Author: TSA Press

Lawyers live in constant fear of details.  Superior attention to detail makes lawyers money; a lack of attention to detail makes for malpractice.  But, as law practice becomes more and more complex — contracts amass, details proliferate — it becomes more and more difficult to spot those small mistakes that can come back to bite you.  Of course, smart lawyers understand that technology is the solution for information overload.  Once you’ve figured that out, it’s just a matter of picking the right technology.

If you’re sweating your contract drafting like you’re walking through a field of land mines, Donna offers peace of mind, and protection against those backbiting oversights that keep you up at night.

What Is It?

Donna is a contract editing software, whose purpose is to provide context and relevant information when you need it in order to spot those easy-to-overlook mistakes. Because, let’s face it, when you’re reading a 50-page contract, it’s not quite as enthralling as “Avengers: Endgame”; so, it’s understandable that your mind might drift, and that you’d overlook an inconsistency or misinterpretation that could that could come back and haunt you.  Donna is there to watch your back, to make sure you’re consistently addressing even the most minute variables.

Donna is a cloud-based product that comes as a convenient Microsoft Word plug-in, available for both premise-based (traditional) versions of Word (like Word 2016 and Word 2013), as well as Word Online. And, because Donna is a plug-in that doesn’t require special permissions, it’s super easy to install.  I mean, you could probably install it without even asking your IT person… But, you didn’t hear that from me, okay?  So, when you do tell your IT person (you will, won’t you), it’s still just a one-step download.

Once you download Donna for Word, that’s when the magic happens.

What Does it Do?

What magic, you ask?  Good question.  THIS kind of magic:

After you’ve downloaded Donna, you’ll find a new Donna button on the far right-hand side of the Microsoft Office ribbon; you toggle Donna off and on by clicking that button.  When Donna is turned on, opening any document will automatically set it to work.  Donna will bring up potential suggestions and other interesting details, by generating colored highlights in your document. Clicking these highlights opens up matching snippets in the Donna sidebar. For instance, suggestions are highlighted in yellow and clicking them, Donna explains the potential problem discovered.  Donna will even link other relevant snippets such as related issues or definitions. Every snippet has a “focus” button that allows you to jump to the exact spot in the document where the Donna highlight exists.  Using this information, you can decide to make a change based on Donna’s suggestion, or to skip the suggestion, and optionally any suggestions like it.  In this way, Donna becomes your second set of eyes for contract review — eyes that don’t glaze over thinking about the upcoming weekend’s plans — but, it’s ultimately your choice as the lawyer to make or reject changes related to Donna’s operations. Donna of course can’t write the agreement for you, AI lacks something people like to call “common sense”. But Donna isn’t your typical AI, its Assistive Intelligence, because it ultimately leaves the decision making in the capable hands of the lawyer.

Donna’s baseline is simplicity: it issue-spots, gives you relevant information, and otherwise doesn’t disturb you getting the job done.  You can easily parachute into and out of potential change options by navigating the snippet, focus, and skip options.

And although you’ll be drawn to Donna’s yellow suggestions there are lots of other things Donna can highlight. A favorite seems to be defined terms in light blue. Clicking on this highlight gives you a snippet of how the term was defined in the side-bar. Nod “yes” if you’ve ever frantically scrolled up and down in an agreement trying to find what a term means. Now nod “yes” if you’d be happy to never have to do that again.

By filtering on a single category within Donna, a user can complete their review via the sidebar, rather than struggling through the massive scrolling and scanning challenge presented by traditional document review.  In this way, Donna delivers to you only the information you need, when you need it. With Donna, you can get into and out of your contract documents quickly, with increased accuracy and decreased malpractice risk.

What’s Next?

Donna currently has clients in 50 countries, with additional language capabilities coming.  And, with a $2.5 million capital raise recently secured, Donna will be investing even more resources into designing intuitive workflows as well as adding some great new features. A couple of things on the roadmap are:

– Compatibility with Google Docs and Word for Mac.

– Ability to link related documents and external resources. Imagine clicking on a reference to a specific law and having the relevant text available right there.

– Knowledge sharing features — Donna could allow users within a firm to look for inspiration from other clauses that have been drafted by colleagues for a particular client.

Want to Find Out More?

Schedule a demo or just download Donna today: https://www.donna.legal/

Donna is only $15/user, with enterprise solutions available.

Support options include in-app chat.

. . .

Ritchie Valens really loved Donna, but you might love her even more.

Prof. Ruth Ginsburg. C-plus. Very precise. Female. Reads.

— an excerpt from a note written by the late Justice Harry Blackmun during then-professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s first argument before the Supreme Court in Frontiero v. Richardson, in January 1973. Blackmun took detailed notes about SCOTUS advocates, grading each of them from A through F (the scale used from 1970 to 1974), from to 1-100 (the scale used from 1975 to 1977), and from 0-8 (the scale used from 1978 to 1994). Over the course of her arguments before the high court, Ginsburg continued to improve, earning some Bs and B-s from the justice. Her final GPA was a 2.8. When recently informed of the grades she earned from Blackmun, Ginsburg had this to say: “Listen to the arguments and judge for yourself.”

