Author: TSA Press

Managing email is among the most frustrating problems lawyers face. ZERØ, launched in 2018, is a mobile app that uses artificial intelligence to target lawyers’ email woes, automatically capturing billable time spent on email, automatically filing emails to the proper folders in a firm’s document management system, and guarding against inadvertently sending sensitive emails to the wrong recipient.

Today, ZERØ is releasing a new “lite” version of its product, targeted at smaller and mid-sized firms. ZERØ Lite provides virtually the same functionality as the flagship product, except that it lacks the flagship product’s ability to integrate with and file emails into the DMS systems NetDocuments and iManage.

Otherwise, ZERØ Lite is much like the product from which it is derived. It uses AI to help lawyers organize their emails into appropriate Outlook folders, capture time spent interacting with client-related emails from mobile devices, and automatically detect potential wrong recipients before an email goes out.

“Once we started with our flagship product, we started getting a lot of requests from mid-market firms and even larger firms that do not have the DMS platforms we support, but nonetheless wanted the benefits of our product for email mobility,” ZERØ CEO Alex Babin told me in an interview earlier this week.

“Now, attorneys and legal professionals do not have to have a DMS to get the value that ZERØ provides,” he said.

Specifically, ZERØ Lite performs three key functions:

• Email management. ZERØ Lite predictively files emails into corresponding Outlook folders, without the lawyer having to manually drag-and-drop them into the appropriate folders. The app can also prioritize emails by importance or sender.
• Mobile time capture. ZERØ Lite automatically captures the time lawyers spend interacting with client-related emails on a mobile device, creating draft time-entry narratives tied to emails and specific activities.
• Prevents data loss. ZERØ Lite prevents users from sending emails containing sensitive information to potential wrong recipients by warning them before the email goes out.

Babin says that both ZERØ and ZERØ Lite help law firms make more money by capturing time that might otherwise be lost emailing from mobile devices. It also helps firms be more compliant by helping users store emails in the right locations.

Although Babin did not specify the price of the new product, he said it will be lower than for the full product, in part because it does not require set-up of the connection to the firm’s DMS. If a firm purchases the Lite product and later decides to upgrade to the full product, the transition would be smooth, Babin said.

The company has already signed up three firms to use ZERØ Lite, two of which are Canadian firm Cox & Palmer in its Halifax office and Missouri firm Lewis Rice. (Babin declined to identify the third.) For its flagship product, the company recently signed the law firm Holland & Knight as a customer.

Longer term, Babin’s goal is to make ZERØ the standard for mobile email management in the legal profession, not just for time capture and compliance, but as a general email application.

While Apple’s native iPhone email app is currently the most widely used, it is a consumer app not designed for the needs of professionals such as lawyers, he noted.

Babin wants to see ZERØ become the standard mobile email app for legal professionals, with all the attributes professionals would want, including security, compliance and productivity.

In fact, pointing to ZERØ’s integrations with timekeeping tools such as Intapp Time and Aderant iTimekeep, Babin believes the product will become more a platform than a standalone app.

“We’re making it a hub of productivity management,” he said.

Malcolm Gladwell built a career out of making facially unconventional yet ultimately fairly obvious connections and allowing the lowest common denominator of American society dub him a genius for it. Oh, Sesame Street is successful because its content is memorable? Give this guy a unique haircut — more “stickiness” — and declare him a public intellectual with all the guest spots with Bill Simmons that title entails.

The problem is Gladwell’s “expertise,” such as it is, rests on compiling research from actual experts and then spitting it back packaged as some kind of novel revelation. It does not, for example, extend to his observations about the criminal justice system. Speaking at Penn State yesterday — you already see where this is going — Gladwell opined:

And this is the Tipping Point where we all need to come together and admit that blithely recategorizing straightforward stuff doesn’t make someone smart.

