Morning Docket: 08.27.19

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* If you’re following the Spider-Man movie rights kerfuffle, it’s worth remembering that this was entirely Disney’s fault for screwing up copyright law in the 1990s. [Screen Rant]

* Johnson & Johnson plan to appeal verdict suggesting that handing out heroin like candy might be a bad thing. [Law.com]

* Leonard Leo got himself a mansion in Maine apparently so he could raise money for Susan Collins (R-Federalist Society). Her https://screenrant.com/spiderman-copyright-mcu-disney-lobbying-fault/

campaign spokesperson declared that “The fact is, Senator Collins’ votes are not for sale” by which he means “they’ve already been bought.” [Central Maine]

* At the Greg Craig trial, Skadden folks are testifying that Craig had a “very passionate” aversion to foreign agent registration. In his defense just about every lobbyist will do anything in their power to avoid actually registering as a lobbyist. [National Law Journal]

* Explaining how the Brazilian rainforest fires link back to the trade war with China. [Huffington Post]

* Dallas has a new mayor and Locke Lord has a new partner and they are the same guy. [Dallas Morning News]

Zimbabwe state doctors threaten strike over pay – The Zimbabwean

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The government on Friday proposed a 60% pay increase for doctors, while offering a 76% raise for the rest of the civil service, in a bid to avert crippling strikes by state workers.

But in separate statements, the main unions representing the doctors and the teachers said they rejected the government offers, which would see the lowest-paid worker earning 1,023 Zimbabwe dollars ($98.75) a month.

The Apex Council, which is an umbrella group for public sector unions, has demanded the equivalent of $475 for the lowest-paid government worker.

In a letter sent to the government on Monday, the Zimbabwe Hospital Doctors Association (ZHDA) said its members could no longer afford to report for duty amid surging inflation and continued deterioration of Zimbabwe’s economy.

“We maintain our request to have our earnings, which were previously pegged in United States dollars, be paid at the prevailing inter-bank rate,” the ZHDA said. adding that they would strike on September 3 if their demands were not met.

The Zimbabwe Teachers Association (Zimta), the biggest single union of public workers with about 44,000 members, also said the government’s wage offer was unacceptable, but committed to further negotiations.

Hope that the economy could recover under President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who replaced the long-ruling Robert Mugabe in a November 2017 coup, has made way for widespread anger over the slow pace of reforms and recovery.

Last week, the police banned a series of protests called by the opposition in the country’s major cities. They used teargas, baton sticks and water cannon to disperse demonstrators and arresting scores of protesters.

Ten leaders of a smaller teachers’ union were arrested on Friday along with their lawyer when they tried to petition the minister of finance for higher wages. The police on Thursday also arrested Amos Chibaya, a senior MDC official, on charges that he failed to stop the banned Harare protests.

Chibaya was released on 400 Zimbabwe dollar bail by a Harare magistrate on Monday. He also faces a separate subversion charge over protests staged in January 2019 over a sharp fuel price increase.

Zimbabwe scoops Bronze medal

Post published in: Featured

Why don’t citizens trust the government – The Zimbabwean

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In two recent reports, RAU has looked at the issues around political trust, trustworthiness, social capital and political participation.

We carried out two different exercises. The first was to examine political trust over time, with the notion that political trust (and trustworthiness) should be sensitive to the political and economic context at any one time.

The second was to examine in the most recent data, Round 7 (2017) of Afrobarometer, the relationships between all the variables of the political trust, social trust, social capital, etc. We did this in order to understand the more subtle relationships involved in the approval and support of the government.

Of Course Our First Space Hack Is So Banal And Human

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[image via Getty]

Obviously, when I think of space hacking, I think like a full on James Bond villain. I imagine an evil genius circumventing all Earthly firewalls to manipulate global currencies. I imagine a megalomaniac reprogramming the world’s nuclear arsenal to give themselves full control from their space lair on the dark side of the Moon.

I do not imagine a spurned lover checking in on her spouse’s bank accounts during a bitter divorce. But, of course, our weak and petty species would use the God-like power of space habitation to check in on whether their ex bought a new car. That’s humanity: a species not ready to join the intergalactic community (if there is one) because we are still easily consumed by our own materialistic problems.