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.

While no decision has been officially made yet, University of La Verne College of Law is inching ever closer to shutting its doors for good. Last week, the University Provost, Jonathan Reed, announced the Board of Trustees’ decision to pass a resolution to consider closing the law school. The University has created an ad hoc committee of faculty to prepare a report of recommendations to the Board on the financial viability of the law school. The Board is scheduled to make its final determination on the future of the law school at their November 18th meeting.

As reported by La Verne Campus Times, at a student meeting, Reed stressed a final decision had not yet been made:

“As part of the Board of Trustees’ due diligence, they have triggered the process of making sure we are taking a look at the long term trajectory of the ABA-accredited College of Law program,” Reed said. “That creates a process where a committee is formed, and administration is tasked to come up with recommendations on what the program should look like moving forward.”

In the event the University does decide to close the law school, they are investigating “teach out” programs and other options to ensure those currently enrolled are able to graduate.

In addition to financial concerns about the law school, there is also concern about the recently amended American Bar Association Standard 316 at La Verne. The law school accreditation body decided in May of this year to require law schools to have 75 percent of their graduates pass the bar exam in two years; the previous standard had been in five years.

Reed assured the students that the board did not spontaneously come to a conclusion to look into the College of Law’s financial viability.

“This decision did not arise from a single event,” Reed said. “It has been the history of the College of Law in terms of finances continuing to be subsidized by the University, although it has gone down in recent years. The new ABA standard also creates problems for us.”

The results of the most recent California bar exam will be available on November 16th, and will reportedly factor into the law school’s future.

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).

Last Halloween, I blissfully passed out candy to half a dozen RBGs, bedecked in their black robes and signature collars, and I thought, finally, there’s an attorney costume I can get on board with. Unlike, say the half-assed attempts put forth by my law school brethren who showed up at Halloween parties with plastic white fangs and declared themselves blood-sucking lawyers.

Over the years, I thought I’d seen them all. The bespectacled Atticus Finches. The aggressively pink and perky Elle Woodses. The high-waisted jean and halter-topped Erin Brokoviches. Heck, I even once handed out Kit-Kats to a blue-haired Lionel Hutz.

But what was chuckle-snort worthy as a costume turned downright upsetting this year when someone crossed THAT line into a full-blown impersonation of an attorney. That was the moment my reptilian brain kicked into high gear and ran around flicking its lizard tongue and shouting “do not want” over and over again.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think if you’re going to put forth legal arguments and draw legal conclusions in a legal opinion, then perhaps it’s best you’ve suffered through the slings and arrows of law school, passed the bar exam, and obtained your license to practice (or you’ve otherwise satisfied your state’s requirements… looking at you, Washington State, you lovable weirdos). Then you can hold yourself out as an attorney and enjoy all the benefits and baggage that comes along with that title.

What you can’t do is draw up a legal opinion where you use language like “the company has legally concluded” and send it off to an outside party. I mean, you totally could if you’re an attorney. But if you’re a first-year tax manager straight out of school, you really shouldn’t do this. And when confronted, you definitely shouldn’t shrug your now-dated Bieber bangs and ask what the big deal is.

Because that is how you unleash this beast this Halloween season.

Without going into the gory details, I found out this week about this non-authorized sham of a legal opinion (dear business partners, we always find out) and spent a stupid amount of time walking back our “legal opinions” and doing general damage control. Then I confronted the tax dweeb. With all of the dignity I could muster — which was very little and mostly consisted of teeth grinding and constipated expressions — I ticked through the various reasons that legal opinions needed to be prepared by the legal department. I didn’t use sarcastic air quotes around the word “legal,” but it was a near thing. I don’t know what I was expecting, maybe a plea of ignorance or some hint of remorse, but the guy just looked at me and asked what my problem was. Oh, right. My problem. But don’t worry, he helpfully added he found the answer on the internet, alright?

Facepalm. The jerk actually admitted he found the answer on the internet.

So, we fired the guy just days before Halloween. Turned him out on the streets with the other tricksters. Nah, I’m just kidding. Of course, he wasn’t fired. Like you’ve no doubt seen a hundred times in your practice, business partners aren’t disciplined for their transgressions. Occasionally, they’re axed when they miss sales targets or use the company card for a four-figure personal boondoggle. But not for something as silly as the unauthorized practice of law. I mean, what’s a misdemeanor or in some cases, a felony between friends, right?

As someone who has buttressed her in-house career with a sense of humor and the ability to turn the other cheek, even I can admit there comes a time to cut basic, common-sense-lacking ass waffles out of your professional life. And in the face of an unrepentant creep essentially masquerading as an attorney and exposing the company to a world of risk? Time to ghost ‘em.

