Author: TSA Press

It’s not easy being a criminal defense attorney. If you work for a public-defender organization, the case load is high, the pay not great, and frustrations abound.  It’s difficult to win; often you’re not favored by the judge or the law, and sometimes your client thinks you’re less than a “real” lawyer simply because he’s not paying for you.

You’re not only unappreciated but you might also be the target of physical attacks, anything from being spit on to being punched in the nose (as happened to a colleague) after a jury verdict.

With all that stress, no wonder there’s burnout caused by the direct stress of the job — what the attorney has to put up with on a day-to-day basis.  But then there’s also the indirect stress of dealing with traumatized clients.  Compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress (STS), and vicarious traumatization (VT) are all terms referring to the stress that occurs from working with traumatized people in terrible straits.

Being exposed to histories of abuse, neglect, poverty, and violence can affect attorneys.  According to studies on burnout (referred to in one study with the unfortunate acronym “BO”), dealing with trauma-exposed clients causes  “an accumulation of stress and the erosion of idealism characterized by fatigue, poor sleep, headaches, anxiety, irritability, depression, hopelessness, aggression, cynicism and substance abuse.”

A survey done in the early 2000s by Pace University found that in comparing criminal defense attorneys with mental health providers and social service workers (who also work with traumatized populations), the criminal defense attorneys experienced more symptoms of STS than the others.  This may be because their case loads are higher and they’re expected to come up with a very specific outcome — a win for the client.

I recently spoke to a public-defender organization in New York where new attorney hires were feeling the initial burn of BO and decided to address their administrators about it.

Instead of just telling the new attorneys to “man up,” office managers brought in an expert on post-traumatic stress.  Senior attorneys poo-pooed the idea as a sop for coddled millennials.  But after attending, even senior attorneys noted that that they, too, suffered symptoms of STS — clipped emotional bandwidth, short-temperedness with family, disturbed sleep, withdrawal, exhaustion, anxiety, and helplessness.  In spite of their initial skepticism, they found the session helpful.

It’s clear that, given the nature of the job, direct and indirect stress go with the territory.  What can be done about it?

Step one is recognizing secondary traumatic stress is real, and should be addressed rather than repressed.  Providing forums for the “regular ventilation” (as the Pace study put it) of such feelings is a start.

Whether it’s training sessions with experts or simply grabbing a beer with colleagues to discuss the week’s high and lows, encouraging people to talk is a good idea.

Next, putting a ceiling on the number of cases any attorney can handle will do wonders.  Fewer cases equals less stress and less burnout.

There’s a certain machoness that goes along with criminal defense.  “Give me the toughest case and I’ll represent the guy,” is the general attitude.  But this if-you-can’t-stand-the-heat-get-out-of-the-kitchen perspective leads to a speedier onset of BO, a no-win for everyone.

I find the attorneys who stick with the job of criminal defense the longest are those who know how to compartmentalize.  Leave the job at the office, go home, develop a fully separate life and set of passions that permit a respite from the day to day.

I don’t know any defense attorney who hasn’t cried (whether on the inside or the outside) at some point of his or her career.  But unless you come up with a way to deal with the pain of others, it’s time to explore other areas of law.  There’s always mergers and acquisitions.

Toni Messina has tried over 100 cases and has been practicing criminal law and immigration since 1990. You can follow her on Twitter: @tonitamess.

A new lawsuit filed against the white-shoe firm of Davis Polk alleges the firm participated in racial discrimination and then retaliated against the associate who complained.

The plaintiff is former associate Kaloma Caldwell, who began at the firm in 2012 as a summer associate and then was a lawyer at the firm from 2014 to 2018 and worked in various corporate groups during his time there. According to the complaint, as an African-American, Caldwell was concerned about the firm’s lack of diversity before he began at Davis Polk, but new initiatives at the firm and assurances from leadership that black associates would have opportunities to excel at the firm convinced him to accept the job. However, Caldwell alleges a firm culture that allowed implicit biases to flourish, and minimized opportunities for black associates to advance at Davis Polk. Caldwell alleges that as an associate at the firm, he was regularly left off of team emails for deals he was assigned to and was not invited to participate in conference calls. He also says that more experienced attorneys at the firm would ignore diverse associates, even avoiding eye contact with them.

