Author: TSA Press

Mostly we can say, ‘it affects them’ and we contribute our resources and our prayers. But with this latest plague – the corona virus – it affects us, whereever we are. It cannot be contained locally despite the best efforts of the most advanced nations in Asia, Europe and North America.   In fact these are the continents most affected. They are the places most travelled to and from.

Globalisation has brought many benefits but we are realising that it has also brought many costs. America gets much attention in the media and it is noticeable that this virus has really knocked them off course.  Their president has his eyes on his ‘approval ratings’ but he also has his eyes on the stock markets. This virus is making them plunge.  This is awkward for him and distracting from his re-election bid. It is exposing the vulnerability of a country that preens itself on being ‘great’. They cannot even provide health care for their citizens or sick pay.

So Corona – the word means ‘crown’ – is a shock to the system of the most powerful nation.  In the long run it might help them become a more caring society.  Politicians, nearly everywhere, are urging people to ‘think of others’. Don’t visit your old folk in homes.  You may carry the virus unknowingly. Wash your hands lest, in greeting others or doing anything for others, you may transmit the virus. Don’t, as we do, put your hand to your mouth or nose when you sneeze or cough.  Your hand may become a carrier. And we are told many such ‘dos’ and ‘donts’ so as to show our care for others.

I do not think I have heard politicians speak so emphatically about ‘caring for others’ before this plague, or pandemic, hit us.  This is something we would like to see become contagious! Every culture must have its equivalent to the English proverb, ‘every cloud has a silver lining’. It conveys the fact that women and men in every age have proved their worth by struggling against obstacles in their path.

The Corona virus is, to my thinking, the first truly global challenge in history – even more intrusive to our lives than climate change.  Suddenly the daily bulletins coming out of an office in Geneva, Switzerland, which most of us have never heard of, is top of the news every day. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia, Secretary General of the World Health Organisation, is the most listened to person on the planet. This has to be a ‘silver lining’.

15 March 2020                    Lent Sunday 3 A

Exodus 17:3-7                     Romans 5:1…8                   John 4:5-42

Post published in: Featured

According to ALM’s 2020 Go-To Law School data, from how many different law schools did Kirkland & Ellis hire their 2019 new associate class?

Hint: K&E had the largest new associate class last year, at a whopping 245.

See the answer on the next page.

Olga V. Mack is the CEO of Parley Pro, a next-generation contract management company that has pioneered online negotiation technology. Olga embraces legal innovation and had dedicated her career to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive than before by embracing technology.  Olga is also an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor, and entrepreneur. She founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to participate on corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. She authored Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board Seat and Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security. You can follow Olga on Twitter @olgavmack.  

The morning after Hurricane Sandy hit Brooklyn, I turned on my faucet, drained my bathtub, and wandered around my neighborhood. Typically, Dumbo is bopping with tourists posing in front of our bridge for a famous photograph. But this morning, instead of selfie stick holding millennials, small fish scattered the sidewalks. My street was impacted, but it could have been much worse.

As I checked my office email, I breathed a similar sigh of relief. Our emergency plans had done what emergency plans needed to do. Generally, our people, servers, and things were safe. We were a fortunate mix of prepared and lucky. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for other places, companies, and people. Because sometimes no amount of planning can plan around a catastrophe.

Like bracing for a hurricane, as concerns over COVID-19 spread, in-house attorneys for startups are digesting information, assessing risks, making plans, and answering questions. Frequently, on top of the typical workload, the legal department is tasked with leading and coordinating with stakeholders concerning complex and risky situations. The team must provide tangible advice that goes beyond purchasing soap and hand sanitizer.

The pressure on the lawyers to make quick and thoughtful decisions in an unclear and changing world would be unbearable without formal and informal networks. In the past few weeks, generous and thoughtful in-house lawyers in my networks have shared, for example, response-plan templates, reliable websites and statistics, and work-from-home policies and resources. As well, there have been several lively debates on the topic of force majeure clauses.

As the New York City subways turn empty, it is comforting to have an inbox full of accurate, up-to-date information to keep the baby unicorns as safe as possible. We are a community. We have a duty to help each other. Remember to wash your hands and hooves. Be safe out there, little fish.

Sarah was the General Counsel/first Lawyer at Etsy and Vroom. She’s a co-founder of The Fourth Floor, a creator and producer of Legal Madness, an NYU Law School Engelberg Center fellow, a board member, an investor, and a speaker. You can also find Sarah hammering silver, eating candy, and chasing her child. sarahfeingold.com.

We have some incredibly sad news from Bellevue, Washington, where an executive legal assistant at Davis Wright Tremaine, has died from unknown causes. According to a statement from Jeff Gray, the firm’s managing partner, Lisa Carney was 60 years old and had been with the firm for more than 16 years. Carney reportedly left the office on Tuesday because she had flu-like symptoms, worked from home on Wednesday, and was found dead in her home on Thursday morning.

Perhaps believing that this was too close to the epicenter of the coronavirus breakout in the area, DWT has rolled out a plan to protect its employees. Here’s an excerpt from Gray’s statement on Carney’s unexpected passing (available in full on the next page):

Since we do not yet know the cause of her death, in the interest of the health and well-being of all our employees, we are closing our Bellevue and Seattle offices until further notice and have asked everyone in those offices to work remotely. In addition, we have asked those in the Bellevue office to self-quarantine according to the CDC’s guidelines during that time.

