Author: TSA Press

This morning, Tulsi Gabbard’s attorneys filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York alleging that the former Secretary of State had “smeared” Gabbard’s “political and personal reputation.” Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill, quoted in The Hill, said “that’s ridiculous.” Calling Hillary Tulsi’s, “political and personal rival” as opposed to someone who could barely point her out of a lineup might be ridiculous, but the crux of the suit — that Clinton tried to brand a woman as an agent of foreign power because she doesn’t tow the party line in an effort to discredit Gabbard’s political career — doesn’t seem like much of a stretch at all actually.

Gabbard’s political career was starcrossed out of the gate: a Democrat with an anti-LGBTQ past and a hawkishness on Islamic “terrorism” that veers a bit too close to racist anti-Muslim tropes for most of her party’s comfort. She also said impeachment would only improve Trump’s chance of reelection, which she’s probably right about but still isn’t winning her any career points. She is never going to be the party’s nominee at any level of the ticket and, at best, is carrying on a vanity campaign and at worst is trying to lock in enough name-recognition to achieve sideshow relevance as a third party candidate. Which of course is Clinton’s axe to grind because she gives fuel to the idea that third party candidates cost her the presidency, which conveniently ignores Jill Stein’s core voters from 2012 and the boom in Libertarian “Never Trumper” voters, neither of which were ever in play for her. Still, it’s a nicer story than blaming yourself for writing off whole states.

Back in October, Hillary appeared on a podcast and branded Representative Tulsi Gabbard (vis-à-vis a comparison to Stein) as a “Russian asset” — or at least in the process of being groomed to be such an asset.

She’s the favorite of the Russians, they have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far, and that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not, because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian asset, I mean totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate.

It would be one thing to say Gabbard might be playing into Russia’s hands, but calling her an “asset” being “groomed” is troublingly McCarthyite. Russia certainly dallies in US elections and certainly deploys bots to create mischief wherever it can to bolster Donald Trump’s presidency because Putin perceives the doddering tool as a boon to Russia’s foreign policy aims. Note, that this doesn’t make Trump an “asset” — a term commonly understood in this context as an agent on the payroll of a foreign power — even if he is colloquially an “asset” in that he’s helpful to them. Clinton might claim that she only intended the latter meaning but don’t pee on my bed and use the pictures for Kompromat and tell me it’s raining.

The difference between those meanings may feel like a narrow rhetorical line, but running around branding people “Russian assets” is some real Alger Hiss stuff. Whether this lawsuit is an actionable claim or not, and the lawsuit faces plenty of hurdles ahead, these political attacks tying people to “light treason” is a practice that should be flagged so people stop doing it.

Gabbard is represented by Brian Dunne and based on his Avvo page you’d best not mess with him because he just might be Baby Yoda:

Goofy picture aside — and seriously there’s nothing wrong with lawyers having a little personality — Dunne released the following statement upon the filing of the complaint:

“Rep. Gabbard’s presidential campaign continues to gain momentum, but she has seen her political and personal reputation smeared and her candidacy intentionally damaged by Clinton’s malicious and demonstrably false remarks.”

And while the idea that her campaign continues to gain “momentum” may be the most demonstrably false remark of all, trying to tie a sitting congressperson to actively working for the Russians based on nothing is certainly not cool.

Gabbard suing Clinton for defamation over ‘Russian asset’ comments [The Hill]

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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.

When the employees of CG Blockchain learned their boss wasn’t who he said he was, and was instead a convicted Canadian hedge fund fraudster named Boaz Manor, they quit en masse. This seemed like quite a bit of an overreaction to Shaun MacDonald née Manor. After all, he said, if anyone asked him if he was Boaz Manor, he readily admitted it, and “people don’t have to disclose any kind of embarrassing or painful situations that they’ve encountered in the past, so long as it does not relate to their current job.” And in spite of his working in blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies, Manor/MacDonald was just a humble “product designer” and management consultant, so no need to worry about or even mentioned that ban from the securities industry. (Plus, are cryptos even securities anyway? No one seems to know, so why fret?)