Caldwell says he complained about the discrimination and implicit bias at the firm on numerous occasions, but rather than fix the problem, it made it worse. Caldwell alleges that the firm actually doctored performance reviews — in the words of the complaint, they were “retroactively created after Plaintiff engaged litigation” — to manufacture a reason to fire him after he complained about the alleged discrimination. Caldwell says that in addition to these negative performance reviews that were inconsistent with the feedback he received in real time, he was increasingly isolated, and not given any work, which the complaint describes as a “barrage of direct and indirect forms of harassment and humiliation.”

Davis Polk has not yet issued a comment about the litigation.

Read the full complaint below.

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).

On Sunday, an eagle-eyed observer, pun intended, managed to snap near simultaneous shots of not one but two birds inside the Harvard Law School library.

For those of you just catching up with this story, there’s been — we thought — a solitary bird loose inside the library and defying all efforts to get it kicked out by munching on student food and keeping its energy up. The library asked students to stop letting the bird get access to their food, which prompted the bird to take to social media to lodge its objections.

We have received one disturbing report that a severed wing was spotted in the library. Hopefully this was just a lost feather and not an injury occasioned by a botched humane capture effort. Still, even if one bird was taken out of commission, two more may rise in its place!

This picture suggests Langdell Bird may already have an accomplice — another soldier in the ever-growing Avian Army.

Processed with MOLDIV

If cinema has taught us anything, it’s that Harvard is about to get massacred by a bird uprising. Sorry Harvard, we don’t make the rules.

Congratulations to Stanford on your USNWR ranking bump.

Earlier: There’s A Bird Loose Inside Harvard Law School… Time To Call Cat Lawyer!
The Harvard Law School Bird Has A Twitter Account And He’s NOT Happy About The Food Situation

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.

Law Jobs for Humans 2.0, our second first-of-its-kind legal professional development conference, is coming up next week (November 15 in New York City) and tickets are almost sold out! Almost is the operative word though – because there just happen to be 15 left, and we are sure they are going to get snatched up quick.

The event will be bringing together legal innovators, law school educators, law school students, and non-traditional legal professionals for discussions about the changing legal employment landscape and on how to create a career path for the 21st century;  if you’re someone who is interested in fresh and unique jobs in the new frontier of legal careers, this event is for you.

So you’d better act fast! If you haven’t purchased your tickets yet, you can buy them here – you won’t want to miss this!

One of the conversations I became engrossed in during Relativity Fest a few weeks back is the idea of corporations taking a more aggressive approach to moving their data — specifically, their electronic discovery data — to the cloud. It’s conversation I’ve been having for years and one that I’ve had several times since I left Chicago.

The question is what are corporations doing in this area?

And let’s set this up with some context. I’ve always been sort of old-school when it comes to the cloud. I think it stems from my many years working at law firms. Lawyers, we all know, are some of the more risk averse professionals in the world. I think some of that rubbed off on me.

But like any good, progressive-thinking person working in legal technology, I like to think that I’m able to evolve. And when I really think about it, law firms have been saying no to the cloud for many years, not because they enjoy investing millions of dollars every year in infrastructure, but because their clients were objecting.

Now, I think we are seeing a seismic shift and the corporations — and legal operations professionals in particular — are taking control. The cloud is not so scary anymore. With the rise of cloud-based Office 365 and a host of other applications, it seems to me that in five years most of our data will be in the cloud.

But is your organization ready to make the move?

I spoke recently with Chris O’Connor, William Belt, and Sue Tang at Complete Discovery Source, a New York-based company providing the full spectrum of eDiscovery services across the legal industry to corporations, law firms, and the government. Among the services CDS provides is assisting corporations to migrate their data to cloud and SaaS-based systems.

O’Connor, CDS’s Director of eDiscovery Strategy, agrees that corporations are retaking control of their data. “Corporations fear risk and cost,” he says. “Clients, even in the financial services space, are coming around and developing a go-to-cloud strategy.”

Security has always been a concern, of course, and CDS has made the strategic choice to take advantage of the Relativity’s new SaaS-based offering RelativityOne. For them it came down to not only having the geographic reach and ubiquity of a leading product, “but also the baked in maintenance and the security,” says Bill Belt, CDS’s Director of Consulting. “Do you want your data at 10 different law firms, or would you prefer that would-be hackers face the prospect of going up against Microsoft’s security?” asked Belt rhetorically.

