Author: TSA Press

As global temperatures continue to rise and the world seeks solutions to stem the tide, the deputy UN chief visited Hwange National Park, which, at 14,651square kilometres, is almost half the size of Belgium.

“We have seen what climate change is doing to our environment and livelihoods”, she said. “We saw how the park is hounded by climate change; the way in which Hwange is hot, the water, and even animal migration and people”.

With unreliable weather patterns resulting in less rainfall, Hillary Madhiri of the national parks and wildlife office said that more than 400 bird and 150 mammal species – 45,000 of them elephants – are suffering.

Key issues include conflict between humans and wildlife, lack of water, loss of habitat, limited resources, population management and community partnerships to preserve the park.

“It’s quiet complex,” the deputy UN chief observed.

Mr. Madhiri maintained that of all the problems “climate change is our biggest challenge”.

He said that in spite of the park’s use of green technologies and sinking over 100 boreholes to save the animals from literally dying of thirst in the dry season, more still needs to be done.

Ms. Mohammed commended the park’s efforts to buffer nature against climate change.

Prelude to meeting

The Deputy Secretary-General is in Zimbabwe to attend the 6th Africa Regional Forum on sustainable development, which begins on Monday and runs in Victoria Falls until Thursday.

Ms. Mohammed said she would participate in the discussion on the Regional Coordination Mechanism between the UN and the African Union.

The focus will be on the elements needed to accelerate action on the ground for nations to achieve the goals of Agenda 2063 – Africa’s master plan to transform the continent into a global powerhouse – and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – the blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet.

“What a better place than Zimbabwe to show the kind of leadership that we would like to see in transforming Africa through the Agendas 2063 and2030,” the UN deputy chief said.

According to bar passage data release by the American Bar Association, which law schools failed to achieved an ultimate bar pass rate of 75 percent for their 2017 class (two years after graduation)?

Hint: Nine law schools (excluding Puerto Rican schools) failed to hit the ABA standard that 75 percent of graduates pass the bar within two years of graduation.

See the answer on the next page.

In spite of having just sold a house for almost $80 million, former hedge fund manager Phil Falcone is apparently hard up for money. This is to an extent understandable, as piano-playing pigs don’t just feed themselves, and also the $70 million in settlements Falcone has reached in the last couple of years stemming from his inability to correctly pay his taxes, to say nothing of other potentially pricey litigation. So Falcone sold a couple of paintings to raise some cash, since he no longer has a hedge fund to borrow money from with which to cover said taxes.

In an uncanny coincidence of timing, two new services have come along in the past month to deliver free legal and litigation news derived in large part from court dockets.

Legal Radar, slated for release tomorrow, comes from legal and business news company ALM, the publisher of Law.com, The American Lawyer, Corporate Counsel, and other legal publications. The other, Law Street Media, was launched Jan. 15 and comes from the legal research and publishing company Fastcase.

Legal Radar and Law Street Media are free legal news services, and both are heavily focused on delivering litigation-related news derived from court dockets.

Both will use artificial intelligence and analytics to help automate and customize news delivery.

(And when it comes to full disclosure, I’ve got a bucketful for this story: I am on Law Street Media’s advisory board. Law Street Media will be using some content from LexBlog.com, where I am editor-in-chief. And I am a long-ago former employee of ALM.)

Legal Radar

Slated to launch on Feb. 25, Legal Radar will deliver news drawn from PACER — the federal courts’ electronic docket system — as well as news from the Law.com network. It will include updates on new lawsuits and filings in federal courts, federal litigation trends, breaking news, and other legal news reported by ALM journalists.

As I report in more detail at my LawSites blog, ALM says the service will be ideal for business litigators as well as for attorneys who want to keep up with industry and practice-area trends, get alerts for news involving clients or other firms, and cut through information overload.

The service will include news extracted from PACER as well as the full-text source documents. A story about a new litigation filing, for example, will include a link to the full complaint.

Legal Radar’s summaries of PACER news will be generated algorithmically, rather than by human editors. Although editors will not review each summary, they will quality-check the summaries’ overall accuracy.