From the New York Times:

Summer Worden, a former Air Force intelligence officer living in Kansas, has been in the midst of a bitter separation and parenting dispute for much of the past year. So she was surprised when she noticed that her estranged spouse still seemed to know things about her spending. Had she bought a car? How could she afford that?

Ms. Worden put her intelligence background to work, asking her bank about the locations of computers that had recently accessed her bank account using her login credentials. The bank got back to her with an answer: One was a computer network registered to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Ms. Worden’s spouse, Anne McClain, was a decorated NASA astronaut on a six-month mission aboard the International Space Station. She was about to be part of NASA’s first all-female spacewalk. But the couple’s domestic troubles on Earth, it seemed, had extended into outer space.

Ms. McClain acknowledged that she had accessed the bank account from space, insisting through a lawyer that she was merely shepherding the couple’s still-intertwined finances. Ms. Worden felt differently. She filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission and her family lodged one with NASA’s Office of Inspector General, accusing Ms. McClain of identity theft and improper access to Ms. Worden’s private financial records.

Goddamnit. It’s not even an interesting jurisdictional issue. If McClain had hijacked a Star Destroyer and laid waste to Worden’s new Camry from space, like that would at least be a thing. Does GEICO cover that or do death beams from low Earth orbit constitute an act of God? This is just boring-ass alleged invasion of privacy. It doesn’t matter that McClain is accused of doing it from space, you could get busted for invasion of privacy is you do it from Phuket, once you are back in U.S. jurisdiction.

The Times does raise a potential issue with discovery, because it’s likely that NASA’s email protocols on the International Space Station are subject to highly classified security that far surpass the kinds of protections your bank offers you for online banking. But even there, I mean this case is not what a kid has in mind when she dreams of “space discovery.”

We’ll get there. More people are going into space, and that means more stupid things will happen in space, and eventually something will happen that will be both interesting and totally illegal, but for the fact that it happen in space.

NASA Astronaut Anne McClain Accused by Spouse of Crime in Space [New York Times]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

David Einhorn Evincing Signs Of Late-Stage Ackmania

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D-Hornz -who is shorting Tesla- is demanding Elon Musk resign from Tesla, which we’re pretty sure is cheating.

Lawyer Says Mercedes Struck By Golf Ball, Prosecutors Say That’s When He Murdered The Victim

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Bryan Schmitt, associate corporate counsel and director of contracts for Manhattan Associates, says “he saw a man on the side of the road next to a trash can making “a throwing motion with his arm” before he ‘saw a white object’ strike his car.” At that point, Schmitt told investigators that he confronted the guy who threw a trash can and in the process of swerving to avoid that, the guy was struck — receiving injuries that led to his death.

Prosecutors charged Schmitt with murder, felony murder and aggravated assault because the rest of the evidence suggests to law enforcement that Schmitt was much more direct in using his car as a weapon:

However, surveillance footage and witness statements contradicted Schmitt’s account, the criminal complaint states. One neighbor, a nurse, allegedly witnessed Schmitt attempting to pull Jahangard’s body from underneath his car and told him to stop and wait for paramedics to arrive, stating that Schmitt “ran him over” rather than knocked him down, according to WSB-TV.

In either case, it’s a reminder that a car is a deadly weapon even if law professors get to joke about vehicular homicide.

Atlanta lawyer killed victim with Mercedes after car was struck with golf ball, prosecutors say [ABC News]

HeadshotJoe 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.

Biglaw Firm Tells Associates They Have To Take Vacation Time To Attend Firm Event

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Anyone who has spent any time in Biglaw is familiar with the concept of firm-wide events. There’s the requisite bonding/networking/making a good impression on newbies and you’re supposed to leave the event feeling some degree of warm fuzzies for the place where you spend the overwhelming majority of your waking hours. What you aren’t supposed to feel is that you’ve been hoodwinked into forking over a chunk of your valuable vacation time.

Unfortunately for the associates at Quinn Emanuel, the warm fuzzies were hard to come by this year.

