Author: TSA Press

In-house legal departments have been making significant strides in legal innovation. In a field that has led society in innovations, in-house departments have been at the forefront. While there are numerous explanations for why in-house departments lead innovation and the future of law, five, in particular, stand out.

In-House Lawyers Are Rarely The Show

Only rarely are the in-house lawyers a company’s main feature. Often, they play a supporting role, just a small part of the much bigger show.  As a result, they are by nature nimbler, attuned to demands of others, and collaborative. The in-house lawyers must follow the show. They must enable and support it. And most importantly, they must not impede it.

Billable Hour Legacy Is Rare

The legacy of a billable hour does not impede progress. Unlike at law firms, there is no pressure on law departments to figure out how they will make money if a technology or process stalls significantly. Based on my informal, highly unscientific survey, numerous innovators had to rethink their offering and business models to a law firm because it questioned the imperial infallibility of the billable hours and the institutions they support.

Very Close Ties To The Business

The in-house departments are very close to the business. They are on many calls and in numerous meetings. The members of the in-house departments often socialize with the rest of the company in the regular flow of formal and informal events. And finally, they are united to meet the company’s goals and targets. Together they celebrate successes, reflect on misses, and live the consequences of what happens. That is why in-house departments are more likely to keep with the business trends such as increased collaboration, enterprise-wide automation, diminishing hierarchal structure, widespread digitization, increased transparency, and numerous others.

Inflow Of Other Professionals

I recently asked many in-house legal operators how they joined the field and emerged as leaders in the space. Many of the legal operators I spoke to had numerous and diverse paths that may not have included adventures in law in the past. Many had competencies in finance, business, or technology. Some came from the military and other less traditional backgrounds. As a result of the inflow of other professionals into law, legal departments tend to normalize quicker and more likely to cross-pollinate with the ideas across the enterprise.

Constant Reality Checks

Finally, to be part of a business is to constantly benchmark against competitors and react to external events, such as the state of the economy, influence of elections, emergence of national disasters, social media trends, and, most recently, the spread of a virus. These close ties to the world put constant pressure on in-house departments to provide legal services cheaper, faster, and more effectively. Thus, they also tend to be more open-minded and okay with experimenting and change.

Just by their nature, in-house legal professionals are predisposed to innovate within their companies. It’s no surprise, then, that they are leading the charge in the legal industry. From diverse backgrounds, legal operators play key supporting roles while working closely with their business and in conversation with external realities. As the field continues to innovate, look to the work of legal operators to predict what might come next.

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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.  

My mantra for the justice is to “just show up.” When it comes to working out, showing up is part of the battle. The Justice always shows up for training and gives it her very best. One time, she told me she left a White House dinner early to make it to our training session.

— Bryant Johnson, who serves as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s personal trainer, sharing the fitness mantra that’s helped everyone’s favorite justice remain notorious in the gym. Ginsburg is almost 87 years old, but she can probably do more push-ups than you.

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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.

Harvey Weinstein is set to be sentenced this Wednesday following his conviction for Rape in the Third Degree and Criminal Sexual Act (unconsented oral sex.)

For a guy like Weinstein, who spent the entirety of his case under house arrest and rarely passed a moment of his adult life in a place he didn’t want to be, this will be a huge change.

Many people facing prison hear the down-low of what prison’s like from relatives, friends, and neighbors. Although they’re still nervous about it, at least they have some real sense of what to expect and how to survive. Some people even get “props” for being “in.” It ups their public image, helps sell their music, reputation, or brand. Not so for Harvey Weinstein. I’m guessing he’s scared to death. He’s probably seen a lot of movies (and maybe even produced some) about what happens in jail to guys accused of sex crimes, especially ones with money.

Weinstein’s facing a minimum state sentence of five years, but it could run as high as 25. He’ll be given a fixed number of years on each crime that will likely run consecutively, one after the other, since they involved separate incidents and separate complainants. Plus, Judge Burke is not a light sentencer, and the eyes of the world are upon him.

To get a better sense of how best to face this uncertain future, Weinstein added prison consultant Craig Rothfeld, a former Wall Street exec found guilty of securities fraud who spent time in an upstate prison, to his already robust defense team. Rothfeld cleverly parlayed his experience into a consulting biz advising future inmates and their families how best to tackle the many issues that arise when locked up 24/7 with a lot of dangerous guys who hate your guts or want your money.