A key feature will be customization, allowing each user to create a custom news feed, Vanessa Blum, ALM director of newsroom innovation, told me during a demonstration of the product. New users will be guided through a series of choices to select the news the user wants to track. Options include:

• Industries, including aerospace, AI and automation, biotech, cannabis, education, entertainment, fintech, government, health care, renewable energy, and technology.
• Practice areas, including antitrust, consumer protection, employment, intellectual property, product liability, securities, and trade secrets.
• Companies, from the U.S. and globally, spanning the Fortune 500, major global companies, and emerging fast-growth startups.
• Law firms, including the Am Law 200, NLJ 500, elite plaintiffs’ firms, the largest global law firms, and alternative legal services providers.
• Regional news covering all 50 states as well as some global regions.

The service is designed to be optimized for use on mobile devices, but can also be used on computer desktops. It will include the option to receive push notifications, either in the app or browser, for updates involving specific companies or law firms.

The service will be offered for free in both the desktop and mobile versions. For some articles, clicking through to the full text may take the user to ALM publications that require a paid subscription.

Law Street Media

Similar to Legal Radar, Law Street Media is a legal news service whose goal is to enable readers to track legal news by industries, companies, law firms, and litigation.

To do this, it leverages both case law from the Fastcase legal research platform, and docket information and analytics from Docket Alarm, the docket search platform owned by Fastcase.

So far, Law Street Media covers just one industry, high tech. But it plans eventually to cover 10 core industries, with food and agriculture slated for June. After that will come health and medical in October 2020, followed by hospitality, logistics, and travel in December 2020. Slated for 2021 are manufacturing and retail, entertainment and communications, energy and environment, legal, and then finance, insurance, and banking.

Users can read the news at the Law Street Media website or subscribe to a daily update.

Whereas Legal Radar’s articles are both journalist-written and algorithmically generated, Law Street relies on a small staff of in-house writers, led by Editor-in-Chief David Nayer, a lawyer who formerly worked as a reference attorney at Fastcase.

Nayer describes his mission as delivering news that leads to business for the site’s readers. “News leading to business could be as simple as tracking emerging litigation, but today, with docket alerts and analytics, it extends to tracking a growing company’s litigation docket, or the law firms that represent those companies,” he said.

Many of Law Street’s articles link to the underlying source documents, including judicial opinions, statutes, regulations, docket sheets, and pleadings, all of which can be viewed for free.

A feature Nayer expects to add soon is the Docket Alarm Alerts Center. This will allow users, when reading a story, to easily create docket alerts for the parties or firms mentioned in the story. By clicking on the name of a party in Law Street, the user will launch a search in Docket Alarm, from which the user can set up an alert. Use of this feature will require a Docket Alarm subscription.

Targeted for June is the launch of a premium subscription level for Law Street Media. This will offer pre-alerts of litigation news, before articles are written; analytics articles about judges, firms, and companies; and access to a new Emerging Litigation Journal.

It will also include access to what Law Street is calling “pop-ups” — which it describes as hyper-focused alerts devoted to emerging areas of litigation, such as litigation around vaping, drones, or data privacy.

The Law Street that launched last month was a phoenix arising from the ashes of an earlier incarnation, founded by journalist John Jenkins in 2013 as a news site for Millennials. After the site went dormant, Fastcase acquired it in 2018 with the goal of retooling and relaunching it. As Fastcase CEO Ed Walters told me at the time, he viewed expanding into legal news as consistent with Fastcase’s mission to become as robust a legal research platform as LexisNexis or Westlaw.

“We’re knocking the legs out from under the chair of things people get LexisNexis for,” he said. “Legal news is definitely one of them.”

At a time when trusted options for legal news grow increasingly rare, both of these new services should be welcome additions for legal professionals. While particularly suited to litigators, they should be useful to any legal professional who wants to track news of practice areas, industries, firms and companies.

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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).

Vered Yakovee, former vice president and associate general counsel of the NBA team the Miami Heat, has filed a federal lawsuit alleging violations of the Family and Medical Leave Act. The complaint, available in full below, seeks lost wages, employment benefits and other compensation, damages, and return of her job.

