Author: TSA Press

From 2008 to 2015, what was the percentage increase in tuition at private law schools?

Hint: Despite a sharp decline in demand for law schools (applications went down by almost 50 percent over that period), law schools raised tuition — and lowered admissions standards — to keep the lights on.

See the answer on the next page.

Based on the defendant’s conduct since the time of the December 18, 2018, sentencing hearing, the government also does not believe the defendant should receive credit for acceptance of responsibility. Indeed, the government has reason to believe, through representations by the defendant’s counsel, that the defendant has retreated from his acceptance of responsibility in this case regarding his lies to the FBI. For that reason, the government asks this Court to inquire of the defendant as to whether he maintains those apparent statements of innocence or whether he disavows them and fully accepts responsibility for his criminal conduct.

— United States Attorney Jessie K. Liu in a sentencing memo recommending a sentence of up to 6 months for former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Flynn was all set to walk having offered prosecutors some measure of cooperation before hiring Sidney Powell who promptly tried to blow up his guilty plea and got him raising money from QAnon freaks. All in all, this could be his worst decision since, you know, lying to the FBI.

Check out the full memo on the next page….

By now it is pretty clear, if you want to be considered an elite law firm — and be able to compete for the best legal talent — you have to pony up with a generous parental leave policy. We are seeing more and more firms offering their attorneys generous paid leave, and the programs are increasingly gender neutral and offered without a primary caregiver stipulation.

The latest firm to offer improved parental leave is Dorsey & Whitney. Their newly expanded program, effective January 1, 2020, provides attorneys with 15 weeks paid leave — up from 10 — as well as a 4 week ramp up/down periods surrounding leave (for anyone that takes at least 12 continuous weeks of parental leave) which consists of a 50 percent billable hours expectation. The firm is also doubling their adoption assistance program, increasing the reimbursable expenses from $5,000 to $10,000 for qualified adoption expenses.

Bill Stoeri, Managing Partner, said the program’s expansion is part of the firm’s commitment to helping employees have a real work/life balance:

“We are committed to being a family-friendly workplace and to having the policies and benefits in place that enable our attorneys and staff to manage their professional and personal lives in the way that works best for them. We believe this benefits our lawyers, the Firm as a whole, and most importantly, our clients.”

Staff at the firm also receive paid leave, but it is only 8 weeks (plus any applicable disability).

Dorsey has been recognized in the past for their family friendly benefits, including being named a Best Law Firm for Women by Working Mother magazine, an Adoption Advocate by the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, and Gold Standard Certification from the Women in Law Empowerment Forum.

You can read the firm’s full announcement of the new program on the next page.

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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).

As we’ve discussed, it doesn’t take much, relatively speaking, to own the most expensive residence in the City of Chicago. Indeed, the city’s housing stock is so proletarian than Ken Griffin had to buy four separate apartments and combine them into one to ensure a home of sufficient magnificence in the Windy City.

Obviously, Griffin’s Gold Coast aerie is the most expensive pied-a-terre in the whole town, and by a lot: It cost more than three times as much as the next-priciest pad, George Lucas’, but still not much more than the rounding error on Griffin’s $238 million place in New York, and cheaper than most of the teardowns he’s assembled in Palm Beach.

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Be careful what you wish for, Florida Man! In 2018, voters in the Sunshine State passed a constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to felons who have completed their terms of parole and probation. There are 1.4 million disenfranchised adults in Florida, including 1 in 5 of the state’s black voters. And in 2018, the GOP candidates took the state house and senate race by fewer than 35,000 votes each. So naturally, the state’s Republicans swung into action.

Last summer, the Florida legislature passed a bill requiring all fines and fees to be paid before voting rights could be restored. Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who beat out Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum by less than half a percent, happily signed it into law in July. Backers of the original ballot initiative immediately sued, and U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle held that Florida could not use real inability to pay fines as a bar to re-enfranchisement. The state has appealed, and in the meantime, felons are being allowed to register, but not actually cast a ballot.