There was, in fact, nothing unbalanced or egregious about the prosecutors in the Sandusky case. And that’s saying something, because prosecutors are unbalanced and egregious all the time but they were pretty by the book in this case. Gladwell’s entirely amateur legal reasoning comes from his new book Talking To Strangers where he relitigates the Sandusky case based on a psychologist saying that people generally trust each other and therefore Joe Paterno and Penn State administrators should deserve public sympathy that Sandusky duped them when they trusted his denials.

I’m sure they were inclined to trust the guy they knew… but that wasn’t their job. These weren’t random folks on the street, they were university officials paid handsomely — in Paterno’s case very handsomely — to protect the school. That’s where they owed their duty and that’s why they faced repercussions.

There may be problems with the criminal law, but we’ve gotten this system by and large through decades, if not centuries, of evolution. The burdens placed on the Penn State administration reflect the wisdom of generations of legal professionals. It’s not something to throw out because someone slapped together a dime store attempt at a Brandeis brief based on one psychologist. If anything, the right lesson to take from that psychologist’s work is “people tend to trust folks and that can be dangerous so the law should situate some people with the responsibility to exercise critical judgment.”

Sometimes cutting against conventional wisdom is the sign of a bold thinker. Sometimes it’s the sign of an ill-informed poser collecting speaking fees and book deals. Figuring out where to draw that line is pretty important.

Earlier: Harvard Law School Is Full Of Druggies: A Conversation Between Malcolm Gladwell & Lance Armstrong

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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.

Listen, you’re a busy lawyer. You don’t have time to keep up with the vastness of the internet. Plus, in case you haven’t noticed, there is an impeachment trial going on. That spectacle, presided over by Chief Justice Roberts, is sucking any spare time you might have. But that doesn’t mean some hilarious ish isn’t going down on the interwebs.

Take, for example, the Twitter feed of George Conway. Conway is notable in Biglaw as a litigator at Wachtell who had some conservative-leaning political aspirations. But, as we all know by now, he is also married to counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway. And he doesn’t like his wife’s boss. Like, not at all. Like he’s started a fund, The Lincoln Project, to make sure Trump gets defeated in 2020 and his wife is out of a job.

As interesting as that is to watch from afar, Conway has doubled down on the Trump attacks. Just the other day, he went on a Twitter screed slamming the president for some of the most egregious mistakes he’s made while in office. It’s a shade-filled walk down memory lane; actually, it bypasses shade and gets to full-on dunking on the president. Anyway, it would be an entertaining thread regardless of who put it together, but once you know Conway’s personal connection to the president, well *chef’s kiss*.

Enjoy!

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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).

* Michael Bolton’s lawyer disputes allegations from the National Security Council that Bolton’s new book contains confidential information. [Hill]

* The criminal trial of Michael Avenatti has begun, and the allegations are pretty juicy. [New York Post]

* A Syracuse man has decided to sack his court-appointed attorney and boycott his own trial. Seems like this self-represented defendant may have a fool for a client… [Syracuse.com]

* A lawyer saved a hawk who flew into a building in Brooklyn occupied by the U.S. Attorney’s office. This lawyer kind of gives new meaning to the term “legal eagle.” [New York Daily News]

* Hillary Clinton has so far been able to successfully duck process servers trying to serve her with papers related to the defamation lawsuit filed by Tulsi Gabbard. [New York Post]

* Facebook has agreed to a $550 Million settlement of a facial recognition class action lawsuit. How do we get in on that money?? [USA Today]

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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.

At issue in Lochner was New York’s Bakeshop Act of 1895 and its provision barring bakeries from keeping employees working obscene hours around hot stoves. How many hours a week were bakers allowed to keep their employees working under the act?

Hint: Lochner was fined $25 for holding an employee longer and $50 for a second offense before appealing his conviction.

See the answer on the next page.

If you’re lucky enough to have a $100 bill in your wallet, take it out and look at all those beautiful anticounterfeiting security features designed to keep your money safe. It’s got that trippy blue security ribbon with textured images of bells and 100s, an image of a bell in an inkwell that changes color in the light, and of course the watermark that is now iconic to U.S. currency. Ben Franklin’s subtle half-smirk is well placed, almost like he knows a little something you don’t.

