Author: TSA Press

* The New York Attorney General is suing DHS over restrictions on the access of New York residents to Global Entry and Trusted Traveler Programs. JFK and LaGuardia are a mess already… [Fox News]

* Boies Schiller is facing partner departures amid leadership changes at the firm. [American Lawyer]

* A lawyer has been suspended from practice for backdating a filing. Maybe this attorney hopped in his DeLorean and the papers were timely filed? [Virginia Lawyers Weekly]

* Michael Flynn’s disagreements with his former counsel have delayed his sentencing. [Talking Points Memo]

* Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer has confirmed that Weinstein definitely needs a walker and has not watched Curb Your Enthusiasm recently. Really need to check out the latest season of Curb. [Deadline]

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

The Zimbabwe government has for years maintained a ban on the importation or growing of genetically modified maize, but the current food shortages in the country have forced the government to change its policy stance. The ban on GM maize imports was lifted on the 31 January 2020 as the country seeks to improve local supplies following yet another poor harvest season.

Zimbabwe’s maize production fell by 53% y/y in the 2018/19 production season to 800,000 tonnes, according to data from the United States Department of Agriculture. This was far below the country’s annual maize consumption of between 1.8 and 2.0 million tonnes. Therefore, the country had to import at least a million tonnes of maize in order to meet the local supply requirements.

But the dearth of timely and credible data has made it a challenge to track the maize importation activity into Zimbabwe. Observing from reports of food shortages at the beginning of 2020, I am inclined to believe that the country was unable to import the required maize volume for the 2019/20 marketing year (this corresponds with the 2018/19 production season which was a drought year).

Zimbabwe imported 100,000 tonnes of maize from Tanzania in 2019, according to Japhet Hasunga, Tanzania’s Agriculture Minister, and 79,283 tonnes from South Africa between May 2019 and January 2020, according to data from the South African Grain Information Services. This data supports my view that Zimbabwe has thus far imported less than the required maize quantities to meet consumption requirements. The slow pace of imports might have been caused by fiscal constraints on the back of the country’s ongoing macroeconomic crisis. The stringent regulations on the importation of GM maize might have also contributed to the slow pace of imports.

South Africa had about 1.2 million tonnes of maize available for export markets in the 2019/20 marketing year which ends in April 2020. However, roughly 80% of its maize is produced from GM seeds. This means that South Africa was inhibited from supplying the Zimbabwean market under its stringent GM policy. This is evident from South Africa’s maize exports data; the country exported 900,585 tonnes of maize between May 2019 and January 2020. But Zimbabwe imported only a 9% share of this total volume.

With international humanitarian organisations such as the World Food Programme actively assisting Zimbabwe to avert the current food crisis, the lifting of the GM maize import ban could accelerate maize import activity into Zimbabwe in the coming months. The maize might originate from South Africa and other leading maize exporting countries such as the United States, Brazil, Mexico and Russia, among others, who have in the past exported maize to Zimbabwe.

The challenge for countries aside from South Africa and Mexico is that they are not major white maize producers, which is the preferred maize variant across southern Africa. Hence, the recent GM policy change will benefit maize exporters from South Africa and Mexico in the near term. Moreover, Zimbabwe’s maize deficit might not end in May 2020, which would have marked the end of its harvesting period. The country’s 2019/20 maize production season began on a bad footing because of delayed rainfall. The plantings were delayed and so far, the area planted and the expected maize harvest in the 2019/20 production season remains unclear, but on the lower end.

Fortunately for Zimbabwean consumers, neighbouring South Africa and other major maize producing countries are expected to remain maize exporters in the 2020/21 marketing year (this corresponds with the 2019/20 production season). The locust infestation in East Africa could limit surpluses from that region, but overall global maize exports remain awash. For instance, at the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa (Agbiz), we estimate that South Africa could see its maize harvest improving by at least 11% from the 2018/19 season, reaching 12.5 million tonnes. Here we’ve applied the preliminary maize planting data of 2.5 million hectares (up 10% y/y), at an average yield of 5.0 tonnes per hectare, which is plausible with current soil moisture.