Kay Thrace (not her real name) is a harried in-house counsel at a well-known company that everyone loves to hate. When not scuffing dirt on the sacrosanct line between business and the law, Kay enjoys pub trivia domination and eradicating incorrect usage of the Oxford comma. You can contact her by email at KayThraceATL@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter @KayThrace.

The Washington Post did a big profile of Andrew Yang’s aborted Biglaw career and… well, it pretty much sounds like everybody’s aborted Biglaw career. Yes, he had all the credentials. Yes, he made a lot of money. But the feelings of pointlessness and soullessness took hold, and he eventually left Biglaw to find what he really wanted to do.

Yang went to Brown for college, Columbia for law school, and Davis Polk for money. Then, he got off that train. The only significant difference between his story and most is that Yang only lasted five months. Most last a bit longer.

The rest checks out. Here are some quotes from the Washington Post:

He frequently refers to his lawyer days as “the five worst months of my life.”

“Working at a law firm was like a pie-eating contest, and if you won, your prize was more pie,” Yang said in a recent interview on the Acela train from Washington to New York, between hurried bites of a turkey sandwich.

The law jokes play well, especially because seven of the 12 candidates in the last televised Democratic debate have law degrees.

Everybody makes that joke, WaPo.

“It felt very purposeless and empty,” Yang said. “I was looking out at New York and thinking, ‘Wow, is this why my parents came to this country?’ ”…

Yang said he did a “test” with himself to see whether he was in it just for the money.

“I went to Bloomingdale’s and bought my family cashmere scarves and some other nice gifts. Then I brought them to them that weekend, and they seemed to like them,” he said. “And I thought: Is this enough for me to do a job I don’t like? Definitely not.”

After a case unexpectedly settled in the middle of the week, I took the rest of the week off, bought a first-class ticket to Vegas, at the airport, and won about half of it back taking money off of people there for some sort of convention. It wasn’t enough.

Look, we’ve all been there, some people find a way to love what they do. Others find a way to love the money they make while doing it. And a lot of people eventually quit. The best thing about Yang’s story is that he went through the process so quickly. It took me two years to figure out how to get out. It takes others longer. Some people are a decade in before they finally break free.

Often, things work out. Maybe not as well as they’ve worked out for Yang, but in my travels I’ve found that the skills that made people successful Biglaw candidates can be redeployed to make them successful at other things. The training is never really lost, it just has to be re-formatted a bit. As Yang puts it:

He said he doesn’t regret studying law, which made him more “structured and detail oriented.” On the other hand, he said, the cautious analysis taught in law school can get in the way of an entrepreneur who needs to make decisions quickly, often based more on instinct than data. He said he had to “unlearn” some of what his law professors taught him.

Plunge on in, the water’s fine. You almost probably won’t totally drown in debt for the rest of your life.

Andrew Yang was groomed for a high-paying job at an elite law firm. He lasted five months. [Washington Post]

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.

5 Secrets to Growing Your Law Firm 

Hiring for success is arguably the single most important task you’ll have as a leader in your firm.

But who are the right candidates? How do you sift through a sea of applicants to find the perfect fit for your company? And how do you give them the best chance of success once they’re on board? Poor hiring decisions can significantly damage your business, so you need to get it right the first time.

To increase your chances of success, fill in the form to download Hire for Success: 5 Secrets to Growing Your Law Firm, authored by Jules Miller, co-founder at Evolve Law. You’ll gain insight into five key recruitment practices to guide your hiring, including:

• Defining your firm’s culture
• Hiring based on culture
• Creating the right hiring procedures
• Developing an effective onboarding process
• Spotting red flags

By requesting this report you are opting in to receive communications from Clio and Above Law. 

Artificial intelligence might cause job losses

For today’s seniors, it’s easy to slip into complacency and ignore the demands of keeping physically fit. This neglect carries a whole host of health risks and can contribute to being forced into a home late in life at tremendous cost. But 78-year-old Patricia Currie managed to get her assisted living needs met, securing a 22-year prison sentence in Louisiana.

In August, a jury convicted Currie of trying to murder her lawyer, Keith Couture, after he failed to get himself withdrawn from representing her in a bankruptcy case. From the New York Post:

Couture claimed that Currie arrived at his office alone with a gun, wearing latex gloves on her hands and plastic bags on [her] feet, the newspaper reported.

She allegedly told him that she came to kill him then revealed a shotgun from under a towel.

Gloves and plastic bags? What is CBS teaching our elders these days? It must be CBS because, one, old people watch it constantly and, two, they have that show that’s all about science and making viewers dream of getting away with murder: Big Bang Theory. Blaming the media seems like a cop out, but something must have happened, because the lady in that picture doesn’t strike me as experienced in gangland hits.

Couture managed to wrestle the gun away from Currie because, you know, she was 75 at the time. If you can’t overpower a 78-year-old, then natural selection is just doing its job. The jury took 15 minutes to convict her.

78-year-old Louisiana woman sentenced for trying to kill her lawyer [NY Post]

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.