As reported in Law.com, Yakovee, who began working at the Heat in 2015, alleges that when she told her boss, the team’s General Counsel Raquel Libman, that she’d been selected to adopt a newborn baby and would be taking parental leave, she was immediately met with hostility, with Libman allegedly saying, “Now I definitely won’t get to take a vacation.”

Yakovee did take the leave she was entitled to — 12 week unpaid leave — and when she did return to work, the situation allegedly only deteriorated further:

Libman “berated Ms. Yakovee and complained about her FMLA leave not only privately but also publicly in group meetings and on group email correspondence,” the complaint states. The suit said Libman canceled their weekly one-on-one meetings that started when Yakovee was hired.

The complaint also alleges that Human Resources was brought into the situation when Libman “self-reported.” However, it goes on to allege that process was unsatisfactory and only served to create documentation:

She later asked the president of business operations to assign an independent investigator to the matter because the HR vice president and Libman are “close friends,” according to the complaint. But her request was denied on the same day that the director of human resources sent Yakovee an email criticizing her for failing to provide “enough advance notice” for her parental leave.

Yakovee asserts in her complaint that the email was part of an effort “led by Ms. Libman and supported” by the Heat to “litter the file” and provide Libman and the team “grounds to continue to harass and retaliate” against her.

Only a few months after Yakovee returned from leave, she alleges she was terminated. The complaint says it was the day after Yakovee took her first sick day at the company, which she used to take her sick child to the doctor.

Read the full complaint below.

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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).

This entire situation is a load of BUNK, starting with this court’s order … and a waste of tax payer monies!

— Matthew Thompson, a prisoner in Florida, in his “Motion to Put My Foot In Your Ass,” pursuant to Florida’s Rule 12.150a(a) (governing motions to strike), which he seems to have taken quite literally.

(Behold, a legal masterpiece, below.)

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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.

As Slack continues to be adopted as the tool of choice for workplace communication, Slack eDiscovery becomes an increasingly hot topic for legal teams. Whether you’re in-house counsel, a service provider, or external counsel, if you’re working with enterprise applications, it’s likely that Slack has come across your radar. If it hasn’t, it will — with over 12 million users making 5+ billion actions within the platform per week, Slack’s adoption rates continue to eclipse the workplace. 

From data retention to litigation to GDPR & CCPA, there are a number of reasons why having a Slack eDiscovery plan is crucial. If you’re looking for a place to start, we’re breaking down everything you need to know about Slack eDiscovery to set your legal team up for long-term success.

What is Slack?

Slack helps people work together and collaborate as easily online as they do in person. Rather than inboxes, all those messages are organized into channels, private direct messages, or multi-party messages. Channels can correspond to anything — projects, teams, planning, office locations, business units, functional areas, temporary channels for things like planning an offsite. For example, a security team may create a channel entitled “security alerts” where team members can share files of potential security threats and collaborate on a solution. 

But this is only the baseline of Slack’s capabilities. Unlike email, Slack was designed from the bottom up to integrate with the software tools you use every day. Whatever tools you already use, Slack vastly increases the value of your software investment, by making it easier to access, act upon, and share. With over 2,000 third-party apps to integrate with, Slack is an extremely dynamic platform. Based on an organization’s needs, Slack users have the ability to share files from GSuite, start a call on Zoom, send a celebratory gif, file a support ticket, and so much more. By creating a central hub of collaboration, Slack allows work to get done in a fast, streamlined way.

What makes Slack data different?

Everything that makes Slack so great to use, is also what makes its data so complex. Messages, documents, threads, edits, deletions, and so much more can all live within a single conversation on Slack. 

These robust capabilities amount to extremely dynamic ESI (electronically stored information), which processing engines typically have a difficult time organizing. From an eDiscovery standpoint, ESI within exports should be in a comprehensive format for review, but given Slack’s collaborative nature, this isn’t an easy feat. The good news? Slack has options to make processing its data easier for legal teams. We’ll get into what those options are next.

What are my options for Slack eDiscovery?