When we parted back in the hazy late days of 2019, we were deep in the weeds, reviewing the depth and breadth of copyright protection for short literary works. In particular, we were examining the works claimed by songwriters who had asserted claims against pop maestros Taylor Swift and Lizzo.

The two songwriters who are suing Taylor Swift for infringement assert rights in the following: “Playas, they gonna play / And haters, they gonna hate.” A short work to be sure, and one that expresses an idea that is not particularly profound, But, as we know from Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., and its progeny, the standard for “originality” under the Copyright Act is minimal. Unlike patents, as the Supreme Court wrote, the “sine qua non of copyright […] is that the work is original to the author.” So, to be copyrightable, a work need not be novel or unique; it just needs not be copied from another author and evince at least an extremely low amount of creativity. Verily, almost any ingenuity qualifies, no matter how “crude, humble, or obvious.”

The Ninth Circuit acknowledged as much in the Swift case, finding that plaintiffs’ material met the “extremely low” bar required for protection. This accords with decisions reached by other courts. In OG Int’l, Ltd. v. Ubisoft Entm’t, for example, the court held that even stick figures could qualify for copyright protection. So, when considering how many words are needed to cross the line from “short phrase” — which is not protectable — to a “short literary work” – which is protectable — there are a number of guiding principles. In Phillips v. Murdock, the court analyzed the phrase “Wisdom Bible of God,” and found it to be too short and too rote to be protectable. This phrase, notably, was used as the title for a book, which weakened the claim given the code’s prohibition on title protection, and simply combined words routinely used to describe the work at issue.

Contrast that with the Eight Circuit’s decision in Applied Innovations, Inc. v. Regents of the Univ. of Minnesota, which addressed a series of short test statements used in educational settings. The court found that these test statements were protectable because while they were “short, simple, declarative sentences,” they were “not merely fragmentary words and phrases within the meaning of 37 C.F.R. § 202.1(a).” The court found these short statements protectable even though some were revisions of prior works, because they constituted “distinguishable” variations of the earlier material.

The Second Circuit’s approach, as seen in Salinger v. Random House, Inc., delineated what is protectable from what is not by noting that “a cliche or an “ordinary” word-combination by itself will frequently fail to demonstrate even the “minimum level of creativity necessary for copyright protection,” but such protection is available for the “association, presentation, and combination of the ideas and thought which go to make up the [author’s] literary composition.” This counsels that short phrases can be protectable depending not just on the words but the presentation of expression and the author’s analysis and emphasis.

This case, it should be said, reverses a finding of “fair use” by noted fair use maximalist Judge Pierre Leval back when he was a district court judge. The court notes that Judge Leval’s fair use finding was erroneous because it failed to recognize that while and “ordinary phrase may enjoy no protection as such […] its use in a sequence of expressive words does not cause the entire passage to lose protection.” Thus, while “the “ordinary” phrase may be quoted without fear of infringement, a copier may not quote or paraphrase the sequence of creative expression that includes such a phrase.

Swift’s case has now been sent back to the district court for discovery and further development of the record, which will likely include depositions ventilating how the plaintiff songwriters and Swift’s team developed the competing player-hater songs.

The case against Lizzo (at least the one we will be discussing) will not reach the discovery stage or even the courthouse. She had a massive hit with Truth Hurts, which topped the Billboard Hot 100 list for many weeks running. The most oft-quoted line from that song is its opener: “Just took a DNA test, turns out I’m 100 percent that bitch.” The problem, though, is that Lizzo 100 percent stole that line (allegedly) from a tweet written by British singer Mina Lioness. After initially denying that the line had been copied from Lioness, Lizzo eventually changed her tune and reached a deal to provide credit and compensation to the original creator of the line.

