Author: TSA Press

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Chelsie Lamie to our pages.

It’s 8:50 a.m. and I’m running late to take the kids to school.  I’m only one minute away but I’m stuck on a one-lane dirt road in the jungle outside of Playa del Carmen, Mexico.  A local farmer’s bulls have gotten out of their pen (again) and are blocking my way.  Thankfully, one of the farmhands sees me through the trees and zooms out on his motorbike.  He quickly clears the road and I am on my way again.

After dropping the kids off, I head back to our home to prepare for my 11:00 a.m. telephonic hearing.  I watch the waves of the ocean as I enjoy the watermelon juice and fruit cup that I picked up from a vendor on the highway (for only 3 USD).  The hearing goes well.  I can’t help but smile when my motions are granted while I’m wearing a swimsuit, thousands of miles away from the courthouse.  I head up to the rooftop and practice my Spanish with a family visiting from Columbia while I get in a quick swim.

Later on in the afternoon, I have my weekly telephone call with my office manager to discuss the week’s financials before picking up the kids and taking them to soccer practice.  After soccer, we try a new restaurant for dinner (for a total of 25 USD for a family of four).  We walk home from dinner, tuck the kids into bed, and I take an hour to respond to emails and answer my team members’ questions through our case management software.

Thanks to a great team of employees, years of building systems with integrated forms, and a decade of marketing, I have found the sweet spot.  I truly believe I have attained the best work-life balance that is possible for me and my practice area.  If you would have told me I would be living and working this way, just three years ago, I would have laughed out loud.  I had always been a big believer in lawyers having a brick-and-mortar space.  I thought clients expected it and would flee if I went virtual.  But I started tracking the data in 2016 and noticed that over 80 percent of my clients never stepped foot in my office.  They hired me based on personal recommendations from other attorneys or past/current clients.  They didn’t need to see me or my space in person.  My client base was getting younger, more tech savvy, and simply preferred to do business over the internet.  Based on my review of the data, in 2018 I did what I had previously considered unthinkable: I took my five-employee, mid-six-figure law firm virtual.  I closed my brick-and-mortar space and quickly grew my business into a seven-figure law firm in less than nine months.

My clients have access to me through telephone calls, Zoom video calls, email, and of course, in-person meetings when I come back one week each month to attend depositions, hearings, and mediations.  I won’t lie, I call that one week “hell week” for a reason.  My days start at 7 a.m. and ends almost at midnight.  But it’s only seven days out of each month and to me, it’s worth it.

From a business perspective, going virtual freed up over $5,000.00 per month in our law firm budget (no more rent, electric bill, alarm system monitoring, office snacks, etc.).  But the most important and valuable change I’ve seen is in my personal life.  I’m more connected to my husband and kids than ever before.  Three weeks out of the month, I drive them to and from school and soccer practice and tuck them in each night.  We are living a healthier lifestyle, walking everywhere we can, eating more fresh fruits and vegetables, and spending our weekends immersed in nature.  We spend our nights and weekends swimming in cenotes, floating through underground rivers, snorkeling with sea turtles in the ocean, combing the beach for shells, exploring ancient ruins, and visiting different cities across Mexico.  From the beautiful cobblestone colonial city of San Miguel de Allende to the peaceful translucent lake of Bacalar near the Belize border, Mexico has so much to offer.  Our kids don’t have time for tablets and video games — they’re too busy identifying the bugs, lizards, snakes, spiders, and birds in the jungles that surround our magical city.  They’re learning a new language and absorbing a culture that puts family and community ahead of material possessions and competition.

I hope that my story has inspired you to consider transforming your brick-and-mortar law firm into a virtual one.  You can certainly do so without moving your family thousands of miles away to a different country.  But once you are virtual, the opportunity to at least travel more is a fantastic one and I hope that you take advantage of it.

Earlier: Mothers At Law: Achieving Meaningful Success In The Legal Profession

After 11 years of practicing law in a brick and mortar firm, Chelsie M. Lamie, a personal injury attorney, moved her family to Mexico and took her six-person law firm virtual in 2018.  She returns to the Tampa Bay area one week every month to meet with her clients, and to attend depositions, mediations, hearings, and trials.  Chelsie is a 2002 graduate of the University of Tampa and a 2007 graduate of Stetson University College of Law.  Prior to attending law school, Chelsie was employed by an international insurance carrier as a bodily injury and general liability claims adjuster.  Chelsie has been married to her husband, David, for 18 years, and they have two fantastic boys, five-year-old Michael and three-year-old Henry.  Chelsie and her husband are certified scuba divers and travel enthusiast.  Chelsie and her family have visited 60 countries and are working towards visiting the remaining 130+ in the next 15 years.