Above the Law has been tipped off by firm insiders about a massive snafu following the firm’s annual hike. According to our tipsters, in previous years the firm has allowed associates that attend the event to bill the time to a non-billable client number. When associates attempted to repeat the practice this year however, they were told that time should, instead, be charged to their vacation time. Yup, that’s right, after the fact they were told attending a firm event was really their vacation because attendance wasn’t mandatory.

Associates at Quinn were just as shocked as you are. And, to be clear, vacation time at Quinn is not unlimited, so this is a far cry from a “no harm, no foul” situation.

This policy, in a word, stinks. We know, as a profession, that the legal world has issues with mental health and wellness. The right response for a firm to the stresses of Biglaw life is not to take away the limited time attorneys have to unwind and (hopefully) unplug.

We reached out to the firm and they defended the policy since it subsidizes the travel costs associated with the trip:

The firm sponsors an annual hike. It’s always voluntary, but always very popular. In recent years, the hike has been in Switzerland, Japan, Iceland and Italy. Many associates and partners sign up. The firm heavily subsidizes the cost for associates. This year the hike took place in Interlaken, Switzerland. We hiked the “Faulhornweg” trail through some of the most spectacular scenery in the world. The final night of the trip, there was a celebratory group dinner held at the Victoria Jungfrau Les Colonnades & Atrium. Over 250 attorneys attended the hike, which is the biggest turnout the firm has seen. It’s an opportunity to travel, see some of the most beautiful settings in the world, and enjoy time outside the office with one’s colleagues. It is properly treated as vacation time though some associates have recorded it as recruiting time because some summer associates also attend.

While international travel might be a nice perk for associates, it isn’t the same as an actual vacation. However nice the firm trip may be, it is still part of the job. Sharing a drink with your boss does not have the same relaxing properties as not responding to your boss’ emails because you’re lying on a beach somewhere. And changing the policy about how the time gets billed after the associates get home? Well, that just really stinks.

headshotKathryn 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).

Anatomy of a Legal Matter

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When meeting our law firm clients, or prospective clients, I’m often asked which team or practice group would benefit most from HighQ. My answer is always the same — all of them! HighQ is an intelligent collaboration and client engagement platform, with the relevant word here being platform.

Although lawyers might not want to admit it (they’re a fiercely competitive bunch), the fundamental anatomy of most legal matters looks the same — even though the precise process, type of law, and even the jurisdiction may differ.

The HighQ platform delivers core features and solutions that are applicable across all teams and practice groups, so no matter the type of legal work, HighQ has the essential tools needed to optimize the management, collaboration and delivery for that matter.

  1. Team collaboration

Law is a team sport. Yes, there are some big personalities, but all legal matters involve a team of people with differing roles and responsibilities working towards a common goal.

Team collaboration is both internal (between paralegals, legal project managers, lawyers, support staff and so on) and external (with other key project stakeholders such as clients, banks, accountants, surveyors, foreign counsel, expert witnesses and so on). All of these project participants will benefit from effective communication and collaboration tools, enabling them to break down silos and improve transparency and knowledge sharing.

Thankfully for our clients, HighQ is the engine room of collaboration; it allows matter teams to share files, work together on documents, send private messages, post updates in a blog, manage team tasks, share project calendars, and connect using social collaboration tools. Unfortunately, legal project teams still rely on email for matter collaboration, which is often a problem as information needs to be consolidated in one place to make it accessible by the entire project team. HighQ solves this issue by providing a central workspace for distributed teams to work.

Efficient collaboration also requires teams to connect regardless of their location and time zone. All you need is a web browser to access the HighQ platform, and it’s also accessible on mobile devices, so team members can access files, information and collaborate on the go from anywhere in the world. Easy!

  1. Document management

There’s no escaping that all legal matters involve documents and files of some kind — engagement letters, KYC documents, contracts, advice notes, exhibits, pleadings, witness statements, reports…the list goes on. As do the document management use cases — data rooms, M&A documents lists, conditions precedent trackers, e-bundles and more. However, how often is there a central online workspace where the whole project team can access and manage key documents, as well as collaborate on those documents? Not very often.