This phrase, like the phrase in the Swift case, is likely creative enough to be protectable and provides one of the more compelling moments in the song. Short, punchy, and memorable, one can easily see a jury finding the lines to have value and be within the ambit of copyright. And one can easily see why settlement would be the preferred course.

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Scott Alan Burroughs, Esq. practices with Doniger / Burroughs, an art law firm based in Venice, California. He represents artists and content creators of all stripes and writes and speaks regularly on copyright issues. He can be reached at scott@copyrightLA.com, and you can follow his law firm on Instagram: @veniceartlaw.

It’s 2020. Did you hear Barbara Walters announce it?

This year is the 100th anniversary of women winning the right to vote, and it was anything but a slam dunk. Showing my ignorance, which I do quite a bit, I had no idea that Tennessee was the deciding state as to whether the 19th Amendment for women’s suffrage would succeed or fail. Yes, we are divided today, but that’s really nothing new. Read this book (I reviewed it for HeadButler.com) and you will understand that divisiveness is not a new concept in American politics. Not surprisingly, not every woman was in favor of giving women the vote; see any parallels to today’s battles? One hundred years ago and today are closer than we would like to think.

I shudder to think what the fight would have been like had social media been around. In fact, I wonder if the term “antisocial media” makes more sense in these days of vitriolic, vituperative “discourse.”

Are you a member of the “clean desk” club?  I marvel at attorneys who are able to keep their workspaces clean, like working on only one file at a time.   Most litigators, especially in house, that I have known or know now do not fall into that august group.

One thing that irritated me about the television show The Good Wife was the clutter-free appearances of attorney offices, especially litigation associates whose spaces should have been drowning in paper. While I can appreciate the Zen concept of clutter-free, Zen and litigation just don’t seem to mesh, at least not for me. If they do for you, please tell me how. For me, the problem with Marie Kondo-izing my office would be the inability to find what I am looking for after the purge.

My office was full of boxes of discovery production (in the days before CDs and, then, third-party vendors). Briefs to be written, pleadings to be filed, and the like. Since I was in house, clients would routinely call or drop by with questions that took up time that I had promised to devote to a litigation matter. However, I rationalized that the time spent with a client could mean one less claim, one less lawsuit, always a happy thought. We never lacked for work in house. Some client was always getting into trouble; that was a given.

Do you know that one of my favorite words, “dinosaur” doesn’t translate into Zulu? Stay with me here. A scholar who works on decolonizing language that has untranslatable words suggests “ancient animal.”

Whether you are an “ancient animal” or a “dinosaur,” Carolyn Elefant’s recent post should prompt all of us of a certain age to heed the calls for the profession to change, sooner rather than later (wishful thinking there). It should be “do not go gentle into that good night” (remember the Dylan Thomas poem) It’s time for us old farts (can I say that?) to move us forward after years of tiny incremental changes. At this point in our careers, we should feel free to suggest what works, criticize what doesn’t, and how to make the next decade better.

I am all for disruption, and I agree with Elefant’s take that it’s time for women to stop worshiping at the feet of Biglaw and start their own practices. After all the years of trying to achieve parity in Biglaw, it’s time to stop, stop right now, and disabuse ourselves of any notion of equality and equal pay. It’s time to stop trying to twist ourselves into pretzels.

Men have ruled the roost and it’s time to take a slingshot (or something stronger) to their crowing. As Elefant says we need to stop looking at women owned law firms as a fallback when women are passed over for partnership; we need to see women owned firms for what they are: legitimate career choices, and perhaps even better ones, at whatever stage in the career such a choice is made. It shouldn’t be regarded as “loser, loser,” but rather “winner, winner.”

Elefant says that it is the dinosaurs aka ancient animals who can make lasting changes, be the risk takers, the trail blazers, the mouthpieces; at this point, what do we have to lose? If our dinosaur legacy can be one of positive changes for clients, the profession, and access to justice, then sign me up. Let’s hear the Twenties roar. Now, where and how to begin?

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Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for over 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.