O’Connor recommends that organizations exploring a move to the cloud, particularly to RelativityOne, “have a clear and thorough understanding of the organization’s current platforms, data sizes, technical and business requirements.” He says that among the first things any company needs to do is prepare a clear and detailed project scope, including a project overview, assumptions, timelines and deliverables. Roles should be defined, and milestones should be set “so everyone has a clear understanding of what to expect,” he says.

For those considering a move to RelativityOne, it’s important to walk through the platform to identify areas where your organization needs to make design decisions for workflow and template creation, including field mapping and other areas where users must make decisions. Another recommendation from O’Connor is to prepare user acceptance training scripts that mirror the workflow and design decisions for the various roles within an organization. Finally, it is necessary to properly track the migration process, report on current status, and conduct quality control checks.

“Detailed planning, documentation and management is key to a successful implementation,” says O’Connor.

Over the course of the past decade we have seen tremendous growth in cloud-based applications. Gartner predicted just a few years ago that half of all enterprises would adopt an all-in cloud strategy by 2021. My guess is that in the next five years, that number will only trend upward. If your organization does not have a roadmap for a move to the cloud, it may be time to start developing one.

Mike Quartararo

Mike Quartararo is the President of the Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists (ACEDS), a professional member association providing training and certification in e-discovery. He is also the author of the 2016 book Project Management in Electronic Discovery and a consultant providing e-discovery, project management and legal technology advisory and training services to law firms and Fortune 500 corporations across the globe. You can reach him via email at mquartararo@aceds.org. Follow him on Twitter @mikequartararo.

* R. Kelly has hired a lawyer who specializes in plea negotiations. He might be singing a different tune about case strategy. [Chicago Tribune]

* President Trump has been sued for defamation for statements made about sexual assault allegations. [Rolling Stone]

* The lawyer defending a Brooklyn judge on obstruction charges has been implicated in the case, according to federal prosecutors. This might be a case where a lawyer needs a lawyer. [New York Post]

* The Justice Department has warned the anonymous author of an upcoming expose on the Trump Administration that she or he could be in legal trouble. Hence, why this person has remained anonymous. [Deadline]

* A White House lawyer has indicated that he will not comply with an impeachment inquiry subpoena. [The Hill]

* An Oregon public defender refused to press charges against a homeless man who stole her coat while in court for drug charges. This lawyer can definitely say she’s kind enough to offer the coat off her back… [Oregonian]

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.

A notice received from police by the Apex Council of public sector unions said the protest could go ahead but also warned that police would stop the march if it turned violent.

“The regulating authority still reserves the right to stop the gathering should it turn out to a public order threat or violent. Police will monitor,” Oscar Mugomeri, police commander for Harare central district, wrote in the letter.

Mugomeri could not be reached for comment on Monday.

Unions say Mnangagwa’s government has not responded to demands for U.S. dollar-indexed salaries to cushion public sector workers against inflation that economists say reached 380% in September.

Daily life in Zimbabwe is getting harder, with prices of basic goods, fuel and electricity rising as hope fades for a quick economic recovery under Mnangagwa, who took power after the late Robert Mugabe was ousted in a coup in 2017.

Mnangagwa has banned several opposition protests and faces accusations that he is using Mugabe’s heavy-handed tactics.

Police have been on high alert since January when fuel protests turned violent and at least a dozen people were killed during a security crackdown.

Unions want the lowest government employees paid the equivalent of $475 (7,251 Zimbabwe dollars) a month compared to the 1,023 Zimbabwe dollars they earn now.

Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube, who projects the economy to contract by 6.5% this year, has said the government cannot meet the workers’ demands.

Charles Chinosengwa, spokesman for the Apex Council, which represents 230,000 workers – excluding the health and security sectors – said unions were mobilizing members from across Zimbabwe.

“This is strictly a labor issue. We don’t need support from politicians, we are saying hands off to politicians,” he said.

Shortages of foreign currency, fuel and power are among the most visible signs of a crisis that has revived memories of 2008, when hyperinflation wiped out savings and forced the government to abandon its currency.

Mnangagwa says Zimbabweans should be patient while his government pursues economic reforms, including gradually cutting subsidies on fuel and electricity and the re-introduction of the domestic currency.

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