This means South Africa could have more than a million tonnes for export markets in the 2020/21 marketing year, which begins in May 2020. Part of these supplies will help ease pressure on Zimbabwean consumers, and trade should be more free-flowing now with the GM ban having been lifted.

These measures could assist in the near term. In the long run, the Zimbabwean authorities should consider legalising the growing of GM maize in order for domestic farmers to produce higher yields such as South Africa, Brazil, the United States and other GM-growing countries.

The ultimate beneficiaries of such a policy shift would be consumers, as an increase in Zimbabwe’s maize production would lead to relatively lower prices. Moreover, in seasons of unfavourable weather conditions, GM crops wouldn’t be as badly affected as the conventional seeds that are currently grown in Zimbabwe. Indeed, necessity is the mother of invention. DM

Post published in: Agriculture

Why would a lawyer ever imagine it’d be okay to lie to and threaten a judge? This sounds like the exact opposite of how you’re supposed to act. And it looks like that was a lesson Georgia attorney James A. Dunlap had to learn the hard way.

Dunlap was temporarily admitted to practice in the state of Tennessee, but after his representation of a wannabe methadone clinic went off the rails, the Tennessee Supreme Court suspended him for one year. The court found that Dunlap had violated professional ethics rules against dishonesty and mandating candor to the court.

The disciplinary action stems from a company trying to open a methadone clinic in Tennessee. As part of that effort, in 2013, Dunlap filed an action with a state agency as well as cases in federal court for the clinic permits. Big Law Business has the details of just how Dunlap’s, erm, zealous advocacy for his client ran afoul of ethics rules:

After the state denied the certificate, Dunlap appealed and administrative judge Kim Summers stayed the hearing pending the outcome of the federal suits, the court said. But when Summers asked for updates on the federal cases, he stated there were no new developments when in fact one case had been dismissed and another had been stayed pending the administrative hearing.

When the state agency filed a motion to set that administrative hearing in 2014, Dunlap allegedly said to Summers there was no need for a hearing for the certificate and that he might have to ask the U.S. Justice Department to file an enforcement action against her, the court said. He also allegedly told her that if she held a hearing, she might be perceived as a “fixer” for the opposing parties and as “aiding and abetting” them.

The state professional responsibility review board did not take kindly to Dunlap’s actions, saying they amounted to “bullying and [were] prejudicial to the administration of justice.” They also found that Dunlap was “unapologetic and saw nothing improper in his conduct during the administrative appeal before Judge Summers.”

All of which is a long way of saying the Tennessee Supreme Court found a one-year suspension was warranted.

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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).

When it comes to the internet, the online collection, use, and disclosure of personal data has become the rule, rather than the exception. Personal data is being collected and used by online providers in a myriad of ways, and for companies in the United States, such practices have been subject to only limited disclosures of their data collection and usage practices. Times, however, are changing. In 2016, the European Union adopted the General Data Protection Regulation that fundamentally updated data privacy practices in the EU (as I have written about most recently here and here). The United States, unfortunately, has yet to enact such comprehensive legislation federally. The states, however, may be forcing change, and California is relating the change with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). CCPA compliance, however, is not without its pitfalls, and it’s easier to slip into these traps than you may think.

By now, most of you have heard about the CCPA. Enacted in California in 2018, the CCPA created a plethora of enumerated consumer rights regarding access to and control over California residents’ personal information as collected by businesses covered by the law. More specifically, the CCPA gives California residents the right to (i) know what personal information is being collected, used, shared, or sold about them, (ii) know whether and to whom their personal information is sold or otherwise disclosed, (iii) access and review their personal information, (iv) opt-out of the sale of their personal information, and (v) non-discrimination in the level of service and pricing despite exercising any of their privacy rights. Such responsibilities under the CCPA, however, only apply to those businesses that meet one or more of the following criteria: (a) gross annual revenues in excess of $25 million; (b) buy, receive, or sell the personal information of 50,000 or more consumers, households, or devices; and/or (c) derive 50 percent or more of annual revenues from selling consumers’ personal information.