This is not a new business. Books like “Surviving and Thriving in Prison” (about federal prison time) have been written and, judged by the customer reviews, appreciated by the relevant audience. But state prison’s a hybrid, especially in New York, where there are over 52 correctional facilities. Each one has its own quirks, feel, bosses, wardens, and subset of inmates. It’s hard to write a template about the whole system.

Certain basics, however, are universal. The first is a complete loss of control and power. Then there’s the dehumanization. The inmate becomes a number, a “body” which must be housed, fed, cleaned, and counted. Finally, there’s unending boredom tinged with paranoia. Every day is the same — wake at the same time, move at the same time, and maybe get library or religious privileges on occasion. The lucky ones are awarded basic jobs like cleaning the floors, doing the laundry, or working in the kitchen. Controls are enforced on who inmates call, write, and have as visitors. Mix this with the fear that an attack could come at any moment from other inmates and even a few years in prison can seem like an eternity.

Solitary confinement keeps inmates from the fray of “general population,” but it brings a greater burden of boredom, isolation, activity restriction, and loss of privacy (guards check in more often).

Being well known brings its own burdens. If other detainees know you’re rich, they’ll expect more from you. Although Bill Cosby turned his fame to his favor. I’ve read he’s been using his jail time to mentor young inmates and to get in better shape. He reportedly entered prison at 220 pounds and has peeled down to a healthier 189.

But Cosby had a much different standing in the outside world than Weinstein. He was widely known, was popular, and was (and probably still is) funny.

None of those things are true for Weinstein.

Prison consultant Rothfeld will coach Weinstein on how to not argue about the television remote with the big guy from down the hall, how it’s not a good idea to gamble, and what to expect in the first 90 days.

But really, it’s a go-it-alone process. And there’s no telling what experiences an inmate might confront within those confines.

Weinstein’s appeal motion, even if successful, will take years to perfect, and he’ll spend those years inside. In part how he does is up to him. In part it will depend upon the vagaries of a regimented system filled with randomness — who the guy in the next cell is, who the warden is, who wants a piece of him the most.

The man who controlled a chunk of the money in Hollywood will be lucky to control any aspect of his own fate.

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Toni Messina has tried over 100 cases and has been practicing criminal law and immigration since 1990. You can follow her on Twitter: @tonitamess.

In defense of Dechert, they’re doing exactly what crafty lawyers eyeing a loophole should be doing.

The Am Law 50 firm moved its headquarters to Philadelphia’s Cira Centre in 2005, taking advantage of a tax break program that Pennsylvania offers businesses to move into developments in formerly run-down areas. Since taking up residence in Cira Centre, Dechert’s paid virtually no state or local business taxes in exchange for Dechert’s role in making the area an attractive business destination.

But the program expired in 2018, so when the Keystone Opportunity Zone program eyed a new tax-free area in Schuylkill Yards, Dechert walked up and asked to move there too.

There’s nothing in the law to say companies can’t hop from zone to zone to remain permanently tax-free, and when authorities denied Dechert’s request to continue not paying its taxes, the firm took the government to court.

On the one hand, by moving to the new location, Dechert’s asking to be rewarded for bailing on the first opportunity zone. On the other hand, Dechert’s right that the law doesn’t account for the stopping businesses from “zone hopping” and Dechert’s attorneys argue that Dechert’s already done its job and that Cira Centre can now fill its potential Dechert-sized vacancy with any number of willing tenants who won’t mind paying their taxes. They feel the firm should be rewarded for volunteering to march into a new frontier a second time.

These stadium deal-style tax breaks have a pretty bad record for the cities when all is said and done, but states keep doing them, one of the many “race to the bottom” side effects of Federalism in the modern age where entities can play state governments off each other. At one point there was a concerted effort to force the businesses taking these tax breaks to aid in the development of the neighborhood — not so much anymore. From the Inquirer:

Originally a company had to either boost employment by 20% or invest at least 10% of its total revenue from the previous year. The new way to qualify just required a company to sign a lease covering the duration of the zone and to spend at least 5% of the previous year’s revenue on rent.

Much like the much-publicized Amazon headquarters deal in New York, the logic is that increased taxes on wages will pay for the business tax cuts. During the run of the deal, Dechert reduced headcount from 700 in 2005 to 461 last year.

