Author: TSA Press

Year in and year out, we watch law firm after law firm pay lip service to their commitment to diversity in the legal profession, with promises to recruit, retain, and promote more minority attorneys. Despite these continued assurances, and despite the fact that a number of firms have made great efforts to improve the stature of their diverse hires in the law, there is still much more to be done. On the bright side, one firm hopes to make its pledge to increase diversity and inclusion a major priority.

Dorsey & Whitney is hoping to make diversity in the workplace a reality by introducing a new “diversity hours” policy. “We’ve long said that we valued diversity and inclusion,” William Stoeri, the firm’s managing partner, said. “We were looking for a way to reward those who put time and effort toward it.”

The American Lawyer has some additional details on Dorsey’s new policy:

Just as firms often encourage pro bono work by allowing attorneys to record those hours as billable and count toward an annual goal, Dorsey will now allow diversity-related work, activities and training to count toward billable hours requirements.

The policy is retroactive to January of 2019 and includes up to 50 billable hours to be spent on activities such as attending internal and external diversity educational sessions, participating in the firm’s internal affinity groups or representing Dorsey at client-facing diversity events or trainings.

In a statement released by the firm, Stoeri noted that “Dorsey is committed to creating an enduring, more united and more profitable firm by investing and maintaining a culture in which all individuals can thrive and realize their full potential.”

Dorsey was recently ranked in 141st place for Am Law’s 2019 Diversity Scorecard, with just 12.4 percent of its attorneys and 8.8 percent of its partners identifying as minorities. Perhaps the Dorsey’s new “diversity hours” policy will help it get started on the right foot, but Stoeri realizes that it may not happen overnight.

“I want to encourage people to work in this area,” Stoeri said. “There are some things we can do internally, but there are also a lot of deep-seeded issues that we need to address as a society,” he said.

Best of luck to Dorsey & Whitney in its quest to increase diversity within its ranks and encourage encourage associate participation in diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Diversity Meets the Billable Hour at Dorsey & Whitney [American Lawyer]

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.

On Tuesday, a man brandishing a knife outside of a federal courthouse in Los Angeles was shot by a security officer. The man was shot in the hand and, as reported by KTLA, is expected to make a full recovery.

Authorities say the officer shot the suspect after he approached the officer with a weapon and an altercation ensued. The knife was recovered at the scene and two men were taken into custody.

Also going on in the courthouse at the time of the shooting was testimony in the copyright case that accuses songwriter Dr. Luke, aka Lukasz Gottwald, and singer Katy Perry of ripping off Christian rap artists when writing the hit “Dark Horse.” Marcus Gray, aka Flame, Emanuel Lambert, aka D.A. Truth, and Chike Ojukwu claim their 2008 song “Joyful Noise” was used as the basis of the Perry hit. In testimony, Dr. Luke denied the claim, saying he’d never heard of the Christian rappers or their song before the lawsuit. As reported by Law360:

“Dark Horse” started as a simple, catchy instrumental beat created by producer and songwriter Henry Walter, known as Cirkut, Luke said. The eight-note melodic phrase beginning with four C notes and two B notes is actually so simple, he said, that it’s essentially made up of the building blocks of music.

“It’d be like trying to write a book without using words like ‘the,’ ‘and’ or ‘a,’” Luke said in response to the plaintiffs’ claim they own the right to that sequence of notes.

Dr. Luke, who works with recording artists like Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, Kelly Clarkson, and Pink, said there was a lot of time and effort that went into making “Dark Horse” and “We’re trying to make what we do as great as possible.”

The trial was uninterrupted by the chaos outside the courthouse.

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).

In a digital world where the lines between a personal and professional persona emulsify, a glut of personal information floating around the internet can lead hackers to sensitive data about an organization or an individual, creating undue and immeasurable risk.  

Borrowing from principles of the intelligence community, understanding the information that exists about oneself is sometimes just as valuable as collecting information about one’s adversaries.   Therefore, being more proactive about security from a counterintelligence standpoint — whether as counsel or as a client — can begin by taking a long hard look at your digital footprint. The goal is to adopt defensive practices that guard against malicious actors who are conducting their own open source intelligence (OSINT) gathering (industry-speak for “internet searching”).  

Information security professionals seek help from outside experts to understand what’s “out there” about their company and its top executives, so that the information can be scrubbed or at least assessed from a risk perspective. This knowledge helps a company determine full risk from a personally identifiable information (PII) vantage point, developing the basis for a thorough assessment and remediation.