However, the law also provides that “a court may not be prohibited from modifying the financial obligations of an original sentence.” And it’s this provision that’s coming back to bite DeSantis in his wall-loving behind. Because in practice, the counties that are taking full advantage of this judicial “out” are heavily Democratic.

South Florida’s public radio station WLRN reports:

Out of the four counties across the state that have launched similar programs, every one of them is Democratic leaning. Those include Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Hillsborough counties, together which include more than a third of the state’s total population. All of those counties voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, and for Democrat Andrew Gillum in the 2018 governor’s race.

There is no corollary for Republican-leaning counties.

Miami-Dade Public Defender Carlos Martinez, who worked to set up a “rocket docket” for felon re-enfranchisement, told the radio station, “The estimate for Miami-Dade County is that there are about 150,000 people — that’s not just cases, that’s people — that will qualify under this process.”

And to the extent that the newly restored voters in Miami-Dade are representative, this is not a big cohort of Trump supporters.

“The next election is gonna be fun. Hooo boy is it gonna be fun,” Andre Williams told WLRN. “Changes are gonna be made. Donald Trump? Hmm. Toodle-oo. I’ll put it like this: you send your own companies into bankruptcy, you won’t send this country into bankruptcy.”

“I feel excited about moving forward in life,” said Cynthia Cray. “We got Donald Trump in that presidency. We can’t keep having that foolishness. I vote because I don’t want another Trump.” She immediately filled out a voter registration card.

For the GOP legislators’ part, they insist the uneven participation in judicial fine waivers proves that the law was never intended to disenfranchise Democrats, much less depress minority voting.

“If I’m trying to suppress the vote, and if I am Jim Crow Jamie, why did I create the waivers that Democrats have been turning around and using? Which one is it?” state Rep. Jamie Grant, R-Tampa insisted. “If what the effect of what I passed flips the state blue — so be it, I’m good with that. I did my job.”

Or it could be a sign of crappy draftsmanship leading to unintended consequences. Hard to say, really. Who can tell?

People Across Florida Are Getting Their Voting Rights Back. Few Republicans Could Benefit [WLRN]

Nicholas Sandmann, the Covington Catholic kid who is suing major media outlets for hundreds of millions of dollars for pointing out that he wore a MAGA hat and then honestly explaining to the audience what a MAGA hat means, managed to convince CNN to settle yesterday for undisclosed terms and, folks, there were a lot of takes to be had on the social media. Whether or not you believe Sandmann has a real case against the media outlets who covered the story — and it’s sufficiently weak that the majority of his claims have already been laughed out of court — the real lesson of yesterday is that nobody seems to understand what a settlement means.

Alas a settlement is, generally speaking, not an admission of “guilt” and admitting liability wasn’t a term of this settlement. Nor is it “crumbling” to pay a rumored $25 million to avoid an unpredictable trial and a discovery process that — even if CNN’s communications were innocent — would be selectively leaked and contextualized to make the network look bad. It’s better for the freedom of the press to have had this fight out in court, but CNN’s business decision is understandable. This is why an exception to the American Rule that placing the burden of a defendant’s legal fees on a plaintiff if they unsuccessfully bring a claim implicating a constitutional right could do wonders for outlets facing frivolous, wildly inflated defamation claims funded by shadowy interests hoping to simply outlast cash-strapped publications.

Sandmann’s sued many more outlets… will they follow CNN’s lead? If they do, it’ll be less about which publications think Sandmann is right, and which have financial concerns — real or artificially enforced by outside management — outpacing journalistic impulses.

But I digress. The point is that idiots out there don’t understand what a settlement is and as troubling as it is to think the three stooges quoted above don’t grasp basic legal concepts, the really scary part is that they probably do. Charlie Kirk’s had to talk to lawyers before… he must know what’s up. The dog and pony show they drag out on social media isn’t about their ignorance as much as it’s a reflection of how they see their audience. They know their uneducated and intellectually lazy fans will sop up whatever disingenuous take they can spin up to show the libs getting owned. It’s a conscious disinformation campaign and trying to make Americans stupider shouldn’t be something a major party celebrates.

Or maybe these guys are just f**king stupid too. That’s the more comforting solution.