Now take a peek at a twenty. Whereas the $100 bill is the most counterfeited U.S. denomination overseas, here at home, the $20 bill is more frequently counterfeited than its companion notes. Still an impressive feat of printing and design, the $20 bill has all the security features that have become more or less ubiquitous on U.S. currency, including the twist of a shifting color palette which fades from green to peach and back again. It doesn’t feature a picture of Harriet Tubman thanks to Steve Mnuchin, but hey, still a pretty good-looking banknote from a design perspective.

Finally, pull out a one. Soggy, torn, green ink smeared across it in tones that seem to differ wildly from one bill to the next, it looks like something you blew your nose into. Would anyone bother to make a fake version of something that looks so despondent in the first place?

Yes, it turns out they would. International Falls, Minnesota, perhaps best known for its unofficial motto, “Oh God it’s so cold I can’t feel my face,” and as the birthplace of my redheaded friend Andy, now has a new claim to fame: the end of the line for an international counterfeit currency smuggling operation.

Last week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized 45 cartons of counterfeit U.S. currency with a face value of $900,000 — in fake one-dollar bills — at the U.S.-Canada border at the International Falls Port of Entry. If you’re wondering what a shipment of nearly a million bucks in fake ones looks like, well, it looks like a bunch of cardboard boxes stacked up on pallets that stand well-above waist level. That is a lot of singles.

The bogus money was found in a commercial rail shipment, which authorities say originated in China. It really makes one wonder what the plan was going to be if and when the shipment reached its destination. How do you launder almost a million bucks in fake singles? Do you just pass them out as tips to baristas for the next 57 years? Maybe you bring a small army of complicit hotdog vendors into the fold? I’m pretty sure you’re not going to just get a hand truck and wheel 45 boxes stuffed with ones into a bank. And why 45 boxes, anyway? If you do the math, that’s 20,000 singles per box. Did someone get sticky fingers between here and China and run off with the other five boxes? Or did the printer decided he or she could get away with shipping $900,000 in pretend $1 banknotes, but trying to ship an even million was just too risky?

Perhaps you’re wondering, like I was, whether this crime could even be worth the printing costs. Well, if the presumably Chinese counterfeiters behind this daring low-rent forgery ring are at least as efficient as the U.S. government, it could indeed be worth their time. It only costs the government 5.5 cents to print each one-dollar greenback. This is about half of what it costs the Department of the Treasury to print the larger bills up to the $100 denomination, and about a third of what it costs to print a $100 bill, because $1 bills haven’t been redesigned in decades and lack the slightly more expensive security features of the larger bills.

Apparently the fourth season of the hit series “Fargo” is already set to air in 2020, but if the showrunners need some ideas for season number five, they need look no further. Midwestern crime stories don’t get much more absurd and charmingly quirky than $900,000 in counterfeit one-dollar bills in a train car in International Falls.

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Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

In less than a year, I turn sixty. Not quite senior, but certainly approaching the cusp. I have reflected on words my father spoke often to my brothers and me growing up in Pittsburgh.

“Today is the youngest you will ever be, live like it.”

This was a mindset that escaped me when I began recovery at forty-six. I sat in the 12-step room and listened to men and women who had been twenty and thirty years sober. They had begun their recoveries years and decades before me. It honestly depressed me. I wasn’t sure if I even had that many years in front of me with all the damage I had done to my body. It caused intense depression and loneliness.

I lamented the loss of a way of life and uncertainty about a projected future free of the bonds of booze and blow. I was terrified of looking at myself in the mirror, stripped naked, having to love the person I saw without an expensive but ill-fitting suit of cocaine and booze.