The reach of the CCPA cannot be underestimated — businesses outside of California are not necessarily outside the scope of the CCPA. More specifically, to the extent a business collects the personal information of California residents and meets the any of the requirements set forth above requirements, it is likely subject to the CCPA requirements. Why? Because the focus of the statue is to protect the rights of California residents.  Although a California statute, the extent of its reach becomes clear — for example, a business based in New Jersey that does business online with California residents and otherwise meets any of the business qualification elements set forth above will need to comply with the CCPA. Given the size of California’s economy (which has been ranked as fifth-largest in the world) and the extent of business contacts to that state, some could argue that the CCPA operates as a de facto federal law. Moreover, the CCPA also confers a private right of action to affected consumers against companies that violate the law, providing for statutory damages between $100 and $750 or more if such damage can be proven (all in addition to any declaratory or injunctive relief). In sum, the reach of the CCPA is extensive.

Given the scope and reach of the CCPA, it comes as no surprise that most  companies in the United States that do business with California residents and meet any of the qualification criteria are scrambling to comply. Such compliance, however, is not an easy proposition — care must be taken to address the nature of disclosures as well as the architecture necessary to respond to requests from consumers to know, delete, and opt-out within specific timeframes. This has led to a ton of questions regarding the fit of existing practices as well as the changes otherwise necessary for a business to comply with the CCPA. Although there is precious little guidance given the statute only became effective on January 1, 2020, the potential pitfalls that need to be navigated for CCPA compliance are far easier to identify. Here are three of the biggest issues to traverse regarding CCPA compliance that will require your company (or client) to tread carefully:

Being GDPR Compliant Does NOT Mean Your Company Is CCPA Compliant. It may come as a surprise to some, but GDPR compliance does not guarantee CCPA compliance. In fact, your company (or client) may have additional obligations under the CCPA. For example, the CCPA definition for “personal information” is actually more expansive than the GDPR. This difference alone may impact the data mapping that was performed under GDPR compliance efforts and whether additional qualifying data under CCPA is properly inventoried so the appropriate disclosures can be given. GDPR compliance is definitely a good thing, but simply does not guarantee CCPA compliance.

Compliance Favors The Turtle, Not The Hare. Given the scope of the CCPA, it’s easy to get caught up with moving as quickly as possible toward compliance. Although it’s good to grab the CCPA bull by the horns, ensuring the proper steps are being taken to achieve compliance is extremely important. The CCPA cannot be enforced by the California Attorney General until July 1, 2020, so at least there is time to achieve compliance without the threat of an enforcement action in California. That said, the dragging of feet is not an option either — determine where your client (or company) currently stands with regard to the CCPA-defined “personal information” it collects, how such information is collected, stored, handled, and disclosed and whether current policies meet those requirements. Be methodical.  Remember: Slow and steady wins the (compliance) race.

Right To Be Forgotten Does Not Mean Forget Your Policy. This point is worth stressing — too many companies fail to recognize that data privacy is an ongoing process. Once the policies implemented by your company (or client) have been updated to address CCPA requirements, those policies must not be set in stone. The CCPA may give the consumer the right to delete personal information held by businesses (or their service providers), but this “right to be forgotten” does not extend to the privacy policies of your company (or client). Revisit these policies on a regular basis to update them based upon guidance from enforcement actions, newly promulgated regulations or potential modifications to the statute.

Of course, the foregoing pitfalls aren’t the only ones, but are illustrative of the point that companies need to be methodically proactive in their CCPA compliance. The CCPA is forcing qualifying companies to take stock of consumer personal information in different ways than they may have previously done. Such companies need to address and update their personal information handling practices, but should do so carefully. There is a lot to consider regarding CCPA compliance, and any other approach may be a risky move. So take heed: it will be far easier (and less costly) to avoid these pitfalls than help your company (or client) to climb out of them.