In 2015, a same-sex female couple in Indiana tragically lost their twin babies during a premature childbirth. But in a bizarre application of Indiana law, while both parents were permitted to be named on the children’s death certificates, one parent — the parent who was not genetically related to the children — was denied the right to be listed on the children’s birth certificates. The couple challenged the Indiana laws that were at play, joining several other same-sex couples in the litigation. Eventually, the couples won an injunction in federal district court.

Indiana appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 2017. On appeal, the Indiana Attorney General’s office argued that state law requires that the biological parents of a child must be listed on the child’s birth certificate. In other words, the right procedure for a same-sex female couple would be to list a sperm donor on the original birth certificate as the “father.” And then, go through an adoption procedure for the nongenetically related mother. Once that adoption was completed, the couple could request a reissued birth certificate. Oh that’s all? Actually, that’s quite a lot of red tape! And confusingly, the same standards apparently did not apply to an Indiana death certificate.

What Is Marital Presumption And What If The State Discriminates As To Who Gets The Presumption?

The plaintiffs argued that Indiana law was being applied in a discriminatory manner. For instance, Indiana law provided a presumption that any man married to a woman giving birth was presumably the father — the biological father — of the baby. That was true even if the couple had used a sperm donor in order to have a child. But Indiana declined to apply that same presumption when a woman was married to a woman. So a heterosexual couple using a sperm donor avoided quite a few headaches that a same-sex female couple had to overcome, in order to reach the same legal position as parents.

The Indiana attorney general argued that the state’s laws were not discriminatory, since all couples were being treated the same. Every woman giving birth should know that when filling out the “father” portion of the birth certificate under Indiana law, the law required her to write the information for the “biological” father –- whether he be an anonymous sperm donor or other –- and not necessarily her spouse. The attorney general further argued that if a woman were to write her husband, and he was not the biological father, then her husband would not have any parental rights to the child. Of course, this argument obfuscates the underlying issue at stake — that the marital presumption only applies to heterosexual couples, and that the state is only objecting when same-sex couples list both parents on the birth certificate.

But, But … Obergefell And Pavan

Last week, the Seventh Circuit FINALLY ruled in the case known as Henderson v. Box … two and half years after arguments before the court, and just at the three-year mark after the case was appealed in 2017. In a victory for same-sex parents throughout Indiana, the appeals court ruled in favor of the parents. The judges on the panel were Flaum, Easterbook, and Sykes; Ford, Reagan, and George W. Bush appointees, respectively.

The court acknowledged that, yes, a man listed on a birth certificate, upon contest in Indiana, can be shown not to have parental rights to the child. However, the court pointed out that even with a “bursting-bubble presumption” –- one that vanishes as soon as it is contested — the presumption has consequences for parental rights. Unless the presumption is, in fact, contested, the husband is deemed the father (regardless of biological parent status), with full parental rights and parental duties, in a way that both women in a female-female marriage are not.

The court noted that the spouse of the woman giving birth may, indeed, be the biological mother of the child. One set of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are an example of this. The couple went through “reciprocal IVF” — where one spouse gestationally carried and gave birth to the child, and the other, through an egg retrieval and in vitro fertilization, was genetically related to the child.

Case closed.

Of course, this should have been an easy case all along, and resolved much sooner. We already know from SCOTUS rulings in Obergefell and a subsequent cased called Pavan that same-sex couples are entitled to receive the same “constellation of benefits” as different-sex couples. That includes parental rights. So if a man married to a woman gets the presumption of parenthood, a woman married to a woman, or a man married to a man, must receive the same presumption. Equally. Indeed, the Court’s opinion was a breezy 10 pages explaining this rationale.

Good Work. But In Less Helpful News …

Nice work to the court coming to a sound decision as to the plaintiffs’ rights to equal treatment under the law. If you are going to take 32 months to write a 10-page decision, you definitely want to get it right.