The following steps and considerations, curated by Rob Volkert, VP of Information Operations at Nisos, a leading cyber investigations firm, are useful for reducing and hardening digital footprints on an individual basis (disclosure: I work at Nisos).  Organizational, large-scale, or deep-dive executive OSINT assessments require more manpower and strategies than those outlined here.  But this type of bottom-up approach will have broad beneficial effects for employers, especially since data breaches in 2019 alone cost U.S.-based firms an average cost of $8.19 million per cyberattack. Note that this is not a one-time exercise, but a digital hygiene process which should be rinsed and repeated at regular intervals.

1. Discover and assess your footprint: Start by conducting online searches of your name (including former names) as well as personal address in a search engine to see where and how your information appears, including personal or sensitive images that others may have posted about you. Log into all social networking sites and forums which you belong to as part of the discovery process.  Drink some coffee and take deep breaths.

2. Clean up and remove your data: Remove any photos, content, accounts, and links that may be inappropriate, reveal too much information, or are no longer relevant.  Consider deactivating or canceling social media accounts which you no longer or rarely use.  You can contact the company and ask them to remove your data permanently from their servers; legitimate companies will usually comply, but data brokers may prove harder to pin down.  You can also request that street photos of your home be removed or blurred on the major map sites, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.  When visiting these sites, look for the links “report a problem” or “report image,” and then follow the instructions for removal or obfuscation.

3. Check your privacy settings: Keep personal accounts, such as Instagram or Facebook, as private as possible, allowing access only to trusted family members or associates — people you actually know.  Consider using different email addresses and phone number combinations for login and registration on all personal communications and social media sites. Some sites, like Twitter, require a public profile.  In that case, limit discussion to general business-related activities, keep posts clean and non-discriminatory, and post photos of professional activities only after leaving the event. Cite general locations such as city or country and limit references to individuals’ true names by instead referring to their social media handles.

4. Create “layered” contact information: Popular services such as Google Voice, Sudo, and Sideline offer the ability to create and manage multiple new email addresses and phone numbers, creating a layer of identity protection while automatically forwarding communications to the primary accounts.  You can manage these online or through smartphone apps and use them for everyday accounts such as utility companies and other home service providers, e-commerce, and social media. More accounts mean more passwords, so consider using a password manager such as 1Password or Dashlane.

9. Limit what you share and with whom: In general, avoid the disclosure of identifying information to any merchant or business, even if it means passing up on four feet of coupons. Store loyalty programs, periodical subscriptions, utility providers, and credit card companies can and will sell PII to data brokers or fail to adequately protect it.

10. Get a little paranoid: Assume that any time you provide your PII to a business or institution, it will be entered into a database that will make its way into the hands of data brokers and/or hackers. This results in headaches and exposure that quite frankly are just not worth the free rewards.  After all, your privacy is worth more than that.

Jennifer DeTrani is General Counsel and EVP of Nisos, a technology-enabled cybersecurity firm.  She co-founded a secure messaging platform, Wickr, where she served as General Counsel for five years.  You can connect with Jennifer on Wickr (dtrain), LinkedIn or by email at dtrain@nisos.com.

The civilian control over armed and security forces is arguably the most crucial, yet least appreciated aspect of democracy. The simple reason is that, as RJ Rummel so conclusively demonstrated in Death By Government, states kill more of their own citizens than any other factor save for natural disasters. No number of violence-free elections can guarantee a democracy as long as a military is not subject to parliamentary oversight.

However, Chapter 4, Article 111 of the Zimbabwe Constitution (2013) grants the president the sole authority to declare war, which can only be overturned by a two-thirds majority in both Houses of Parliament. This is an extraordinary power which severely limits the oversight power of Parliament to control the military in Zimbabwe. In other words, civilian control over the armed forces is fairly weak.

The Zimbabwean military has been content to be the power behind the throne, seldom removing the velvet glove to exercise its iron fist. The removal of Robert Mugabe was one exceptional case where the glove came off, another is the current state of violence. As long as the civilian politicians have acceded to the interests of the military, senior officers have stayed in their barracks. If substantial change is desired in Zimbabwe, then the time has come to stop treating Zimbabwe as a democracy, flawed or otherwise, and view it as a military dictatorship with a thin civilian veneer.

International actors have long struggled to negotiate with military regimes, even when their actions are far more egregious than Zimbabwe’s. As in Burma, the international community has been unable to prevent the genocide against the Rohingya. Similarly, efforts to promote human rights in Latin American juntas in decades past were fruitless.

Unfortunately for the people of Zimbabwe, the options are stark. History has shown that in such similar cases the pursuit of peace and justice can be mutually exclusive. Senior officers are unlikely to withdraw from politics unless granted some degree of amnesty (as in Brazil) or delays of prosecution (as experienced in Argentina). Very rarely do military rulers quietly give up power.