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Tom Kulik is an Intellectual Property & Information Technology Partner at the Dallas-based law firm of Scheef & Stone, LLP. In private practice for over 20 years, Tom is a sought-after technology lawyer who uses his industry experience as a former computer systems engineer to creatively counsel and help his clients navigate the complexities of law and technology in their business. News outlets reach out to Tom for his insight, and he has been quoted by national media organizations. Get in touch with Tom on Twitter (@LegalIntangibls) or Facebook (www.facebook.com/technologylawyer), or contact him directly at tom.kulik@solidcounsel.com.

Remember the Panama Papers? Paul Singer’s favorite book of 2016 (and possibly Vladimir Putin’s least)? Cost one country its prime minister and caused some extra embarrassment to another perfectly capable of humiliating himself? Most recently cost Deutsche Bank some more money it doesn’t really have? Well, even if you do you probably haven’t thought about it in a while (even the Deutsche Bank thing has been quickly overtaken by rather more serious matters in Frankfurt), which is pretty strange, given that you might expect 11 million pages of evidence of tax fraud and prosecutors’ ability to make due with much less might have produced a steady drumbeat of people going to jail all over the world in the past four years. It hasn’t—yet—but here’s the first crack of the judicial snare drum.

I think that a law degree can be a terrific investment for those who just want to focus on their deep analytical skill development and critical thinking skills. But I don’t know that I would recommend a three-year law degree unless you think you want to be a lawyer. It’s a lot of time and money if you’re not looking to practice.

If a full three-year degree isn’t necessary for your professional goals and a one-year degree might meet them, that may make a lot of sense from a cost perspective — both the cost of the degree but also the opportunity cost of that extra time.

— Dean Jennifer Mnookin of UCLA Law School, getting realistic about the cost of a law degree amid the rise of technology, in an interview with CNBC Make It. Given technology’s disruption of the legal profession, with about 23 percent of work done by lawyers having been automated, prospective law students must reassess their goals.

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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.

Donald Trump always gives the game away. From “Russia, if you’re listening” to “shithole countries” to “grab ’em by the p*ssy,” the president is committed to doing his law breaking out in the open. And so it was with his apparent efforts to deny a $10 billion defense contract to Amazon, the company owned by “Trump hater” Jeff Bezos.

Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, is a frequent Trump target because of the paper’s coverage of his administration and its Saudi allies.

In July, Trump telegraphed the punch, saying that he was going to “take a very strong look” based on “complaining from different companies like Microsoft and Oracle and IBM” about the procurement process to award the JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) cloud computing contract. Trump’s deep understanding of military information systems was on display in an Oval Office presser with the Dutch prime minister when he explained, “We’re looking at it very seriously. It’s a very big contract, one of the biggest ever given having to do with the cloud and having to do with a lot of other things.”

How big is cloud? Soooo biiiiiiiig!

Amazon had long been presumed the front-runner, much to the chagrin of competing tech companies. But shortly after Trump’s comments, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper committed to a “review” of the contract.

Four months later, Microsoft was the surprise winner, and Amazon vowed to sue. And unlike Donald Trump, who is always threatening to “open up the libel laws” and sue, Bezos wasn’t bluffing.

As usual, Trump’s own statements are Exhibit A. Exhibit B is a book by former Defense Secretary James Mattis’s aide Guy Snodgrass which claims that Trump ordered Mattis to “screw Amazon” out of a chance to bid on the JEDI contract all the way back in 2018. (That was around the time Trump ordered the U.S. Postmaster General Megan Brennan to double the shipping rate across the board for Amazon.)

So now Mr. Bezos’s lawyers would like to sit down with Trump, Mattis, and Esper to figure out if the president and his defense secretaries interfered in the JEDI contract to use the apparatus of the federal government to harm the president’s perceived enemy, as he promised to do from way back when he was a candidate in 2016, yammering to crowds that, “I have respect for Jeff Bezos, but he bought The Washington Post to have political influence … he owns Amazon … he wants political influence so that Amazon will benefit from it.”