But that’s surely going to totally turn around with these new tax breaks!

One of Philadelphia’s richest law firms wants tax breaks, again. Why it might get its way. [Philadelphia Inquirer]

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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.

Many misfortunes have befallen Wells Fargo over the past three-and-a-half years, nearly all of them either self-inflicted or richly deserved. But here’s one that really can’t be laid on the bank’s account, fake or otherwise: It might have avoided the slow drumbeat of bad news and its associated fines over the past few years if only Mick Mulvaney had hired a non-published racist to do the exact opposite of what his boss told him to do.

According to the report, Mr. Scharf’s immediate predecessor, C. Allen Parker, explicitly told a member of the bank’s board in May that Mr. Blankenstein had promised him that the Trump administration would continue to smooth the way for the bank — even after Mr. Blankenstein resigned that week over racist statements he had made as a law student.

“Eric also assured me that there would continue to be ‘political’ oversight of the engagement with us, although he wasn’t yet sure who his successor would be,” Mr. Parker wrote to the board member, James Quigley…. Given their conversations with Mr. Blankenstein, the bank’s leaders were expecting to be able to resolve the active investigations with the agency in private, without paying any more fines. They expressed surprise, according to the report, when members of the agency’s staff said two months later that they were not aware of Mr. Blankenstein’s assurances.

Coronavirus continues to hit too close to home for the legal community. Lawyers and law students alike have had brushes with COVID-19, which has led to both law firm and law school closures, with numerous people forced into quarantine.

In Seattle, Washington, a coronavirus hot spot, Washington Law has been forced to move all of its classes to an online format for the rest of the quarter. In New York alone, the second person in the state who tested positive for the illness was a lawyer, and that diagnosis reverberated throughout the city. Thus far, a student at Cardozo Law went into self-quarantine after contact with the lawyer’s firm and New York Law School closed its doors for extensive cleaning due to another student’s contact with that lawyer’s firm. Most recently, Quinn Emanuel shuttered its New York office and moved to a work-from-home structure after one of its partner tested positive for coronavirus.

Today, three more New York-area law schools have decided to close their doors.

The following message can be found on Columbia Law’s website homepage:

ALERT: Suspension of Classes: Because a member of the Columbia community has been quarantined as a result of exposure to the coronavirus (COVID-19), classes are suspended on Monday, March 9 and Tuesday, March 10. This suspension of activities will allow for preparation to shift to remote classes for the remainder of the week.

Students at the highly competitive T14 law school will receive a nice little two-day break before their classes resume in an online format. Students at this elite law school aren’t the only ones who are being affected by a coronavirus closure thus week.

Hofstra Law’s posted the following message on its website homepage:

In an abundance of caution, Hofstra University is cancelling in-person classes for the upcoming week, beginning on Monday 3/9, with Spring Break for main campus undergraduate and graduate classes beginning as scheduled on Saturday, March 14. All class work will be made up and a new schedule will be announced soon.

What does this mean for the school’s law student population? Have people with online classes this week gotten the short end of the stick? Will the new schedule eat into the school’s upcoming spring break, which is currently scheduled to begin on March 30? Will the school be forced to use its one snow/make-up day to fulfill its teaching obligations for this semester? These are all difficult questions that the law school administration must answer, but thankfully students are being kept safe.

UPDATE (12:25 p.m.): Minutes after this story was published, Fordham Law announced that its campus would be closing due to coronafirus fears. Like Columbia, Fordham will suspend in-person classes after 1 p.m. today through March 10, and then will carry on with online classes for an indefinite period of time until further notice. A student at the law school reports that they “haven’t heard anything about how classes are going to be conducted yet.”

What is your law school doing to protect students and faculty from coronavirus? Please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “Coronavirus Response”).

Alert [Columbia Law School]
Update on COVID-19 and Class Activity [Columbia | Preparedness]
Campus Notification [Hofstra Law School]
Campus Alerts [Hostra University]
Coronavirus Updates [Fordham University]

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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.

There is a virus spreading through the legal community, causing law firms and law-related companies to shut down. While careful hygiene could help prevent its spread, the virus I’m talking about is not the one that is dominating the headlines.

Rather, what I’m talking about is ransomware. On Feb. 29, a ransomware attack took down the international e-discovery and managed services company Epiq Global, leaving customers unable to access their data or work on e-discovery review projects they had underway.