While carefully navigating the death of an employee that could be related to coronavirus, the firm is also dealing with another office that was possibly exposed:

Yesterday, we were also told of a confirmed case of an individual, not from our firm but in the building where our Portland office is located, who has tested positive for COVID-19. Therefore, we have also decided to close our Portland office and have asked everyone in that office to work remotely today while it is deep cleaned.

Because of all of these unfortunate things happening at once, DWT has decided to offer all its employees work-from-home capabilities:

We are instructing our employees in all our other offices to work remotely if possible, starting Monday, March 16. We are continuing to carefully monitor this situation across the firm and are prepared to implement additional measures to ensure safety.

We here at Above the Law would like to extend our sincere condolence to Lisa Carney’s friends, family, and colleagues, and thank Davis Wright Tremaine for its delicate handling of the situation so that all employees are protected from harm.

(Flip to the next page to read the Davis Wright Tremaine statement in full.)

What is your firm doing to protect lawyers and staff from coronavirus? Please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “Coronavirus Response”). Stay safe.

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.

This afternoon at 3pm, President Trump is expected to announce a state of emergency under the Stafford Act. Finally.

“We have things that I can do, we have very strong emergency powers under the Stafford Act,” Trump bragged to reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. “I have it memorized, practically, as to the powers in that act. And if I need to do something, I’ll do it. I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about.”

The Stafford Act is 192 pages, but … fine, whatever.

As The Los Angeles Times pointed out this morning, when and if Trump declares an emergency, FEMA will have access to $40 billion of disaster relief to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. It will also become much easier for individual states to use Medicaid waivers to expand services and eligibility for thousands of people who will soon find themselves simultaneously sick and out of work as the gig economy grinds to a halt.

“Getting an emergency declaration would really help us get services to people who need it,” said Cooper. Medi-Cal currently covers about 13 million low-income Californians.

Among other things, Cooper said the state wants to shorten lengthy verification procedures to quickly enroll people. Public health experts fear that gaps in insurance coverage make controlling coronavirus more difficult because patients who don’t have insurance won’t seek medical attention and testing they fear they can’t afford.

California and other states also want to ensure that mobile clinics and other temporary facilities set up to handle a crush of patients can bill Medicaid, which also would require a waiver.

If Trump hadn’t spent the past month swearing that the virus would disappear in warmer weather “like a miracle,”  refusing to let states administer their own coronavirus tests, and locking cruise passengers on a floating petri dish to keep the number of confirmed cases down at “15,” he could have declared an emergency weeks ago.

And if he had, states would have had flexibility to enroll newly unemployed residents quickly to ensure they could afford to get tested and treated. But expanding access to health care for poor people is really not the Trump administration’s bag. From imposing work requirements on Medicaid recipients to shifting to block grants that would allow states to kick millions of people off the rolls, if it takes coverage away from poor people, they are on it.

“Medicaid could be the nation’s biggest public health responder, but it’s such an object of ire in this administration,” Sara Rosenbaum, a Medicaid expert at George Washington University, told the LA Times. “Their ideology is clouding their response to a crisis.”

And yet, he waited just one day after hammering out a budget with Democrats agreeing to $1.4 billion for his southern border wall to declare a national emergency to justify filching $3.8 billion from military construction funds to build that wall the Mexicans were going to pay for.

It’s all about priorities. And the health of poor Americans is … not one of them.

Trump administration blocks states from using Medicaid to respond to coronavirus crisis [LA Times]

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

The rapid spread of the coronavirus pandemic across the globe has impacted virtually every facet of life. The times we live in are now uncertain, and nothing is normal anymore. The stock market has tanked, sports seasons have been canceled outright, the lights have gone out on Broadway, school districts have closed, entire countries have been put on lockdown, states of emergency have been declared, and people are waging wars over toilet paper in supermarket aisles.

In order to contain the community spread of COVID-19, many law schools have shuttered for semesters at a time, moving to online learning platforms to spare their students from potentially contracting the virus. Some Biglaw firms have decided to do the same, offering their employees opportunities to work from home in an effort to protect the health and wellness of their most valuable assets.

Just as we’ve done in the past when it comes to raises and bonuses, we are compiling a table of all the firms that have announced coronavirus policies that will benefit their employees, who those policies apply to (lawyers and staff or only lawyers), and the markets where those policies are in effect. Today, we unveil that table for your viewing pleasure. We will be updating this table on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times, as news on these policies is announced. If you see any information here that is incorrect or needs clarification, let us know.

Help us help you. Let us know what your firm is doing to take care of all of its employees during this unprecedented moment in time.

As a little reminder, we love covering the Biglaw news, but we need your help. As soon as your firm’s coronavirus policy memo comes out, please email it to us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Coronavirus Response”). We always keep our sources on stories anonymous. There’s no need to send the memo using your firm email account; your personal email account is fine. Please be sure to include the memo as proof; we like to post complete memos as a service to our readers. You can take a photo of the memo and attach as a picture if you are worried about metadata in a PDF or Word file.

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.