Author: TSA Press

The reality of 2020 is that schools — even law schools — have moved online. Perhaps in person instruction will resurface before the end of the semester, maybe, but for now the reality is online classes.

Zoom School of Law is a mixed bag. Professors were not prepared to move their classes online due to a pandemic. Students are finding it’s even harder to concentrate from home with the constant blitz of coronavirus news as a backdrop than it ever was in the physical law school building. Plus there’s the constant stress and anxiety as no one knows exactly how or when this will end or what long term impact it will have on society — and on law school grades.

Alex Nunn, law professor at University of Arkansas School of Law, understands. And rather that force students to still through another boring lecture, he’s decided to spice it up. What does that mean? There are graphics, obvi, but more importantly it’s sprinkled with humor about the impending apocalypse making it a true gem.

Anyway, watch the two minute preview of the class. It’s definitely worth your chickens and pedialyte.

Is your law prof also hitting online classes out of the park during the pandemic? We’d love to hear about it! Please text (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Law School] Funny Lectures”) with your best stories about law school remote teaching. Please include clips if available.

Stay safe out there, and wash your hands!

---

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

While we are well-positioned to execute the combination on April 1, we believe the decision to postpone is in the best interest of our attorneys, staff, and clients. Postponing the merger will allow our attorneys to remain focused on excellent client care and will allow all our people to prioritize the health and safety of their families and themselves at this difficult time.

—  an except from an announcement posted on the Troutman Sanders website, announcing that its planned merger with Pepper Hamilton is being postponed until July 1, 2020. When the merger is complete this summer, the combined firm of Troutman Pepper will have 1,100 lawyers across 23 offices.

---

Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Ed. note: This was written with one hand while helping a toddler with the other and rocking an infant in a carrier with one foot, which is a far more realistic work-from-home childcare plan than the federal government has offered.

Thanks to the global pandemic that is the coronavirus, law firms of all kinds are bending over backwards to offer their employees feasible work-from-home platforms so that business may go on as usual — or as close to usual as possible. Of course, this isn’t always possible when children are involved, and while the coronavirus crisis is ongoing, children are going to be heavily involved in their parents’ lives.

For the purposes of social distancing, schools in many states have closed their doors and have turned to virtual classrooms, with e-learning plans in effect for students in preschool all the way through high school. Some parents are now lawyers and teachers, which throws a wrench into the whole concept of working from home.

But not to worry, because certain federal agencies have come up with a way for parents to manage both their work and childcare responsibilities. The example schedule below reportedly comes from the Securities and Exchange Commission, and it’s been described by sources in the following colorful ways:

• “Fucking insane”;
• “Nauseating”; and
• “Even more burdensome than parenting regularly is.”

Without further ado, here’s a federal agency’s ideas for a feasible WFH childcare plan:

What kind of fantasyland does this childcare plan come from? When (not if) I’m awake at 5:30 a.m., it’s because I’ve already started my childcare “tour of duty” for the day. No day exists where a parent without household help doesn’t have to perform childcare responsibilities prior to 9:30 a.m. If you think a parent is going to have uninterrupted time in the afternoon to do work from 3 to 6 p.m., then you’ve got another thing coming. The only realistic aspects of this plan are the fact that there’s no time for the parent to eat or sleep for more than five-and-a-half hours (at least that’s what it’s like in a household with a 3-year-old and a 3-month-old).

Much like the parents who are expected to model their work-from-home and childcare arrangements after this example, this isn’t going to work.

Earlier: Prior ATL coverage of the coronavirus crisis

---

Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

The coronavirus pandemic is going to throw a wrench into the world economy and our current way of life. Governments are banning social gatherings and shutting down certain businesses in the name of public safety. Everyone is practicing social distancing. Businesses are adapting by allowing some employees to work from home, reducing hours and laying off others. Despite those mitigation efforts, many of the forecasts are that infection rates will increase. Some of the infected will become seriously ill which means that they and their families will be burdened with high medical costs and lost earnings. It will only be a matter of time before someone you know is infected by the novel coronavirus. You might be infected. We must all be prepared.