As of Saturday, the company said it was still working to bring its systems online. The incident affected a range of law-related businesses within Epiq, including its e-discovery and document review, class action and mass tort, and restructuring and bankruptcy businesses.

Meanwhile, a spate of ransomware attacks have hit law firms, shutting down their operations and posting portions of stolen client data online to get them to pay the ransom. In one 24-hour period last month, three law firms were hit. An attack against a nationwide disability firm resulted in veterans’ records posted online.

As of this morning, I checked several ransomware sites and found multiple instances that purport to have locked law firm data and posted some of it online. These are not so-called “dark web” sites — they are available on the open internet.

Ransomware is not the kind of virus typically associated with the malware that attacks computers. Viruses infect a particular program and then have the ability to propagate within a computer system, causing effects of varying severity.

By contrast, ransomware uses a technique called cryptoviral extortion, which means it encrypts all the files on a computer or system and then demands payment of a ransom to decrypt them and allow you to recover your files.

One of the most common ways ransomware can get access to a computer is through email phishing – an attachment to an email that appears to be a file the recipient should trust, but that in fact contains malware.

A recent Experian study of companies across industries found that 36% reported having had a ransomware attack last year, with only 20% confident of their ability to deal with such an attack.

But Brett Callow, a threat analyst with Emsisoft, a cybersecurity company that is also an associate partner in the No More Ransom Project, an initiative between multiple law enforcement agencies and the private sector, said a major concern is companies not reporting or disclosing ransomware attacks.

Delays in notifying customers that their data may have been breached can give criminals time to hit unsuspecting third parties with spear-phishing attacks and other forms of fraud, he says.

“Folks’ tax returns and veterans’ PTSD claims are being posted online, and these people have no clue that they’re sitting ducks for identity thieves because the companies haven’t told them,” Callow says. “Similarly, I suspect that the groups are using the stolen data to spear phish other companies.”

Yet as the headlines are dominated by news of the coronavirus, there are parallels between that crisis and the rise in ransomware attacks.

“The two have something in connection, in that they shed light on the need for good hygiene in general, and good cyber-hygiene in particular,” said David Carns, a former technology consultant to law firms who is now chief revenue officer at Casepoint. “No system is immune from attack, but there are best practices that people can employ to improve one’s chances of good health.”

With regard to shopping for vendors of legal products and services, law firms should look carefully at their security policies, Carns says. Too often, companies cite their data center’s security ratings as evidence of their own — but security policies must apply also at the company level and even down to the file level.

As the Epiq incident demonstrates, it takes just one successful phishing attack to take down an entire network. For that reason, Carns said, companies need to emphasize regular and company-wide security training for all employees.

He also suggested that companies compartmentalize their data, so if an employee’s lack of diligence opens the door to an attack, it does not infect the entire system.

As for law firms, there are a number of measures they can take to help guard against a ransomware attack. But the most important may be educating staff. Ensure that they know how to protect client documents through encryption and other means. And teach them never to open attachments from unknown senders.

Safe email practices are to ransomware what hand washing is to coronavirus. A bit of hygiene goes a long way toward prevention.

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Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

Elizabeth Warren’s campaign was always at its strongest with lawyers. Something about her being “smart” and “capable” just appealed to this demographic. Unfortunately, lawyers aren’t most of the Democratic Party electorate so Warren brought an end to her presidential campaign.

Well, we’ll always have the Bloomberg debate.

With Warren’s sad departure from the campaign, an impromptu tribute to her campaign has popped up surrounding her and her husband’s Harvard Law portraits.

Bonus points if any of those notes say, “Amy Klobuchar’s Health Care Plan.”

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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.

You’re asked to select the key documents to help a partner prepare for a deposition. You have a messenger roll a cart with a dozen boxes of hot documents into the partner’s office the night before the deposition. You think: “I’m a fine associate. I reviewed those documents and delivered them to the partner before the deposition!”

The partner is thinking: “Why did we hire this damn fool? What am I supposed to do with 12 boxes of documents delivered at 7 p.m. when I’m taking a deposition at 9 tomorrow morning! Didn’t this idiot consider that I might have to read and think about the documents before I started asking questions about them?”

Don’t be a damn fool.

You’re asked to deliver a draft brief to a client. You send the brief to the client a half hour before the brief is due to be filed. You think: “I’m a fine lawyer. I delivered the draft brief to the client so the client could review the draft before it was filed.”