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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 haven’t written about California lawyers and judges for at least a couple of weeks (“bowl of dicks,” anyone?). Yes, I know lots of readers could care less about lawyer life here in California, especially since our cut score is the highest, second only to Delaware, but to use the title of a 1960s Lesley Gore song, ‘it’s my party,” and the East Coast bias that ATL shows prompts me to write about life west of the Hudson.

The first has to do with the California Supreme Court’s order to have the disciplinary review court (the State Bar’s appellate process) review its decision overturning the trial court’s decision to disbar a San Francisco lawyer for defrauding an elderly client. The State Bar’s review department had found that the lawyer had not defrauded his client.

With me, so far?

Now the Supreme Court is telling the review department to take another look at the case. Given that the State Bar’s stated mission is public protection, I would not be surprised if the review court reverses its decision.

Another story: the Executive Director of the State Bar has resigned. Leah Wilson headed the bar for several years and oversaw the final steps in its de-reunification. Her resignation is effective January 17 and she is leaving to “pursue other career interests.” We have all heard that language many times before.

The past decade or so has been a tumultuous time for State Bar leadership. First, Joe Dunn was fired back in 2014 and then things got ugly.

After Dunn came Elizabeth Reinsdorf Parker, who began the task of dismantling the integrated bar that existed since formation of the bar back in the 1920s. Leah Wilson was Parker’s heir apparent, and she finished the job Parker started, not without her own set of controversies.

So, in the past six years, the State Bar has had three executive directors. While some might say that leadership turnover is a healthy thing, I think that stability and continuity at the top might be welcome.

The Bar must address many important issues in the coming years, including, but not limited to, the possible licensing of legal technicians, alternative legal service providers and the unauthorized practice of law, all sorts of legal innovation products, and last, but certainly not least, the bar exam cut score, which has prompted all kinds of consternation among law professors, law schools, law students, and those of us practicing lawyers who think that maybe the bar for entry should remain high. Those issues, not to mention having a good relationship with the Legislature that sets the dues bill, and others that we haven’t even thought of yet will consume the bar over the next decade.

For those of us who ever saw the movie “All about Eve,” (and if you have never seen it, shame on you) the classic line that Bette Davis says in the midst of a cocktail party seems apt. It will be interesting to see how the job description will read and whether there will be a nationwide search undertaken. Would you want that job?

Last and certainly not least is the special masters’ report released January 3 to the California Judicial Commission in the Inquiry Concerning Justice Jeffrey Johnson, an appellate justice on the Second District Court of Appeal here in Los Angeles. The report runs to almost 400 pages (I am not making this up) and contains the findings of fact and conclusions of law by the special masters, whose examiner heard 17 days of testimony from women who claimed inappropriate conduct by the justice over a period of years. Those women included two Court of Appeal justice colleagues, along with several research attorneys, a number of private  attorneys, and other women. The report concludes that the examiner met the high burden of proof necessary (clear and convincing standard) as to the truth of most of the allegations of judicial misconduct (here defined as prejudicial misconduct and improper action).

Allegations of intoxication at the Court of Appeal building and at events outside business hours comprise another category of claims against the justice. Again, the special masters found that the examiner had met the burden and that most of the allegations were true.

The third category of misconduct involves Justice Johnson’s demeanor toward his colleagues and staff on the court. The special masters found most of those allegations true as well.

So here’s what I don’t understand and probably never will: The special masters found that most of the allegations against Justice Johnson were true, despite inconsistencies in some testimony. But why would a justice on the second-highest court in this state ever conduct himself in a manner that could rise to a number of claims, let alone one? Is it the “because I can” rationale?

The special masters concluded that the justice failed to take responsibility for his actions. Maybe when your career, future, and reputation are on the line, you are loathe to accept responsibility. It’s always easier to blame the victims in these types of cases, and that’s what the special masters found here: the failure to take responsibility for the most serious misconduct. Where have we heard that before, and when do you think that ever might end?

Ultimately, and that time is probably not any time soon, the Commission will have to decide what to do about Justice Johnson. Your guess is as good as mine.

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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.

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.

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