Thankfully, the government is acting. The Federal Reserve reduced the interest rate to an all-time low. Congress is quickly working on a relief bill that would provide sick leave, emergency loans and free coronavirus testing. President Donald Trump announced that federal student loan interest accrual will be halted. And Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that tax payments can be delayed for up to 90 days although the filing deadline has remained the same.

Can anything be done to improve your position during this crisis? Should you pay off your federal loans and switch to a private loan with lower interest rates? Or should you try to make the most of it by investing or purchasing a house? Or just wait and see what happens? Of course, everyone has their own goals and levels of risk tolerance so it’s hard to give a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, I would like to offer a few things to think about.

First, and most importantly, do what you can to stay healthy. Avoid activities that can expose you to the coronavirus. The ROI on your ETFs means little in the ICU. Make sure your health insurance premiums are paid up and have a fund ready to pay any co-pays and deductibles in case the worst happens. Start a tax-deductible health savings account if you have a high-deductible plan.

Second, prepare yourself for a layoff. Lawyers are not likely to be laid off immediately but if the recession continues for a prolonged period of time, the chances are higher. Understand your state’s unemployment benefit rules and how to qualify for them, particularly constructive dismissal and wrongful termination laws. Save money to prepare to pay upcoming bills. While it is nice of you to purchase gift certificates for your favorite local restaurant or give a large tip, remember to put on your oxygen mask before helping others put on theirs.

Speaking of unemployment benefits, while it is common knowledge that self-employed people are not eligible, there might be a way around it. For example, in California and some other states, a shareholder of a corporation who is also an officer-employee can be laid off by the corporation and still qualify for unemployment and disability benefits. However, the amount of the benefit will depend on his W-2 salary from the corporation. Those who lowballed their salary will be stuck with lower unemployment benefits. That information could be useful for clients who are restaurant or fitness gym owners whose businesses were forcibly closed by the government.

Third, consider the pros and cons of refinancing out of your federal student loans. While the lower interest rates of private student loans might tempt you to ditch your federal loans with the 6.8% interest rate, remember what you are giving up. Private loans generally do not have income-based repayment plans in case you get laid off or fall on hard times. And private lenders don’t have a PSLF program since they couldn’t care less if you spent 10 years helping the indigent. They may work with you in the short run through forbearances or an altered payment plan, but in the long run, they want to get paid. And they will not qualify for any interest or payment relief proposals currently in the works.

Speaking of which, President Trump only mentioned an interest accrual halt on existing federal student loans. He did not mention payment relief. So while you will have to continue making your current payments, at least it will pay down the principal faster. This will be most beneficial to those who plan to pay off their loans although refinancing might be an alternative option. For those on IBR plans paying $100 per month on a $400,000 student loan bill until forgiveness, stopping interest won’t help them much. Considering the dire economic circumstances, payment relief would be more appropriate.

Fourth, during your self-quarantine, look for state and local relief efforts that you can take advantage of. For example, New York is suspending state debt collection –- including student loan and medical bills -– owed to the state. California will extend tax-return filing and payment deadlines.

And last, should you invest or buy a house? Honestly, I don’t know. I’m not a financial advisor nor can I predict the future. You might have some hot stock tips (my email is below) or see a house that is just right for you. If you saved a nest egg during the economic boom and see a deal on a house, then it might be a good idea to make an offer. A diversified index fund might be a good place to put your money. Or you should max out your 401(k). Or you can take a shot at buying Blue Apron stock hoping it will make a comeback since fewer people will be eating out. All I can say is don’t invest with your rent money or your emergency medical fund.

In these chaotic times, we should be prepared to weather the storm. But the uncertainty could provide opportunities to improve our financial position in the long run. Personally, I think it is best to wait and see. Governments are trying to figure out what to do and the market is trying to adjust. Making a rushed decision is a gamble and can be a major financial mistake. But keep an eye on what’s going on and act accordingly. And in the meantime, stay healthy.

---

Steven Chung is a tax attorney in Los Angeles, California. He helps people with basic tax planning and resolve tax disputes. He is also sympathetic to people with large student loans. He can be reached via email at sachimalbe@excite.com. Or you can connect with him on Twitter (@stevenchung) and connect with him on LinkedIn.