The client is thinking: “Why did we retain this damn fool? I’m in back-to-back meetings. I’ve got six other draft briefs to review. And this clown gave me 30 minutes to review a draft brief? He might as well not have sent me the draft at all! Didn’t this idiot think about my schedule?”

Don’t be a damn fool.

You’re asked to research a topic. You swing by the partner’s office on a Friday night, before you’re scheduled to leave on vacation the following day: “I didn’t have time to do comprehensive research into the subject, but I did read two cases. The two cases say [describe holdings].  But, as I said, I didn’t have a chance to do comprehensive research. I hope that helps.” And you smile, knowing that you’ve done the promised research, and anticipating your vacation.

The partner is thinking: “Why did we hire this damn fool? I need an answer to a question. I don’t need to hear the holdings of two cases without a guarantee that those holdings actually represent the law! This is worth less than nothing. I asked the associate for research; the associate wasted a week; and the associate didn’t answer the question. I need the answer to the question, and now I have neither the answer nor time to find the answer. I’ll never use this associate again!”

Don’t be a damn fool.

You promise the partner you’ll deliver a draft brief on Wednesday, so the partner can mark it up and send it to the client on Thursday morning. You get jammed up, so you stay late on Wednesday night and deliver the draft brief at 11:59 p.m., just before you go home. You think: “I’m a fine associate. I promised the draft brief on Wednesday, and I stayed late to deliver the draft on Wednesday. That’s a heroic effort; surely I’ll get a great review.”

The partner is thinking: “Why did we hire this damn fool? I asked for the brief on Wednesday so that I would have time on Wednesday to make revisions, and we could deliver the draft to the client on Thursday morning. Instead of getting the draft to me on Wednesday, which is what the associate promised, the associate gave me the draft on Thursday. This gives me no time to review the brief. I either have to send this crappy draft off to the client or give the client too little time to review the draft. Why do we hire these idiots?”

Don’t be a damn fool.

That’s really one of the keys to success in the law: Don’t be a damn fool.

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Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.

A state of emergency has been declared in New York due to the rapid outbreak of coronavirus. The legal community has already been touched by the mysterious virus, with one lawyer from a boutique firm having been marked as the second person in the state to be officially diagnosed. That diagnosis led to a student at Cardozo Law going into self-quarantine and New York Law School closing its doors for extensive cleaning due to student contact with that lawyer’s firm.

All the while, Biglaw firms were postponing and canceling events and limiting both foreign and domestic travel due to the illness, but we hadn’t heard of a U.S. case of COVID-19 within the large law firm world — until now.

It’s finally happened. An unnamed partner at one of the most successful Biglaw firms in the world has tested positive for coronavirus.

Which firm could it be? It’s Quinn Emanuel.

Firm leader John Quinn spoke to the New York Law Journal on Sunday, and said that the partner in question listed the names of all attorneys and staff with whom he’d recently interacted. Everyone who has come in contact with the partner thus far has been notified of his illness.

“His symptoms are reportedly very minor, and he actually feels better than he did. We’re hoping and expecting that he’s going to be perfectly fine and that nobody else is going to get infected, and that nobody’s else family is going to be affected,” Quinn said.

“We do know that as soon as he had any issue, he has stayed home, he’s been home since this past week,” Quinn added, though he cautioned, “you can’t rule out the possibility he had the virus before he started to stay home.”

The firm has decided to close its New York offices this week, and sources say they will be thoroughly sanitized before attorneys return to work. Quinn Emanuel is the first Biglaw firm to take such radical action in response to the coronavirus.

In the firm’s statement on Sunday, Quinn Emanuel said New York employees will work from home through the end of the week.

“Our No. 1 concern is for the health and well-being of all staff,” the firm said. “With that in mind, we are taking several steps, including implementing a work-from-home period for the New York office that will run from March 9 through March 13. We will continue to monitor the situation and keep the staff updated.”

“So far we don’t have any indication that anybody else has any symptoms,” Quinn said. “We’re just going to bend over backwards to protect everybody in our firm and anybody who interacted with our firm. We’re trying to act responsibly and take very precaution we can.”

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.

Quinn Emanuel Partner Tests Positive With Coronavirus in NY; Firm To Keep Workers Home [New York Law Journal]

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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.