A first step towards both peace and justice, however, could be to make the restructuring and reform of the security sector a necessary requirement of all loans and aid projects. SADC, Ecowas and the AU have successfully run similar programmes and view security sector reform as necessary post-conflict programmes. The programme for Zimbabwe would require the restructuring of not only the military, but the police, judiciary and intelligence services as well.

As successful as some of these projects have been elsewhere in Africa, it is not a cure-all for Zimbabwe, but a comprehensive reform programme for the military as a necessary step towards a more complete civilian and democratic control of the armed forces. Without such democratic norm training, any other intervention is unlikely to prove stable or enduring. DM

Post published in: Featured

Zimbabwe’s capital is experiencing some of its worst power outages in memory, as drought hits hydropower production at Kariba Dam.

Electricity is mostly available between 10pm and 6am, forcing businesses to go nocturnal, run expensive diesel generators or face bankruptcy.

“The situation has reached another level. We have to do our work during the middle of the night, because that is the only time we are guaranteed electricity,” Enock Chihombwe, a welder in Harare, told Climate Home News.

“Our work relies heavily on electricity, so we have to work double shifts every day. At night we weld window panes and door frames and during the day, we will be selling the products.”

It is particularly tough for informal traders, who cannot afford generators or do not have ready access to fuel. Motorists must queue for several hours to get petrol or diesel.

Even bigger companies are feeling the pinch. The country’s biggest mobile operator Econet said power cuts had reached unsustainable levels and were threatening the viability of the telecoms sector.

“The company is incurring high production costs by use and servicing of generators, while its prices have remained constant. We have made attempts despite serious fuel shortages to increase diesel allocated to our base station sites.

“Even with these contingency measures, fuel allocation is still inadequate to ensure the required optimum network performance and at current regulated pricing levels, the related costs are not sustainable,” said the company in a statement.

Cooking oil manufacturer Surface Wilmar said it had cut production to below 15% of its installed capacity as a result of the incessant power cuts.

Ordinarily, the company produces 8,000 tonnes of cooking oil a month, but executives said output had slumped to 1,500 tonnes.

“There is no production. The company requires 8 megawatt-hours per day to power its plant,” said company chairman Narottan Somani.

The country relies heavily on hydroelectricity, with Kariba Dam providing the bulk of power to both Zimbabwe and Zambia.

“Hydro-energy has increasingly become unreliable because of the frequency of droughts in the country,” said Panganai Sithole, a spokesperson for Zimbabwe Energy Council.

Zambezi Water Authority, which oversees the dam, said the level of usable water in the lake is down to 25%, making it difficult to produce electricity.

It is designed to operate between 475.50 and 488.50 metres, the authority said in a statement. The level fell 11cm to 479.01m on 22 July, compared to 486.83m at the same time last year.

“It is a climate change issue,” said Priscah Mugabe, a climate expert at the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of Zimbabwe: “Climate change is reflected in rainfall patterns in Zimbabwe from 1901 up to now.”

There have been noticeable shifts in the onset of the rains, with more extremes of heavy rainfall and drought, she added. There are also changes in the hydrology and run-off in catchment areas for the lake.

Aging coal infrastructure and weak purchasing power for imports only add to the strain on electricity supplies.

Zimbabwe’s energy minister Fortune Chasi backed small-scale renewables as the government announced a package of measures to tackle the energy crisis earlier this month.

“Government fully supports the use of solar power and sees the adoption of renewable energy as a sustainable, clean and long-term option to the challenges of inadequate power supply.

“Solar energy can alleviate the country’s dependence on both hydro-power energy and non-renewable fossil fuels, and it can significantly reduce the importation of energy and save scarce foreign currency, which can be used for other national developmental programmes,” the minister said.

More than 10,000 solar home systems have been installed country-wide, the minister claimed, while 400 mini-grids have been set up at rural schools and clinics.

To further boost take-up, the government waived import duties on solar energy technologies and made solar power mandatory for new construction projects.

“To alleviate the situation on the power supply front, government resolved that a large-scale programme be implemented to promote the importation, local production of solar equipment and the use of solar power as an alternative energy source,” explained information minister Monica Mutsvangwa at a briefing.

Zimbabwe Building Contractors Association chief executive Crispen Tsvarai welcomed the move.

“It is a good decision, it is innovative, and we welcome that we need to harness the natural power that we have. We are richly endowed in the sunshine. We need to convert it into energy so that we can manage our import bill,” he said.