solid fur muff into which her entire forearm had disappeared.

It goes on from there, but you get the picture.

There, I hope it was worth it, all you efiling metadata thieves -- happy now?