If you need to collect data from Slack, there are multiple ways of doing it, but your first step should always be to check your retention settings. Slack has customizable retention settings for messages and files to fit your preferences, but the default setting will retain everything to prevent data loss. Whether it’s a direct message or a thread within a channel, you’ll be able to find it thanks to Slack’s secure backlog.

After you ensure your data’s been preserved, you can collect it using one of Slack’s Discovery APIs. When it comes to large scale eDiscovery cases, Slack’s Discovery API is your go-to. Given its wide scope of access, the Discovery API gives you access to all resources in multiple workspaces within your account. 

Slack’s Audit Logs API on the other hand, is better for smaller-scale, internal investigations. This API is geared to detect suspicious activity and spot security issues. Bear in mind, the Audit Logs API is read-only. This means the data will show actions that happen within a workspace, but it won’t reveal the actual content. To reveal the content of channels and multi-party messages, the Discovery API will need to be enabled. 

When it comes to exporting Slack data, Slack offers a few different options including the ability to connect to a 3rd party eDiscovery vendor via the Discovery API. Why? The data exported via Corporate Exports and the Discovery API comes in a JSON file which can be a difficult format for responsible legal teams to review if they don’t have technical expertise. JSON files also make narrowing down the information you actually need very difficult, leading to costly and unnecessary processing. Ediscovery vendors like Onna will be able to save you time and money by finding exactly what you need in your Slack archives and collecting it in its native format.

The bottom line

The more dynamic Slack’s workflows and integrations get, the more complex its data becomes — and the same can be said about all of today’s rapidly evolving technologies. So how do we keep up? 

Mark Pike, Senior Product Counsel at Slack, says fostering a forward-thinking eDiscovery approach is critical to eDiscovery success. He encourages anyone who uses Slack to consider leveraging the power of Slack’s APIs to collect, search, and retain information. As companies’ workflows and communication methods get more and more dynamic, Slack is committed to developing eDiscovery solutions that keep up with it all.

Slack understands people are doing work differently these days, and legal professionals should too. By taking a proactive approach to eDiscovery efforts, your team can remain ahead of the curve as emerging technologies like Slack advance.

For more details on Slack’s functionalities and step-by-step guidelines, check out our Beginner’s Guide to Slack eDiscovery.

About Onna for Slack

Onna cuts the steps it takes to collect, process, and export Slack data in half. Connect your workspace directly to Onna to collect data in its native format. Slack’s Discovery API and our open-ended API integrate to simultaneously collect and process the data you need in real-time — nothing more, nothing less. Our rapid ML indexing paired with our precise search capabilities makes it easier than ever to not only customize your collections and avoid unnecessary processing costs but also find what you need when you need it. Once your Slack data is in Onna, your team has immediate access to it. Set legal holds, review and collaborate on evidence, and when you’re ready, export data into the review platform of your choice. (Yes, we’re compatible with them all!) Sound like the solution you’re looking for? Reach out to us here to learn more.

About Slack

Slack is where work happens. Slack is a new layer of the business technology stack that brings together people, applications and data—a hub for collaboration where people can effectively work together, access critical applications and services, and find important information to do their best work. People around the world use Slack to connect their teams, unify their systems and drive their business forward. Want to learn more about Slack, contact us here! 

Slack and the Slack logo are trademarks of Slack Technologies, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others. 

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court continues its inevitable task of remaking the law of the land in Donald Trump’s image. The latest insult happened Friday evening when the Court, on pure party lines, allowed the Trump administration’s immigration wealth test which limits legal immigration, to take effect in Illinois. It’s not a giant change to the status quo, since the test was a go in 49 states, but the decision crossed Illinois — the last state left — off of the list.

But that doesn’t mean the case didn’t ruffle some feathers on the Court.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor went off in a separate dissent that has been noted for its “caustic tone” and calling out of her colleagues on the bench. She describes the Court as kowtowing to the Trump administration, saying, “The Government seeks emergency relief from this Court, asking it to grant a stay where two lower courts have not. The Government insists—even though review in a court of appeals is imminent—that it will suffer irreparable harm if this Court does not grant a stay. And the Court yields.”