Unfortunately, document management, sharing and collaboration across project teams is still done via email in conjunction with Microsoft Word or Excel indexes. Finding the latest version of a document involves searching through an email chain. Yes, some team members will save them to a document management system, but where is the “project DMS” for all team members to use?

This is where HighQ comes into its own. Our platform allows teams to not only centrally store and securely manage matter documents with indexing, version control, custom file metadata and DMS integrations, but also collaborate around those documents with annotations, comments and tasks. Creating and editing documents in either Microsoft Office or Office Online and saving them to HighQ is also easy — there’s even simultaneous editing for collaborative document drafting.

Document access and permissions can be set right down to the file level, and the HighQ platform has full digital rights management and activity reporting so you can control and monitor who does what in the platform. If that wasn’t enough, HighQ integrates with DocuSign and Adobe Sign for electronic document execution, as well as comparison tools for document redlines.

HighQ also has an Outlook integration and a dedicated HighQ Drive desktop and mobile app, which let you work with documents online or offline without having to directly access the HighQ platform. So, whatever you might want to do with a document during a legal matter, HighQ has it covered.

  1. Knowledge management

Law can be immensely complex, and a lawyer’s job is to help their client navigate this complexity in order to obtain the best possible outcome. The most successful law firms are therefore those with the best map and guidebook, in the shape of legal experience and know-how.

However, law firms aren’t always good at capturing know-how, so they tend to have a shifting body of knowledge that depends on the makeup of their lawyers at any point in time. The challenge for law firms is to capture and centralize their collective intelligence so that the quality of their know-how develops and improves over time. A firm that masters this process, and makes quality knowledge available to all its lawyers at the point they need it, will enable better decision-making and improved outcomes for its clients.

HighQ provides several ways for firms to unlock and capture legal knowledge and share it with other lawyers who need it. This might involve storing and managing precedent documents through the Files module, collaborating with colleagues on know-how topics within the Wiki, or sharing current awareness through the Blog.

The social collaboration tools within the HighQ platform also mean that it can be used to share knowledge and opinions in real time, as well as crowdsource knowledge and guidance. For example, just post a question to your colleagues to tap into their knowledge and collaboratively identify the best course of action. HighQ can become the hive mind of your law firm!

  1. Legal process

All legal matters, except for perhaps the most unique and exceptional, have a standard process and workflow. Whether it’s a contract negotiation, litigation, stock market listing, competition clearance or property financing, they all involve a series of standard steps and actions. Sure, each process will have its own intricacies and complexities, but the foundational process of a specific matter type will be consistent.

Establishing and following a standard process is essential for law firms—it ensures quality and consistency of delivery and helps to mitigate the risk of error (something firms are keen to avoid at all costs).

However, an automated approach to legal process carries even more benefit — it helps reduce manual intervention in the process, frees up lawyer time to focus on higher value tasks, enables downstream allocation of work, and speeds cycle times. It also produces data and metrics that allow law firms to identify opportunities for process reengineering and improvement.

The HighQ platform contains tools that enable standard legal processes to be systematized. With the iSheets module, you can create process checklists to help walk project teams through a project framework. These checklists can be made “smart” through the use of conditional logic. Notifications can be built into the checklists so that team members are regularly notified about process status and risk.

However, workflow is more than tracking progress through checklists, which is why we are working hard on process automation capabilities. Our workflow engine will enable users to create a fully automated legal process by identifying a series of triggers and actions — if this, then that. For example, if a user uploads a file to Folder X, then the system creates a new task in List Y and adds an event to category Z. This functionality means that process automation can be “baked” into a HighQ site, enabling the automation itself to be seamless and discreet. This is going to be a game changer for efficient legal process delivery!

  1. Project and matter management

Legal project management (LPM) is not a new discipline, but it remains a fairly nebulous concept for many lawyers. Several law firms now have LPM functions or methodologies. However, despite clients crying out for greater efficiency, consistency and transparency in legal projects, many firms haven’t found a way to institutionalize a best practice approach to the management and delivery of legal matters.

