Author: TSA Press

What now defunct law school’s alumni include two U.S. Vice Presidents, 101 congressmen, 28 senators, six cabinet secretaries, three justices of the United States Supreme Court, 14 state governors, and 13 state supreme court chief justices?

Hint: The law school closed in 1833, but the legacies of its alums live on.

See the answer on the next page.

WASHINGTON: The head of the Justice Department task force on China pledged today to continue prosecuting espionage cases regardless of trade negotiations with Beijing.

“I don’t do trade, and I try to keep our cases well apart from what’s going on the trade front,” Assistant Attorney General John Demers told the CyberTalks conference this morning, “because we didn’t bring one of these cases because of what’s going on on the trade front. And we’re not going to drop them even if we reach an agreement.”

John Demers

“We’re going to stop doing cases about China intellectual property theft when the Chinese stop doing intellectual theft,” Demers continued. “If they agree to a trade agreement and they actually change their behavior, great…That’s ultimately what we’re really looking at.”

The Trump administration has been accused of inappropriately entangling trade, national security, domestic politics, and the president’s family business in its dealings with foreign powers. Demers himself was a presidential nominee, working at Boeing before Trump tapped him to head Justice’s National Security Division. He’s not a career DOJ lawyer. But Demers had significant experience, having previously worked in what was a brand-new division under President George W. Bush from 2006 to 2009, right after he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Since Demers took charge in February 2018, the National Security Division has

Demers and his division have also worked with the Commerce Department to impose sanctions on a Chinese company tied to industrial espionage against the US. Last year, after Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co. was accused of stealing intellectual property from US chipmaker Micron, Commerce placed Jinhua on its Entity List of companies restricted from doing business in the US. Unable to import US-made equipment for its factory, Jinhua was unable to use the stolen secrets to actually make chips, Demers said.

“The practical effect of that is this Chinese company…. is unable to import the tooling from the United States that it needs to produce a product that it stole the intellectual property to create,” Demers said today. “That means Micron is not facing that competition.”

(That said, Micron’s stock price has still slumped, in part because of rising Chinese competition and in part because it can no longer sell to Chinese tech giant Huawei, a major customer for many US firms until it, too, was put on the Entity List.)

The Micron case is an example of the kind of public-private cooperation Demers deems essential to combating Chinese espionage. “We crucially need that cooperation of the private sector to bring these cases,” he said, because it’s the companies that often detect the first signs that a network or an employee is being subverted.

Likewise, he went on, the companies need government help to counter the skills and resources of Chinese intelligence agencies like the Ministry of State Security, which has taken the lead in industrial espionage from the People’s Liberation Army.

“Looking at the way in which Chinese intelligence officers recruit employees of American companies, and comparing that to what we’re used to seeing on the traditional political espionage side,” Demers said, “it’s really the same tradecraft that’s now being aimed not at the government but being aimed at you all, being aimed at the private sector.”

“It’s hard sometimes for government employees to understand what’s going on and resist,” he said. “It’s just much harder for [private sector] employees who haven’t been trained in counterintelligence.”

Anyone who calls themselves a lawyer who would say that should not be a lawyer — let’s start with that. If you shoot someone, that’s a crime, and no one is above the law. He would be arrested, period.

— Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City, criticizing arguments given before the Second Circuit by Donald Trump’s lawyer, William Consovoy, where he claimed the president could not be prosecuted even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue. “If anybody shoots someone, they get arrested. I don’t care if they’re the president of the United States or anybody else,” de Blasio said. “If you shoot someone, you should get arrested, and we would arrest him.”

Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Many lawyers do not think about crafting a business plan until they make partner at a firm. Starting this process sooner, even as a mid-level associate, will at worst be a superfluous intellectual exercise. Having a well-thought-out business plan can mean the difference between landing your dream position and missing the chance to lateral at all. It can also mean the difference between success and lost opportunities at any stage in your career. Here’s why.

A Good Business Plan Takes Time

Designing a solid business plan is not just about putting your ideas on paper. A business plan is a process, it’s an ever-evolving organism, not just an end product. It’s about stretching your brain to the max, being creative, thinking outside the box, connecting dots, and engaging in analytic reasoning. It takes time to get it right. You’ll want to seek feedback from multiple trusted advisors and put the plan aside at some stage so you can return to it with fresh eyes. For this reason, I believe it is never too early to start working on your business plan, even if it’s for your eyes only. You want to start the process well before you start thinking about making a move.