We are sufficiently familiar with the COVID-19 outbreak that cancellations are the new normal. So when the Law School Admission Council, the group that administers the LSAT, announced earlier this week that they were canceling the March administration of the law school entrance exam worldwide, well, it wasn’t much of a shock.

Indeed, LSAC president Kellye Testy told Law.com that applicants were actually happy about the change:

“They not only expected it, it was met with great relief,” Testy said, noting that the council has received many emails and online comments saying it did the right thing.

And procrastinators around the world rejoiced.

Those who were registered for the March 30th exam will be automatically registered for the next administration in their area. For those in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands that means the April 25th LSAT, while folks in other locations will have to wait until June.

The good news is that of the ~9,000 people signed up for the March test, only 470 were planning on using the score in fall 2020 admissions. At least as far as law school admissions goes, coronavirus appears to have excellent timing.

“Thankfully, we’re pretty far along in the [current] admission cycle,” Testy said. “Most schools already had deadlines, or have them in early April. Most students are already tested and are maybe finishing up applications. There’s not many who are really in need of that score in order to apply.”

As of now, only the March administration has been canceled, but the LSAC is working on contingencies in case the April test also needs to be dropped too. Testy said they’re considering adding a May administration of the LSAT as well as a remote administration of the entrance exam. That a remote LSAT is even in discussion is only because the exam moved over to to a digital format last year — a move that’s gone over pretty well — and it has given the LSAC the experience to think outside the box during the pandemic:

Testy noted that the writing portion of the LSAT is currently administered remotely. “You’re sitting in your home, and there is a software system that allows you to take the test from your own computer. The idea is that you can take it remotely, and it would be secure.”

Hopefully this makes applying to law school during a global health crisis a little easier.

---

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

Sorry about that whole “pandemic” thing, America, but Rand Paul’s got a point to make here!

After the House passed a bipartisan coronavirus relief bill last week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Republicans yesterday “to gag and vote for it,” postponing the regularly scheduled rancorous posturing and point-scoring in light of the hundreds of thousands of people who just found themselves without a paycheck. With unanimous consent of all 100 senators, the bill could be fast-tracked for immediate approval.

“We’re able to rise above our normal partisanship and many times our normal positions because these are not ordinary times. This is not an ordinary time,” McConnell said, according to NBC.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin underlined the point yesterday at luncheon with Republican senators, warning that, absent immediate corrective action, we might be looking at 20 percent unemployment. Don’t worry, though, they dispensed with their regular buffet line, so your favorite septuagenarian obstructionists should be totally fine. Whew!

But everywhere Rand Paul goes, there he is. The senator is holding up free coronavirus testing, expansion of Medicaid and food stamps, and unemployment relief to offer an amendment to end the war in Afghanistan. Which is an important issue, and also, dude, you’re really doing this NOW?

Oh, but he is! Senator Paul has a point to make, so he’s insisting on an amendment to the House package — undoubtedly the first of many relief measures — which will give him time for useless floor debate on ending the war in Afghanistan. And without unanimity, the bill has to go through regular process.

This amendment has absolutely zero chance of passing, but by God old Rand is going to stage this interpretive dance in Congress if it’s the last thing he does. Just the way he did when he held up the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund last June to make a point about balanced budgets. Because Rand Paul is a man of principle!

Which will no doubt be a great comfort to the millions of Americans staring down weeks trapped in the house wondering if their jobs will be there when this nightmare is finally over with. Never change, Rand!

Senate coronavirus vote delayed after Rand Paul pushes doomed amendment [NBC]

---

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

As mentioned in prior articles, many attorneys focus far too much on insulating themselves from liability. Indeed, lawyers are often afraid to look bad in front of their bosses or face malpractice claims, and this sometimes forces many attorneys to cover themselves at the expense of their clients. One reason why attorneys may focus on shielding themselves from blowback is because partners at a variety of law firms often concern themselves more with assigning blame when something goes wrong than simply solving issues. Nevertheless, partners should focus less on assigning blame and should strive to spend the most energy possible finding solutions for clients.