Whenever I talk to our law firm and corporate clients about LPM, one thing is clear — they all believe technology has a big role to play in helping to drive adoption of project management techniques in legal. When I was a lawyer, I was involved in a project to create a LPM methodology for transactional work. What was interesting was that when we distilled it down, LPM was actually quite straightforward.

It’s about efficient engagement, planning, delivery and closure of projects. The tools involved are also fairly simple — project plans, timelines, workstream and milestone trackers, task lists, status updates, integration checklists and so on. It’s all about establishing a plan, and then delivering against that plan whilst at the same time providing full transparency for the client.

LPM is a core focus for HighQ. Our platform is built for agile project management so that legal matters can delivered on time and on budget. A core element of LPM is transparency, and HighQ provides the online workspace to consolidate project content in one place and make it accessible to everyone (lawyers, clients and other advisers).

Our Tasks module helps keep team activity organized and aligned. You can assign tasks and track due dates and statuses so that everyone has a clear overview of project progress. The new timeline view of tasks allows you to view activity across days, weeks and months, giving project teams a view of the complete project schedule. Our Events module can also be used to track key milestones and meetings, as well as manage team availability.

The iSheets module is perfect for systematizing traditional Microsoft Excel project trackers, including budget, WIP and billing information, project portfolios, key issues lists and workstream reports, as well as project-specific trackers such as due diligence issues for M&A, negotiation points for commercial contracting and witness evidence for litigation. Another key component of LPM is simple transparent reporting, and this can be achieved by using our dashboard builder. Take data from both the iSheets and Tasks modules and visualize it in graphs and charts in the Home module.

With all of this awesome functionality, there’s no doubt that HighQ enables a smarter way to manage matters, and is the go-to platform for efficient legal project management.

  1. Legal service delivery

Lawyers help their clients mitigate and manage risk as well as achieve value, and they do this in many different ways, for example, negotiating and drafting contracts and agreements, documenting arguments and defenses, providing advocacy, performing due diligence, sharing legal know-how and current awareness, reviewing information and advising on the best course of action, and so on.

The HighQ platform supports and optimizes the delivery of legal services in several different ways. Taking a literal approach, the HighQ platform enables secure file sharing for the delivery of legal documents to clients, with tools to enable online collaboration around, and execution of, that document.

However, HighQ offers further scope for transformation. Our document automation functionality in iSheets can help lawyers easily generate agreements and reports. But it’s not limited to lawyers; more forward-thinking law firms are opening up the platform and document automation directly to their clients—creating legal self-service portals for document generation as well as advice and access to legal playbooks.

These portals can be developed into full client relationship portals that contain client engagement documents, matter management reporting, financial information, know-how and e-learning, event diaries, regulatory and compliance trackers, lawyer directories and help-desks.

Last but not least, our new AI Hub allows lawyers to leverage AI tools, including our new HighQ AI service, directly in the platform. This helps lawyers with the heavy lifting of contract categorization, review and analysis. It also cuts down the chargeable hours, delivering work to clients more efficiently and cost-effectively.

When you sift through the mystique of law, you quickly realize that there is a clear and consistent framework for legal service delivery across all legal matters. With clients expecting more efficiency, transparency and value from their lawyers, it’s time for law firms to reengineer their legal service delivery into a real competitive advantage. The starting point is to health check the anatomy of your legal matters, diagnose the source of the pain and discomfort, and then seek treatment.

In any event, the prescription is clear — one dose of the HighQ platform to transform and optimize your legal service delivery. Your firm will be fighting fit in no time!

Rob is an experienced legal technology and innovation leader specialising in the design and creation of digital solutions to empower corporate legal teams and transform the delivery of legal services. As a former M&A and private equity lawyer for some of the UK’s leading law firms, Rob is passionate about the use of technology to create smarter legal service delivery methods as well as innovative new legal products.

Rob leads the corporate legal solutions team at HighQ. Before joining HighQ in 2017 he was group innovation manager for Pinsent Masons as part of their award-winning SmartDelivery team. Rob is an active member of the LegalTech community, regularly contributing for organisations and publications such as ACC, CLOC, The Lawyer, Bloomberg, Corporate Counsel and Law360.