Your Business Plan Can Highlight a Key Skill or Specialty

A business plan is not just a summary of your résumé and deal sheet. It goes above and beyond a list of your legal skills and your contacts. Through a business plan, you have the opportunity to convince a prospective employer that you will add value to the new firm as a business generator and not just as a legal practitioner. You should explain how your particular specialties will lead to business the firm is not currently able to secure. The more specific, the better.

I recently worked with a counsel-level litigator who was asked by a top firm where he was interviewing to give a presentation to a group of partners on a niche specialty that he proposed to develop at the new firm. The litigator’s niche specialty only came to light through his in-depth business plan.

A Business Plan Is Also a State of Mind

A business plan must have substance. A horribly crafted business plan is worse than none at all. But your only excuse for a bad business plan is not starting the process early enough.

Substance is important, but a business plan is not solely about the substance. The fact that you have a business plan at all shows a firm you are serious about the process of lateraling and that you understand that to be a value to the firm, your business development skills are as important as your legal skills. It is hard enough to lateral as a senior associate without business. Having a business plan helps overcome presumption that you don’t have what it takes to bring in business.

A business plan also puts you in the right mindset to interview well and hit the ground running in a new position. The exercise of compiling and refining a business plan is a fantastic preparation for interviews. You have your recent work, contacts, and historical metrics right at your fingertips.

A Business Plan Is Necessary to Succeed, Not Just to Switch Jobs

Isn’t a business plan a waste of time if you’re not looking to lateral? Absolutely not. As I argue also regarding deal sheets, a business plan is a great way to take stock of your experience and your connections, and to visualize where you have holes in your skills and your network and where you can best build.

Even if you could lateral without a business plan, you’re going to need one eventually to succeed as a counsel or partner. Give yourself the best chance at success by having a roadmap before you make the move so you can hit the ground running. And don’t be afraid to revisit the business plan frequently throughout your career. Remember, it’s not a static document. It’s an adaptable roadmap.

Even if you go in-house, the exercise of crafting a business plan can prove to be useful. In-house, you are not subject to hourly billing requirements. Success is more results-driven. You’ll need to learn to work closely with your business counterparts and understand their mindsets, pressures, and perspectives. Highlighting your strengths and contemplating potential business strategies for your own “brand” can help you rise to the next level.

***

You should seek feedback on your advanced draft business plan from as many trusted sources as you can — in and outside of your specific field. If you work with a recruiter, that recruiter can help. A good recruiter can provide you with sample business plans to get you started. I usually share with my candidates a one-page template, as well as some longer examples. I review my candidates’ drafts and give them suggestions as to tone, style, and substance. We often go through multiple drafts of the document before sending it to any prospective employers. Where I do not have the necessary level of expertise in a particular legal field to give detailed substantive suggestions, I may call upon one of my colleagues to help out; this is one benefit of working with a recruiting firm composed of multiple recruiters who are former practicing attorneys in a range of fields. I cannot stress this enough: Start early. A persuasive business plan can make or break your next career move.

Please reach out to me at agordon@laterallink.com to learn more about the best lateral opportunities for your specific skills and experience, and to give me the green light to start nagging you for your business plan draft.

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on lateral associate and partner moves from Lateral Link’s team of expert contributors. As a Senior Director, Abby Gordon works with attorney candidates on law firm and in-house searches, primarily in Boston, New York and Europe. Prior to joining Lateral Link, Abby spent seven years as a corporate associate with Cleary Gottlieb, focusing on capital markets transactions for Latin American clients in New York and for the last five years for European clients in Paris. A native of Boston, Abby holds a J.D., cum laude, from Georgetown University Law Center and a B.A. in government and romance languages, magna cum laude, from Dartmouth College. Abby also worked with the International Rescue Committee as a Fulbright Scholar in Madrid, Spain. She is a member of the New York, Massachusetts and Maine Bars and is fluent in French and Spanish (and dabbles in Portuguese and Italian). You can view additional articles by Abby here.

Lateral Link is one of the top-rated international legal recruiting firms. With over 14 offices world-wide, Lateral Link specializes in placing attorneys at the most prestigious law firms and companies in the world. Managed by former practicing attorneys from top law schools, Lateral Link has a tradition of hiring lawyers to execute the lateral leaps of practicing attorneys. Click here to find out more about us.

We’ve talked before about the over-reliance on tech to do certain jobs that cannot be simplified to the sum of mathematical parts. The criminal justice system is starting to turn over sentencing to algorithms — something that seems like the smart thing to do but removes judicial and prosecutorial discretion from the mix, leaving defendants with the unpalatable option of challenging software they’re never allowed to examine.