This firm may only be in year 2 of its existence, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t ready to shower their associates with big ol’ bonuses.

Today Selendy & Gay announced their median bonuses for associates. And, yeah, associates there are making bigger bonuses than the Biglaw market bonuses. Selendy’s scale is as follows:

These are the median bonus amounts for associates who have been with the Firm for a full year:

Class of 2012	$177,609
Class of 2013	$136,088
Class of 2014	$132,264
Class of 2015	$98,707
Class of 2016	$80,731
Class of 2017	$34,125
Class of 2018	$20,950

Managing partner Jennifer Selendy said the bonuses were the result of a great year for the firm:

“This has been an extraordinary year. We scored significant victories for our clients, filed innovative new cases, and made a real public impact. None of this would have been possible without our wonderful associates.”

Remember — we can’t do this without you, dear readers! We depend on your tips to stay on top of important bonus updates, so when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Matches”). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we also use for all salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish. Thanks for your help!

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 lanes of the Democratic presidential primary are defined by Medicare for All. It’s the title of the Bernie Sanders health care bill that Elizabeth Warren signed onto in the past. Meanwhile those preening for the increasingly hypothetical moderate vote are quick to blast the policy proposal banking on their firm belief that a struggling Walmart greeter’s biggest concern is maintaining Aetna’s earnings per share.

They trot out a lot of bad arguments against the Medicare For All plan. They’ll complain that it’s too expensive — conveniently glossing over the out-of-control costs in the status quo and the cost cutting power of a single buyer. They’ll tell you it’s about providing choice — even though most Americans only get a Hobson’s Choice passed across their employer’s desk. And they’ll tell you it simply raises taxes — ignoring that it would eliminate employee and employer contributions to more expensive private plans. But they come in with a lot of industry-sponsored graphs and it all sounds compelling to the self-appointed very serious people who tell us what America really thinks from the confines of a D.C. conference room.

But one reason why Medicare For All is the only serious health care plan on the table that we never talk about was just brought back into sharp relief by the Fifth Circuit striking down the individual mandate and throwing the ACA to the Kavanaugh and Krew: no other plan has a chance of surviving these courts.

Joe Biden wants to “protect and build on Obamacare“? Bitch, it’s not going to be here. John Roberts may have saved the Affordable Care Act once to prevent widespread disruption, but with the “death of a thousand cuts” strategy the GOP has waged since that first opinion, there’s a colorable argument that the disruption wouldn’t tank any insurers at this point. The insured would get a real beating, but that’s not who Roberts worries about.

If the Obamacare experiment teaches us anything, it’s that Republican judges will find even the most targeted health care reforms unconstitutional. Even the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius decision upheld the law as a tax as opposed to a straightforward exercise of the commerce clause — a deliberate effort to kneecap any future efforts to regulate the healthcare industry.

The only proposal for fixing health care with a snowball’s chance is one that takes a law that the courts established as soundly constitutional over half a century ago. Medicare stands on constitutional ground almost impossible to shake. Any coherent argument against expanding the plan to more ages would require an assault on the whole regime, a regime that America’s seniors — read: the people who religiously vote and make up the dwindling GOP base — depend upon to stay alive.

Not that there won’t be a game effort. The Court just struck down a 40-year-old precedent for laughs, but the Janus opinion screwed over mostly Democratic leaning teachers. John Roberts didn’t have to worry about them like he will aging folks in Wisconsin. Perhaps “OK, Boomer” will be deployed as proof that seniors are a discrete and insular minority that deserve Medicare where toddlers don’t? Look, I’m not going to predict what Paul Clement is going to argue, but just know that it’s going to be about that frivolous.