Beginning recovery at any age is difficult. It often involves some sort of loss. Loss of family. The loss of self-respect and the breaking down of self to ground zero before the slow rebuild begins. Sometimes the loss of freedom. When it happens at a later stage in life, there is a lot more room to engage in looking back at all that destruction. I certainly did that quite a bit in those early days of recovery. I obsessed over the years I had “wasted,” convinced that I might as well have lit a match to them. I felt the shame, regret, and contemplation of the uncertainty and fear of “middle-age sober.”

Starting out, it ripped me apart that I had two successful brothers whom I compared myself against and never came out feeling good. I engaged in the most self-destructive kind of reflection on the past. I call it “revisionist recovery.” Going over every moment in my past and wondering how things would be different if I had only not taken that drink or done that snort. Would I have been a better law student? A better husband? A better brother? A better son? A better lawyer?

I eventually realized that this was not going to help my recovery because it boiled my life down to moments in time rather than viewing it as a fluid chain of events that make me the person I am today. Do I have regrets? Sure. I will always regret the collateral damage, but that is what making living amends and doing my best to change the world with acts of kindness is all about for me. I can’t change the past, but I can control how I respond to it and do my best to stay in the present, trying to do the next right thing every day.

I had the epiphany that, for my recovery to truly move forward, I could no longer obsess about “wasted years.” How things could have been different or what I could have done in my life if I had gotten sober earlier. I embrace who I am today. Today is the youngest I will ever be, and I will live like it one day at a time in my recovery. That’s what I hope.

Next year I will turn sixty.

When the time comes, I will embrace the cusp of senior sober, hopefully looking forward with verve and purpose. Senior sober will be a wonderful place to be.

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Brian Cuban (@bcuban) is The Addicted Lawyer. Brian is the author of the Amazon best-selling book, The Addicted Lawyer: Tales Of The Bar, Booze, Blow & Redemption (affiliate link). A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, he somehow made it through as an alcoholic then added cocaine to his résumé as a practicing attorney. He went into recovery April 8, 2007. He left the practice of law and now writes and speaks on recovery topics, not only for the legal profession, but on recovery in general. He can be reached at brian@addictedlawyer.com.

Legal operations is all about optimizing the legal department’s ability to grow and protect the company it serves. As such, legal departments are seeking a higher level of operational excellence. This is evidenced by their embrace of innovation, increased demand for automation of repetitive tasks and a workflow-centric approach and understanding of how to use technology to create operational wins. 

Driving efficiencies and containing costs are two key reasons that legal operations is important and is growing so quickly. Legal departments were forced to adopt a more operationally focused mindset as a result of the Great Recession. The 2008 downturn was so severe, and efficiency and cost-cutting were considered so critical to the survival of the business at large, that it was no longer acceptable to spend freely. Since then, C-suites have increasingly been making their law departments behave more like other business units. This ultimately led to the rise of a profession dedicated to bringing business discipline to the law department: legal operations. 

Legal department operations professionals (LDOs) handle the management of vendors, systems, strategic planning, technology, knowledge, financial issues and the myriad other tasks that plague the legal department. Legal operations are all about optimizing the legal department’s ability to support the business and is a multi-disciplinary function that optimizes legal services delivery by focusing on twelve core competencies. The competencies, developed by CLOC, are divided among three levels: foundational, advanced and mature. 

Cost control and cost management have always been among the legal department’s greatest challenges. Economic downturns in recent decades served to exacerbate the “do less with more” mindset. In order to meet these intensifying challenges, many departments began increasing the workload of existing resources or bringing on more in-house lawyers. Others have built and started executing technology roadmaps. Technology has been optimizing legal operations in several key areas. Workflow and automation of processes deserve a spot at the top of the list. Data analytics is also important, as analytics can demonstrate the value of technology in the department and the value of the legal department to the business. Technology is assisting with the competitive bidding process on certain types of cases. Automating many routine tasks can shave hours off any busy schedule. Collaboration using  technology gives a whole new meaning to “working together.” 