Police departments are also moving towards predictive policing. Relying on historical data, cops are hoping to head off future crimes by allocating resources to areas where crime appears to be more likely to be committed. Sounds good on paper, but in reality, all it does is reinforce biases and push law enforcement to treat everyone in targeted areas as criminals. If the data being fed in reflects biased policing, crunching the numbers even harder isn’t going to erase that. It’s only going to reinforce it. And, again, suspected criminals aren’t able to access the data or software that puts them in law enforcement’s crosshairs.

A certain amount of automation is expected as government agencies seek to streamline public services. The problem isn’t necessarily the tech. It’s the removal of human interaction. As has been stated here frequently, moderation at scale is impossible. So is automated governing. Automated processes are as prone to failure as the people overseeing them. But when you decide software is going to do almost all of the work, those who need the assistance of other humans most are cut out of the loop.

Citizens looking for government assistance have grown accustomed to jumping through red tape hoops. Now, the hoops are inaccessible, but still must be jumped through. The most marginalized members of society are given URLs instead of contact names and numbers when many of them have no reliable access to the internet or a computer. A new series by The Guardian shows the human cost of going paperless. It’s happening all over the world, and it’s literally killing people.

The most disturbing story comes from Dumka in India. Here, we learn of the horrifying human impact that has befallen families as a result of Aadhaar, a 12-digit unique identification number that the Indian government has issued to all residents in the world’s largest biometric experiment.

Motka Manjhi paid the ultimate price when the computer glitched and his thumbprint – his key into Aadhaar – went unrecognised. His subsistence rations were stopped, he was forced to skip meals and he grew thin. On 22 May, he collapsed outside his home and died. His family is convinced it was starvation.

That’s the worst case scenario. But there is plenty of ugliness in between. Governments aren’t looking to defense budgets or law enforcement agencies to make cuts. Instead, they’re adding to their bottom lines by pursuing citizens they think have screwed the government. Another process being automated is governments’ attempts to collect alleged overpayments of social services funds. There’s a statute of limitations on most debt, but software is being used to resurrect ancient debt governments feel they’re owed. This is resulting in the destruction of people’s lives and finances as they find themselves unable to challenge these automated determinations.

In Illinois, the Guardian has found that state and federal governments have joined forces to demand that welfare recipients repay “overpayments” stretching back in some cases 30 years. This system of “zombie debt”, weaponized through technology, is invoking fear and hardship among society’s most vulnerable.

As one recipient described it: “You owe what you have eaten.”

It’s not just “zombie debt.” It’s also “robodebt.” The determinations of owed debt are made by automated processes. The collection process is also automated, separating those suddenly facing possibly undeserved clawbacks from the human assistance they need to determine whether or not the claim is valid. Bureaucracies have always been faceless. With the addition of cold calculations, they’ve weaponized this facelessness to deter citizens from pushing back against a decision-making process composed of 1s and 0s. This, too, is linked to a rising human cost.

Compare and contrast the public statements with reality. Here’s how the UK government is pitching its transition to automated governance:

“We are striking the right balance between having a compassionate safety net on which we spend £95bn, and creating a digital service that suits the way most people use technology,” said a DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] spokesperson. “Automation means we are improving accuracy, speeding up our service and freeing up colleagues’ time so they can support the people who need it most.”

If this sounds like a positive development, it’s only because you haven’t seen it in action.

[C]laimants have warned the existing automation in UC’s “digital by default” system has already driven some to hunger, breakdown and even attempted suicide. One described the online process as a “Kafka-like carousel”, another as “hostile” and yet another as a “form of torture”. Several said civil servants already appeared to be ruled by computer algorithms, unable to contradict their verdicts.

The same thing is going on in Australia. The government’s embrace of “austerity,” combined with its fondness for automating social services and debt collection processes has resulted in a world of hurt for the many Australians unable to challenge automated determinations or connect with actual humans willing to help them through the process. Asher Wolf’s Twitter feed is an invaluable resource for these issues, detailing the fallout of automated social assistance programs all around the world.

It’s not that all automation is bad. It’s that automation without strict oversight or human control isn’t making anything better for the most vulnerable members of society. When governments pay millions to let machines make decisions affecting humans, humans almost always seem to come out on the losing end. Legislators may proudly display charts showing incremental gains in efficiency, but few are willing to discuss the constituents they’ve sacrificed on the altar of automation. No system is perfect, but one that relies more on math than human discretion isn’t an improvement.

Skynet, But For Welfare: Automating Social Services Is Killing People

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