Lawyers, like every other type of professional, mess up from time to time. Sometimes, attorneys screw up because they are inexperienced and do not know the correct procedure or substantive law to solve an issue. Pretty much every “baby lawyer” has a hard time figuring out when notices to admit need to be responded to, when paperwork needs to be filed, and all of the other practical legal strategies that professors don’t teach you in law school. In addition, lawyers sometimes mess up because they are too busy. I once worked at a firm where attorneys were responsible for handling hundreds of cases, and it was naturally easy for something to slip through the cracks with such a workload.

At some of the firms at which I worked, partners were not particularly focused on assigning blame, and used mess-ups as teaching moments. If something was not filed properly or was filed after a deadline, this was typically a good learning experience for how to properly litigate matters. Most screw-ups can be fixed, and few will kill a litigation matter or deal. As a result, there was usually ample opportunity to focus on solving problems and learning for future situations.

However, I also worked at firms where partners spent far too much time trying to figure out who exactly screwed up when something went wrong. These partners were like Captain Hindsight (there is a long history of Above the Law writers citing to South Park!), trying to piece together email chains and other evidence needed to figure out precisely who was to blame for a misstep. While it may be important to find out who is the weakest link on a team to guide future employment decisions, it was often absurd how much time and energy partners spent on figuring out who had messed up.

When I worked in Biglaw, I was once tasked by a partner to assist her in an investigation of who had screwed up on a particular project. Our team had written a motion that had been denied by the judge. In a footnote of the judge’s opinion, the judge said that one of our citations did not stand for the proposition that we said it stood for in the brief. Since it is uncommon for a court to point out such a misstep in a footnote, we were somewhat embarrassed in front of the client for this issue.

Since I hadn’t worked at the firm when the motion was briefed (and could therefore not be assigned any blame) the partner tasked me with figuring out who was liable for this situation. While I can understand why a firm would want to do a retrospective on how the faulty citation ended up in the brief, this more introspective type of assessment was above my pay grade. I was simply tasked with determining if there was actually a mess-up and who was responsible for dropping the ball.

Somehow, word got out to other associates that I was conducting this project, and one of the associates who had worked on the brief called my office phone. He told me that the brief was written under enormous time pressure months ago, and the associates were not able to cite check and proofread the brief as much as they ordinarily would. The associate subtly requested that I spin the situation in the light most favorable to the associates that had worked on the brief.

I ended up telling the partner that the proposition that was cited in the brief was in the case cited, but simply in a different place in the opinion than the location referenced in the citation. It was a stretch to make this assertion, but I wanted to protect the associates and just complete the task investigating the mess-up with as little blowback as possible. However, there was really no reason to focus so much on assigning blame, and we could have simply changed our procedures moving forward without worrying associates that they might face serious consequences from a relatively minor mess-up.

Again, I’m not saying that it is bad for law firms to be reflective and assess on how they messed up and how they can improve in the future. However, partners should not perpetuate a culture where blame is delegated over focusing on how to solve an issue. Needlessly assigning blame can hurt morale and divert resources away from fixing problems.

---

Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

The USNWR rankings are out, not that anyone cares right now. Until the coronavirus lockdown is complete, there are really only two law schools out there so let’s rank them like U.S. News would:

1. The Zoom School of Law
RNP. Blackboard

Congratulations on joining the T1!

To commemorate this bizarre time in your professional lives — a time you’ll be telling the 2042 summer associate class all about over cocktails at an outing to an oceanside resort (given climate change models, we’ll assume this resort is in Tennessee) — you should get some swag! And while you’re at it, contribute to a good cause.

The folks over at Law School Memes for Edgy T-14s have a Zoom School of Law shirt celebrating your new law school with the proceeds going to fund food banks — which is a critically important cause with everyone losing their jobs around the country:

We, the admins of Law School Memes for Edgy T-14s, are very excited to share our school spirit with the world! 100% of the proceeds from this campaign will be donated to Feeding America, which funds a network of food banks across the US. The importance of food banks is ever increasing as schools around the country are closing, eliminating the source of two meals a day for millions of kids. Every dollar donated to Feeding America provides ten meals for families facing hunger. So rock your Zoom School of Law pride, show your grandkids this memory of what law school was like, and help us fund food banks nationwide.

Be sure to grab a shirt here.