Though this has been a pattern in the Court as of late, Sotomayor sees the instant case as even more insidious:

“But this application is perhaps even more concerning than past ones,” Sotomayor continued. Previously, the DOJ “professed urgency because of the form of relief granted in the prior case—a nationwide injunction.” Now there’s no nationwide injunction, so there’s no apparent “urgency.” The DOJ “cannot state with precision any of the supposed harm that would come from the Illinois-specific injunction, and the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has scheduled oral argument for next week.” Yet SCOTUS lifted the injunction anyway. “It is hard,” Sotomayor wrote, “to say what is more troubling: that the Government would seek this extraordinary relief seemingly as a matter of course, or that the Court would grant it.”

And she describes the repeated pattern as “unprecedented” and that, like the boy who cried wolf, the “cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow”:

Claiming one emergency after another, the Government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases, demanding immediate attention and consuming limited Court resources in each. And with each successive application, of course, its cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow.

And we all know — and Sotomayor says it out loud — that the practice has “benefited one litigant over all others”: the current administration. Sotomayor compares and contrasts the treatment of death penalty litigants with that of the Trump administration and finds that Trump gets the benefit of the doubt. She notes, “This Court often permits executions—where the risk of irreparable harm is the loss of life—to proceed,” because they blame  death row inmates for the failure “to raise any potentially meritorious claims in a timely manner.” But yet the Trump administration gets a pass:

“Yet the Court’s concerns over quick decisions wither when prodded by the Government in far less compelling circumstances—where the Government itself chose to wait to seek relief, and where its claimed harm is continuation of a 20-year status quo in one State. I fear that this disparity in treatment erodes the fair and balanced decisionmaking process that this Court must strive to protect.”

Well, damn. At least someone said it.

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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).

The LexisNexis you grew up with is, in a sense, dead. And it’s buried in Dayton, Ohio.

For decades, the legal research tool was run on a mainframe holding all the data you could possibly need. Lexis still provided an amazingly efficient database but its age began to show. There were little things rooted in the past, like how the editorial tools still presupposed a printed page at the end. But there were also bigger challenges in simply optimizing the database to provide consistent, outstanding results. It’s a project Lexis has eyed for years. The challenge, CTO Jeff Reihl explained at Legalweek, was that technology wasn’t always ready to support the overhaul. But now, $1.2 billion later, there’s a new Lexis for the modern age.

With an all new, cloud-based Lexis, the mainframe that served us all for generations has outlived its purpose and the company held an event to officially flip the switch shutting down the Lexis servers, placing them in a ceremonial graveyard at the Dayton data center — an exhibit of outdated technology that brought the company to today. The event became something of a reunion, with former staff who worked on maintaining the mainframe returning for the decommissioning. CEO Mike Walsh called it one of the most significant milestones in the company’s history along with the launch of Lexis on the Ubiq platform and the transition to the Internet.

Going forward, the vast 2.5 petabyte Lexis library will reside in the AWS cloud. The power provided by this move allows Lexis to develop new search techniques to provide better results. The burden used to be on the user to craft the perfect search. Generations of natural language systems began taking that burden off the attorney. With the aid of artificial intelligence, these systems keep making these searches more robust at divining intent and producing the right research for every question.

But now is the time to remember the mainframe that has now gone out of our lives. Some fast facts:

The mainframe was critical to the success of LexisNexis for 17,075 days, or 409,800 hours, 24,588,000 minutes or 1,475,280,000 seconds
At their peak, the LexisNexis mainframes handled approximately 71 million instructions per second
Search queries on the mainframe first surpassed 100,000 in 1989. The record number of searches was just under 13 million in the mid-2000s
In June of 1989, LexisNexis updated its searchable database 275 times. By October, new technology enabled updates every 15 minutes and 1,382 updates were performed that month
Records for the top daily and weekly database update were both set in 2019, with16,647 updates on February 26, 2019 and 94,156 updates in the week of March 25, 2019
On Dec. 31, 2019, the mainframe ran its last database update

Goodbye old Lexis… you had a hell of a run. Good luck to the next generation Lexis.

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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.