Of course, in less helpful news, the court specifically noted that the question as to “all-male” couples was “expressly left open for resolution by the legislature or in some future suit.” The court also made clear it was not ruling on any parental rights that a biological father — such as a sperm donor — might have to the child of a same-sex female couple. So all you donors out there, keep your eyes open for future similar cases.

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Ellen Trachman is the Managing Attorney of Trachman Law Center, LLC, a Denver-based law firm specializing in assisted reproductive technology law, and co-host of the podcast I Want To Put A Baby In You. You can reach her at babies@abovethelaw.com.

When it comes to litigation, law schools generally funnel students into larger, defense-oriented firms. These firms offer steady paychecks — all the better to pay your monthly debt bill, my dear — and a tried and true path. But there is another side to the “v” and it often involves better opportunities and more rewarding work. Joe and Elie chat with Edelson PC about the tech-oriented plaintiff and class action firm’s work from protecting biometric privacy rights to addressing sexual misconduct in youth sports with partner Chris Dore and associates Aaron Lawson and Sydney Janzen.

Here at Above the Law, we make it a habit to cover whenever a Biglaw firm expands its parental leave. The move is a growing trend to be sure, and the expanded programs are regularly offered now as gender neutral and without a primary caregiver stipulation. This is good news we should — and are! — celebrating. But we also hope to build the pressure and shame on the firms whose policies and entrenched in the past.

Anyway, on to the good news!

Yesterday, Kramer Levin announced some big changes to their parental leave policy. The firm’s policy — which it should be noted applies to all employees, not just lawyers — will allow new parents, regardless of parenting role, to take 12 weeks’ paid leave. This is on top of any disability leave. And the policy applies to births, adoptions and foster care placements of a child.

Kudos to the firm!

With more and more firms stepping up, expanded, gender neutral leave may start to feel de rigueur, and that’s a good thing. But we should also remember it’s an important step, one experts say will help ameliorate the gender pay gap. And that’s good news we can all get behind.

Check out the firm’s complete policy 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).

Stock market returns are not the best measuring stick of a president’s performance in office, as I’ve written about before. A president has a limited amount of control over what the stock market does. Only about half of Americans even own stocks. And the richest 10 percent of Americans own 84 percent of the stocks, so when the stock market does well, it’s mostly only directly helping a small group of already rich people.

But Donald Trump has actually done an excellent job, among his fans at least, of tying perceptions of his job performance to a rising stock market. This is a good marketing move, because the stock market, even under a bad president, is supposed to rise. Over the past century or so, looking at the past 15 presidents, stock market returns have been negative over the tenures of only three heads of state (Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush –- all Republicans, for what it’s worth). If your argument is, “If the stock market’s doing well, I’m doing well,” historically you have an 80 percent chance of that panning out for you.

Betting that the stock market is going to rise over the long term is a bit like betting that the overall global temperature is going to rise. It’ll probably happen regardless of what a president does or does not do. So, the debate becomes one of degree, and people are bad at nuance.

Yes, the stock market has risen under Trump, just like it did during the terms of 12 of the past 15 presidents. Yes, new record highs were reached for various stock indexes during Trump’s tenure. Stock indexes reaching records is not unusual. It’s what is supposed to happen.

Still, the stock market hasn’t crashed under Trump (yet), and clearing even a low bar is worth something. By modern standards, he’s even doing above average, at least as measured by the S&P 500, which tracks the stocks of 500 large companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges.

To measure stock market performance, you have to pick an index, which is itself a relatively convoluted process. Until recently, there have not been indexes which granularly track total stock market performance. But indexes that have been around for a while, like the S&P 500, can be used as a rough proxy for the stock market as a whole.

Donald Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017, so the end of last week marks the last day of trading exactly 36 months into his presidency. At three years into his own presidency, Bill Clinton had seen the S&P 500 rise by 45 percent. Midweek last week, Trump tied those returns, and then ended the week slightly surpassing them, at 46.1 percent. Neither Clinton nor Trump hold a candle to the S&P 500 returns ushered in by Barack Obama though: he oversaw a 58.9 percent return by 36 months into his presidency. George W. Bush notched an embarrassing -17.2 percent loss in the S&P 500 over his first three years, putting the average returns for the last four presidents at 33.2 percent after three years in office.