Will Bill Barr permit Esper, much less Trump, to answer interrogatories about “what steps, if any, DoD took to ensure that the individuals involved in the JEDI source selection process were not influence by the public or private statements of President Trump, his advisors, White House officials and/or any individuals employed by or acting on behalf of President Trump, his advisors, White House officials regarding the Jedi contract and award, Mr. Bezos, Amazon, AWS, and/or the Washington Post?”

In a word — NO.

But if Donald Trump thought Jeff Bezos was just going to roll over and let the matter drop, he’s even crazier than his hacker buddy Mohammed bin Salman. This ain’t over.

Amazon seeks to depose Trump, Esper in JEDI bid protest [WaPo]

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

Every frosty early February, legal technology vendors, visionaries, and even villains have huddled in the bowels of the Midtown Hilton to show their wares and evangelize about the future of the legal profession. Hotel space in New York is relatively cheap during this window between New Year’s and anything approaching a pleasant climate — it’s a logical time to book up a giant hotel and schedule some meetings with high-profile clients.

As usual, Legalweek offered three days of non-stop information. Unlike the algorithms that vaguely drive every product on the floor, it was more than I could process in such a tight window. Thankfully the show provides easy enough access to whiskey to smooth the sharp edges of collecting all this data.

Over the past several years, the show’s exhibit hall has shrunk like the polar ice caps. The crowded burrows of ostentatious booths are both more sparse and subdued these days. Vendors still flock to Midtown in February, but within the Hilton and its neighboring hotels, many eschew the exhibit hall and set up in suites holding pre-arranged meetings even though the idea of disappearing into a nondescript suite in a strange hotel doesn’t feel like the best business strategy in the #MeToo era.

Consolidation is also certainly a factor — one of the biggest, showiest booths of a Legalweek a few years ago is completely gone, sucked up into another giant entity. For a show once jokingly called “eDiscovery Week,” that side of the tech aisle has shaken down to a few hearty competitors opening up space on the floor like when a massive tree falls in the forest. Will saplings grow to take its place before the neighboring venture-capital-funded trees crowd out the sunlight?

With the eDiscovery market in a maturing space, the transactional sector has jumped into the breach. It’s not like transactional side solutions haven’t been around for a while — Kira Systems was the very first tech vendor I met with as an Above the Law editor — but this year I kept finding myself talking about deals. SimplyAgree assumes clients who don’t want something to pretend to be all things to all people. Are you trying to close a deal? Then SimplyAgree provides a straightforward closing tool. BlackBoiler offers AI-assisted contract review that learns from past deals and company standards, but the focus in my conversation with them was on the ability to prove the value of the system to clients (or your partners) in real-time. Where eDiscovery analytics went a couple years back, transactional work is heading now. Evisort all offered different angles on making and managing deals. I watched Evisort’s system take a random contract — unstructured data — and yank the key terms out of it in seconds. Knowable is all about, well, knowing things. Specifically knowing if your contract has produced unclaimed proceeds by missing triggering events. Deal tech was all over the place.

Not that eDiscovery doesn’t still hold a commanding presence at the show. Like DISCO’s legendary entryway ads — this year they brought some fun “Singlets” — which suffer only from not being the funniest legal tech ad series ever. Casepoint continues to grow, armed with its SEC deal. CloudNine, Consilio, Relativity, even companies at other stages of the process like data-gathering firms X1 which rapidly grabs stuff from your company computers and Cellebrite, grabbing digital data and more importantly training custodians to authenticate the process in court.

Despite remaining an informative and entertaining show, the pall over the proceedings remains the decline in booths. For conference organizers, booking those pricey booths keeps the show going. There was no outward betrayal of concern, but one has to wonder if the conference has to make a radical change to keep its prime spot on the legal technology calendar.

Everyone is going to come to New York — but are they going to stop by the Hilton on the way?

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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.