---

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

I am going to take a controversial position and say that coronavirus is bad. As I write this, on March 15, 2020, 60 of our fellow Americans have been felled by the coronavirus. Five-dozen deaths is not a trivial amount, and there are surely going to be many more before things get back to normal.

Still, I sort of get what Donald Trump was initially trying to mumble his way through on this one. It’s weird which deadly threats we choose to do something about and which we just happily ignore.

Regular old influenza killed 79,000 Americans over the 2017-18 flu season. Over the 2018-19 season, we did a bit better, losing only an estimated maximum of 57,300 of our countrymen and countrywomen. The sum total of what we’ve chosen to do about this is hang up those little flyers around offices passively suggesting that people get a flu shot that is only going to be 40 percent to 60 percent effective anyway. If we shut down public life every flu season like we’re doing right now due to the coronavirus, we could absolutely save thousands of flu victims.

Flu is kind of the low-hanging fruit in this analogy, but all sorts of other preventable things are killing thousands of us every time we all walk out the door. We fatally drove our vehicles into each other 38,000 times last year in this country. We Americans fatally poisoned 69,029 of ourselves from February 2018 to February 2019, by going out and getting, and then ingesting, far too many drugs. We shot to death 39,773 of ourselves in 2017, the last year for which reliable gun death data is available. Lots of things we could have done to prevent these deaths would have fallen far short of shutting down international travel and tanking the economy. But we didn’t do much.

If you go outside today, you’re still way more likely to get creamed by a truck or shot by your neighbor than to develop a fatal case of COVID-19. But everyone’s collective panic about one new possible way to die is ironically going to have the unintended result of preventing a lot of us from departing apropos of the many way more likely ways to die that are already out there.

In 2013, researchers at the Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing in the Netherlands released a comprehensive study looking at business cycles and mortality rates between 1950 and 2008 in 19 developed countries, including the United States. What they found is that a particularly strong economy can kill you.

“In developed countries, mortality rates increase during upward cycles in the economy and decrease during downward cycles,” one of the researchers, Herbert J. A. Rolden, wrote. For every one percent increase in GDP, researchers found that the death rate for older men (age 70 to 74) in developed countries increased by about a third of a percentage point. The death rate for middle-aged men (defined as those age 40 to 44) increased even more than it did for older men, by 0.38 percent. Surprising no one, a surging economy wasn’t quite as dangerous for women, but older women and middle-aged women still saw 0.18 percent and 0.15 percent increases in their mortality rates, respectively, for every one percent boost to GDP.

To give you an idea of what this means, the current overall U.S. death rate is 8.880 deaths per 1000 people, so a 0.38 percent increase in that would be about 8.914 deaths per 1000 people. In a country of 372.2 million people, that’s an extra 12,655 deaths per year.

Researchers haven’t exactly nailed down the mechanisms behind this effect. I’d say it’s pretty intuitive though to think that when more of us have money to drive around frivolously, to buy guns with which to shoot ourselves and one another, and to purchase unregulated drugs, probably more of us are going to die.

So, it’s strange that we’ve decided to take one threat seriously and basically shut down public life over the 60 American deaths it has caused (so far), while doing next to nothing about hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths we were already facing every single year. But hey, even if the threat posed by coronavirus turns out to be overblown, at least we’re not totally wasting our time here. The economic fallout from the coronavirus panic is probably going to be enough to save thousands who would have died of entirely different dangers but for all of us staying at home. We could do worse than doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.

---

Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

The U.K. has yet to impose the more draconian restrictions to slow the spread of coronavirus seen elsewhere, but HSBC is acting as though it’s already subject to a shelter-in-place order. And since Noel Quinn has been acting CEO for almost as long as John Flint was actual CEO, and given the circumstances—the fact that no one else wants the job, not the pandemic, and the fact that Quinn already has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands—HSBC figures it might as well make things official.

HSBC Holdings PLC appointed Noel Quinn as its permanent chief executive, seven months after he assumed the leadership position on an interim basis…. He was the only internal candidate, and other bankers considered for the role included UniCredit SpA boss Jean Pierre Mustier, who withdrew from talks about the position in late February.

HSBC Appoints Noel Quinn as Permanent CEO [WSJ]