The index you use for comparison does matter though. The Dow Jones Industrial Average comprises 30 large public companies specifically selected to represent the broader economy. Viewing stock market returns through the lens of the Dow, 36 months in, Trump, Obama, Bush II, and Clinton scored 47.7 percent, 57.9 percent, -3.7 percent, and 63 percent, respectively.

Whatever measure you pick of stock market performance, things are going reasonably well under Trump, but it’s nothing to write home about either. Both of the last Democratic presidents did as well or better than Trump at juicing the stock market three years in. And Trump’s January 9 tweet about the stock market is self-promotion divorced from reality regardless of how you look at it:

STOCK MARKET AT ALL-TIME HIGH! HOW ARE YOUR 409K’S DOING? 70%, 80%, 90% up? Only 50% up! What are you doing wrong?

Nope, it’s not a 409K (he later corrected that part), and if you’re matching or even marginally beating the broader market, your 401(k) has realized not quite 50 percent returns under Trump. Your 401(k) certainly has not gone up 70, 80, or 90 percent during the Trump presidency. So, credit where credit is due: Trump has had good, even above average stock market returns during his tenure. His stock market returns have not been as good as Obama’s though, and they are nowhere near what he’s trying to take credit for.

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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.

A Northeastern college student from Iran was granted a student visa to continue his studies after a yearlong review. The Trump administration’s shock troops at Customs and Border Protection took a look at his valid visa and decided to ignore it and marked the kid for deportation. So much for “if only people came here legally.” An emergency federal hearing on the matter resulted in Judge Allison Burroughs issuing a court order temporarily blocking the deportation until it could be assessed by the court.

CBP deported the kid anyway.

And faced with this, Judge Richard Stearns, who got assigned the case proper (Hossein Abadi v. U.S. Customs and Border Protection et al), responded by declaring the case moot:

Stearns said in court that he didn’t think the government would “listen” to him, and that he did not [have] jurisdiction over the issue because Abadi had been deported, calling the case “moot.”

“This seems to be an issue for Burroughs, not me,” Stearns said. Church and Doyle contested that the emergency order was issued at around 9:20 pm– Abadi was not deported until 10:03pm, which would indicate the federal government violated the mandate. Doyle said later, “CBP has a history of ignoring district court orders.”

Are you fucking kidding me? “Ha ha. Yeah, those guys don’t listen to us… not much we can do about that.”

The student’s attorneys, Susan Church of Demissie & Church and Kerry E. Doyle of Graves & Doyle are planning to refile with Burroughs, who hopefully will have a harsher response to seeing an order she personally issued trampled on like this, but just because the order was issued by a different judge doesn’t make it any less an order of the court and Stearns had every bit of authority to protect the court itself from the government’s contempt.

With this shoulder-shrugging decision, Judge Stearns gives succor to the idea that parties can obviate stays by ignoring orders with impunity. If that’s the law then we may as well change the “least dangerous branch” to the “least effectual branch.” If there are no repercussions from this action, it’s a green light for increased abuse. It sets the precedent for not only ignoring court orders, but to the extent CBP will argue that they just didn’t know about the order before deporting him, it incentivizes bigoted meatheads to move faster to deport people, increasing the risk of tragic mistakes. Maybe Judge Burroughs will drop that hammer. Maybe Judge Stearns merely felt that punishment should be deferred to Judge Burroughs. Maybe.

The right answer here would have been to say that the habeas petition may be moot with the student no longer in custody, but that the court retains jurisdiction over the conduct of the parties to the matter. The marshals should then have been instructed to take whatever AUSA happened to be in the room into federal custody for contempt. It was the lawyer’s obligation to advise the agency to stay in compliance with the law and they failed. They will remain in the cooler until the DOJ at least offers, at government expense, to return to everyone to the status quo that existed before the act of contempt.