Today’s state-of-the-art technology allows all stakeholders from anywhere in the world – including legal departments, other service providers, and members of the corporation’s accounting team and business units – to be on a single platform. Technology will increasingly play a prominent role, as more LDOs are discovering they can better fulfill their mission by leveraging well-chosen technology solutions to automate processes, track legal spend and deliver key decision-ready information. The increasingly robust alliance of legal ops and technology is now helping to forge the future of legal operations in amazing ways we could never have imagined a decade ago. Onit purpose-built our technology platform to help drive this alliance and enables customers to execute their technology roadmaps over time. Click here to learn more. 

As many readers of this column know from firsthand experience, getting hired by a law firm is a brutal process. Job applicants often need to interview with many attorneys, and sometimes must appear at a law office three or more times to be interviewed for a job. In addition, job applicants often need to fill out long conflicts forms, background check forms, and other documents in order to be hired by a firm. Perhaps the worst part of the hiring process is how long it often takes to get hired. As someone who has been on both sides of the process, I understand firsthand how law firms need to respond faster and be more respectful to job applicants out of courtesy and to reduce the stress of applying for a job.

Throughout my career, I have been both a job seeker and an individual tasked with reviewing applicants for jobs at the firms at which I worked. It has always been very frustrating to observe how long it usually takes for the hiring process for a law firm to take place. Although some job hunts can take less than a month, I have seen job searches take as long as six months. During the hiring process, numerous job candidates are left in limbo as they nervously await a decision from the firm that they hope to join.

I remember earlier in my career when I was a job candidate and had interviewed at a variety of firms. For months, I waited in trepidation. I checked my emails religiously and made sure my voicemail box was empty so I could receive messages from firms. Not a day passed that I didn’t think about my job search, and most days, I constantly thought about my experiences at interviews and my chances of getting hired at a firm.

Given that the hiring process is such a trying time for many attorneys, you would think that firms would prioritize interviewing candidates as soon as possible and notifying everyone within a few days about whether they have been selected for a job. However, that is often not the case.

At many of the firms at which I worked, partners did not prioritize the hiring process and delayed responding to the candidates they had interviewed. I understand some of the reasons why partners take such a long time to respond to job candidates. For one, partners have a number of competing obligations, the most critical of which is billing hours and making money. Although adding personnel can lead to increases in revenue, taking the time to interview candidates in the short term can take time away from billing hours. In addition, law firms operate on cycles, and some periods, such as the holidays and the time leading up to Labor Day, may be slower at a shop, and many key partners may be away. As such, it is sometimes unavoidable for partners to take weeks and months to respond to job candidates.

However, partners need to understand that job candidates are often extremely stressed out about the hiring process and would like a decision as soon as possible. This is even more true for attorneys who have been laid off and simply want the nightmare of being axed to end. As a result, partners need to have compassion and factor in the stress of job candidates when deciding on the timing of a hiring process.

In addition, partners should try to minimize the amount of trips a job candidate needs to make to a firm while interviewing for a position. Every time applicants show up for interviews, they need to take time off from their current jobs (which could arouse suspicions with their current bosses) and make other arrangements. I once had to travel to a firm three times to meet with attorneys during a job search, and the last time was for a ten-minute interview with one person! Firms should try to do screening interviews by phone whenever possible.

In addition, firms should not grant interviews out of kindness or because of office politics when there is no chance the candidate will be hired. Sometimes, I have seen firms offer interviews to a client’s relative just to show the client they care about them, and this is usually fine. However, one time, I was tasked with interviewing a job candidate after our firm had experienced rounds of layoffs and financial uncertainty. There was no way we would hire new people in this situation, but our firm still “interviewed” a candidate since this person had connections to one of the partners. All things being considered, the kinder option might have been to not waste the candidate’s time with an interview when there was no way that candidate was going to be hired by our firm at that time.

All told, the hiring process at many firms is brutal, and one of the worst parts about this process is how long it typically takes to hear back from firms. The job search often takes months, and job candidates often need to attend multiple interviews and won’t hear updates throughout the process. Even though partners have a number of responsibilities, they should try to conduct the hiring process quickly and notify candidates of their decisions as soon as possible.

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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.