But it’s worth noting that some of FedSoc’s most reliable intellectual foot soldiers have already weighed in and declared fighting Medicare for All an uphill battle. In a June Politico piece, ASS Law’s Ilya Somin explained:

“In the 1930s and ’40s, the Supreme Court vastly expanded government power under the spending clause, allowing the federal government to spend money on almost anything they want and regulate almost any transaction that qualifies as interstate commerce,” said Ilya Somin, a libertarian-leaning professor of constitutional law at George Mason University. “It’s highly unlikely the court is going to overrule that precedent now.”

Jonathan Adler followed up:

Jonathan Adler, a legal professor at Case Western University who helped mount the unsuccessful challenge to nationwide ACA insurance subsidies in the 2015 Supreme Court case King v. Burwell, largely agrees that Medicare for All is on solid legal footing.

“I think there are far fewer constitutional issues with Medicare for All than there were with the ACA, largely because insofar as Medicare for some is constitutional, Medicare for all would be as well,” he said.

So when evaluating the different Democratic healthcare proposals coming from the debate stage, just remember that nothing anyone’s saying has even the chance of becoming a reality unless it boils down to universalizing Medicare. The GOP judiciary has made sure that nothing else matters.

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.

We’ve been hearing a lot about depositions lately, oftentimes perpetuating the notion that they take place in a secret star chamber somewhere in a basement in Washington DC. In reality, though, depositions are an everyday part of litigation proceedings all around the country. Knowing exactly what such processes entail, therefore, is also important – both so you are prepared and so you can get the most out of them.

At critical points in a deposition, having the right documents in hand can make all the difference. Preparation is just as important as the flexibility to respond to unforeseen developments. Do you and your team have the right tools and techniques to handle this key moment in litigation?

Take our quiz to find out.

Donald Trump may have had a lousy night, but his former campaign manager Paul Manafort hit the jackpot. As Manafort was being released from the hospital after a “cardiac event,” he got news that the Supreme Court of New York had dismissed charges against him brought by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance. So now all Manafort needs is a pardon from Trump, and he can be reunited with his magnificent ostrich jacket without fear of being locked up again on state charges.

Ever the showman, Vance had a sixteen-count grand jury indictment for mortgage fraud, conspiracy, and falsifying business records ready to drop the moment Judge Amy Berman Jackson banged her gavel in Manafort’s second federal sentencing.

“No one is beyond the law in New York,” Vance announced in a press release on March 13, 2019. Which is a hell of a way to send a message that the state of New York isn’t going to let Manafort off scot-free if Trump decides to pardon him like a war criminal, but doesn’t exactly read as a nonpolitical prosecutorial decision. 

In August of 2018, Manafort was convicted in the Eastern District of Virginia on eight felony counts of bank fraud, filing false tax returns, and failing to disclose a foreign bank account. The jury hung on the remaining ten counts, which included bank and loan fraud. But in September, when Manafort reached a plea deal during his second trial in D.C. on conspiracy and witness tampering charges, he agreed to admit to the Virginia bank charges if the government promised not to retry him on the ten hung counts.

In March of 2019, Judge Ellis dismissed the hung counts with prejudice, which would strongly imply that they could not be revived under New York’s robust double jeopardy law. But Cy Vance had a point to make, so he argued that if you squint really hard, you can see how New York’s bank fraud statute is somehow different enough from its federal cognate to satisfy one of the jeopardy exceptions in Article 40 of the Criminal Procedure Law.

Spoiler Alert: Justice Maxwell Wiley of the New York State Supreme Court did not care to squint along with the District Attorney and find that New York was trying to root out a whole different type of corruption, so Manafort could be tried twice for the same underlying conduct.

“We will appeal today’s decision and will continue working to ensure that Mr. Manafort is held accountable for the criminal conduct against the people of New York that is alleged in the indictment,” Vance’s spokesman Danny Frost told the New York Times. And good luck to them!

In the meantime, Manafort can turn his attention to working on that pardon.  He just needs a guy on the inside of Trumpland to keep pleading his case. Heckuva coincidence that Manafort has been helping Rudy Giuliani with his research into Ukrainian “interference” in the 2016 election, huh? Just doing his civic duty, of course. Maybe he can get early release for good behavior — that is if Donald Trump doesn’t give him a get out of jail free card first.

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

This deliberate effort to obscure the facts, this disregard for the truth undermines our political discourse and it affects our policymaking. If people don’t have the facts, democracy doesn’t work.