But even without such an aggressive response, the wishy-washy quotes Judge Stearns dropped do tremendous damage to the judiciary as a co-equal branch of government. It’s one thing to declare the case moot with a stern lecture that this is wholly inappropriate even though the court’s hands are tied and quite another to transform into Judge Eeyore and say the government just never listens and always disobeys orders. Projecting to the world that the courts are completely impotent is not a good look.

You’re a federal judge! Act like you’ve got some meager authority!

Despite judge’s order, Iranian student deported [CommonWealth]

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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.

I spent a part of my winter break watching numerous episodes of the Dave Ramsey Show. For those who are not familiar with his show, Ramsey gives financial advice to callers from all walks of life. Unfortunately, he gives some people the advice they need, not the advice they want, particularly those who are living beyond their means and are deep in debt.

A few months ago, Dave got a call from Steve, a lawyer in California. Steve is a few years out of law school and just started a job at a law firm making $200,000 per year but hates it. He wants to leave in order to pursue his passion of being a state prosecutor although it will mean making a lot less money. He asked Dave how long he should stay at his current firm in order to maximize his chances at financial success and capitalize on his law degree.

Dave didn’t answer his question. Instead, he told Steve to think about other options, not just the prosecutor’s office. Can he find other jobs that would provide both a law firm salary and a good quality of life? He suggested looking at criminal defense firms or even judgeships which might also satisfy his passion for justice.

While Dave’s advice isn’t really wrong, it’s incomplete. It’s also the type of generic advice someone like him would give to any of his callers. I think it’s safe to assume that Steve has thought long and hard about his career choices while he was in law school and after graduation. It’s likely he had no interest in meeting billable hour requirements or bringing in new business. So I think he was expecting Dave to give more customized advice.

The answer to Steve’s question is very simple. If he wants to maximize his chances at financial success, he should stay at the high-paying firm and take the money for as long as he can stand before transitioning to the prosecutor’s office. However, this is not as easy as it sounds, and there are other things to consider which might convince him to leave sooner than later.

First is the timing. State prosecutor jobs do not magically appear every day. If Steve is picky about the location he wants to work, it might take some time before a job opening appears. So if the dream job in the dream location appears, he should apply as soon as possible because it might be a while before a position opens again.

Second, he should think about the pension plan the prosecutor’s office is offering. Does the employer offer a contribution match? How long must he stay with the office in order for the pension to vest? When will he be entitled to withdraw from it? It might be wise to move sooner if there is a longer waiting period before the pension vests.

Third, he should look at the chain of command, and how promotions and raises are given. Steve said that the salary at the prosecutor’s office tops out at $120,000 per year. But how long will it take before he is eligible for that salary? And is it given to all prosecutors or only to the few members of the senior management?

He might want to consider exit options in case his passion changes for one reason or another. After a few years with the prosecutor’s office, can he switch to the defense side? His experience and possible inside knowledge could command a premium in the private sector. Or maybe he might want to consider being a judge, which is a common transition for prosecutors.

Finally, Steve has to think about his debts. He told Dave that he has $88,000 in debt. Considering that and the massive pay cut he will be taking once he leaves the high-paying law firm job, at a minimum he should stay long enough to pay off the debt as soon as possible and save a comfortable nest egg.

The decision to switch careers is a difficult one, particularly if you have a lot of debt and if the job you want pays a lot less than your current one. But instead of turning to a national radio talk show host, Steve should have went to a legal career counselor, a recruiter or to other people in the legal industry who can provide more detailed and more relevant advice. If he wants to achieve financial success, he will need to think about the short-term monetary gain and the long-term stability of his career choice.

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Steven Chung is a tax attorney in Los Angeles, California. He helps people with basic tax planning and resolve tax disputes. He is also sympathetic to people with large student loans. He can be reached via email at sachimalbe@excite.com. Or you can connect with him on Twitter (@stevenchung) and connect with him on LinkedIn.