Nolo Contender for Honors

A fortuitous timing award should go to Nolo Press, a Berkeley publisher that plans to start selling later this month a computer disk featuring more than 200 attorney jokes and “hilariously mean remarks about lawyers.”

The promotion comes amid a call by Los Angeles lawyer and California Bar Assn. President Harvey Saferstein for a cease-fire on lawyer bashing and jokes. The Irell & Manella partner, who equates disparaging remarks about lawyers with hate speech, made the request after a deadly shooting spree in a San Francisco law office.

Nolo’s timing is just coincidental. The publisher had advertised the $9.95 disk prominently in its summer catalogue that came out before the San Francisco shooting and Saferstein’s plea. Nolo has been collecting lawyer jokes--many of them from lawyers--for 15 years and features them regularly in its publications.

The disk is divided into five subjects: “Lawyers as Vultures,” “The Mis-education of Lawyers,” “Lawyers as Ambulance Chasers,” “Nobody Loves a Lawyer” and “Lawyers in Love.”

A Nolo spokeswoman says the company expects the current controversy will neither hurt nor help sales. Nolo is promising the disk is “100% guaranteed” to “drive every lawyer you know nuts.”

No doubt Saferstein would agree.

Lawyer Bashing (Cont.)

Some people have suggested that the devouring of a lawyer by a Tyrannosaurus rex in Universal Pictures’ hit “Jurassic Park” constitutes picking on attorneys.

Universal officials, who point out that the lawyer also dies in Michael Crichton’s novel (albeit at the claws of a different dinosaur), say they have yet to feel any significant fallout from the current crusade against lawyer bashing.

As it happens, Universal Chairman Tom Pollock is a lawyer. So is his boss, MCA President Sidney Sheinberg. Both stopped practicing some time ago to become executives in the movie industry, where being eaten alive is just another occupational hazard.

Putting L.A. on Ice

Add another venerable Southern California institution--the Ice Capades--to the list of businesses fleeing Los Angeles.

Not that many people knew it was based here in the first place.

Still, Olympic skating star Dorothy Hamill--who, along with her investment partners, just finished buying the show--plans to move the headquarters to the notoriously frigid city of . . . Phoenix.

A spokeswoman says the show is moving because an empty airplane hangar in suburban Scottsdale is being converted into offices, a practice rink and sound stage.

Briefly . . .

A “turnkey” 900 number offering psychic predictions is being advertised for sale. . . . A nonprofit corporation in Idaho needled the Los Angeles County Economic Development Council by sending a list of firms it lured from California, along with the comment, “Keep up the good work, we need the jobs.” . . . “The Cart Assn. of America” trade group has formed in Squaw Valley, Calif., for vendors who sell hot dogs, shirts and other items from carts.