—Judge Amy Berman Jackson during her sentencing of government cooperator and former Trump aide, Rick Gates. Her comments during sentencing reflected the importance of truth and the investigation that uncovered the details of what happened during the 2016 election. Gates was sentenced to 45 days in jail — to be served on weekends — plus three years probation and community service.

It has been quite a year for legal tech startup Evisort. Twelve months ago this week, the company introduced its flagship product, Document Analyzer, a cloud-based AI and text-mining application that helps enterprises analyze and manage their contracts. At the time, I wrote that it “might just be the hottest legal tech and AI company you’ve never heard of.”

After launching with angel funding from Amity Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, and Village Global, a VC firm whose backers include Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Reid Hoffman, the company earlier this year raised another $4.5 million in seed funding. Now today it is announcing that it has closed a Series A funding round of $15 million.

This latest round was led by Vertex Ventures, part of a global network of funds backed by Singapore-based Temasek, and Microsoft Corporation’s M12 Ventures, with participation by Amity and Serra Ventures. With this investment, Vertex general partner In Sik Rhee is joining Evisort’s board, and M12 head Nagraj Kashyap is joining the board as an observer.

Evisort was founded in 2016 by two Harvard Law School students, Jerry Ting and Jake Sussman (who both graduated last year), and MIT student Amine Anoun. Their vision was to build a platform that used AI to help companies mine their contracts for insights and key information by turning unstructured text into structured data.

Since launching their product last year, Ting told me earlier this week, they have expanded that vision to encompass any legal document that defines a business action or relationship, meaning not only contracts, but also statements of work, invoices, purchase orders, and SLA or rebate tables. That includes both pre-signature and post-signature stages of legal documents.

“Our goal is to relieve legal and procurement teams from the labor-intensive process of managing contracts and empower them with the insights they need to truly do their jobs,” Ting said. “We’re excited to deliver a solution that impacts their day-to-day and frees them up to do the core work they are experts at.”

“Evisort is focused on one of the most labor-intensive systems within mid to large-sized enterprises and is leveraging a robust AI engine to deliver mission-critical insights,” Vertex partner Rhee said in a statement announcing the investment. “By removing the friction these teams face with daily document processing, this elegant and simple use of powerful AI algorithms can impact a company’s bottom line.”

Evisort says it has brought in more than 100 enterprise customers this year, including Brooks Brothers, Cox Automotive, Fujitsu, TravelZoo and Sweetgreen. More than half of its customers deploy the product to multiple departments — including legal, finance, procurement and HR — within the first 30 days of their engagement. The platform can be deployed behind a company’s firewall or within a company’s private cloud environment.

Ting said the new funds will be used to add employees in various roles and for engineering to enhance and expand the company’s products. Over the past year, the company grew from nine employees to 35. Ting expect to double that number within the next six months.

The money will also be used to launch a new research and development office in Montreal, Quebec, where the company anticipates hiring 10 employees for its technical and engineering team. “Montreal has emerged in the last five years to be a center for AI expertise,” Ting said.

A major goal for the company is to build a true end-to-end product for managing legal documents within an enterprise, Ting said. While other AI contracts products focus on signed documents, none provide a solution that manages the full document lifecycle, he said.

“Historically, the management of purchase orders, invoices, statements of work and similar documents were left to ERP systems,” Ting said. “This data is contractual in nature, so why limit our platform to long-form contracts? If we can tie these things together, then what we’re building is a more holistic platform.”

For Ting, that also means using the data Evisort extracts from these contracts and other documents to build better workflows. When a contract is coming up for renewal, data can help build a workflow around who owns that contract and who uses the service. Analysis of employment documents can indicate who has yet to sign policy acknowledgements.

Another major area of focus for Evisort will be better integrating with Microsoft Sharepoint, which Ting said is used by 80% of his customers. He expressed hope that the investment by Microsoft’s M12 Ventures will help spur Evisort’s development in that area.

“Simply put, Evisort is creating the new command center for the operations team for mid- to large- enterprises,” M12’s global head Kashyap said in a statement. “Evisort’s AI algorithms draw out the deepest insights for legal, procurement, and financial teams, and are pushing the envelope on AI advancements.”

Earlier:

Evisort’s New Document Analyzer Offers Out-of-the-Box AI to Mine All A Company’s Contracts