Author: TSA Press

Most work has a cadence and flow. Step One followed by Step Two followed by Step Three. Repeat. Complete. It’s a distinguishable harmony one you recognize it, and that instills a sense of comfort. A familiar flow that you can recite in your sleep.

Sometimes that means using a brief that you have used before. You know there’s no shame in reusing quality work product, especially one that has proven to be successful. You always do due diligence to ensure that it accurately reflects the current state of the law. Of course, that research takes time, but you give what time you have. That old familiar process kicks in once again.

The process as it was

Once you have determined the facts of your case, you know what legal issues you need to research. You use your preferred search tool to find caselaw and court decisions that will help shape your argument.

You tailor your brief for this specific case and cite your authorities. You pore over the research, checking and cross-checking, trying to ensure that you don’t mistakenly cite bad law. But there’s only so much you can do, because there’s only so much time in a day.

When does “done” mean done?

In the old world, even after you had spent days finalizing your arguments, ensuring you had the strongest authority and cases, it was difficult to feel like you were done. Because “done” meant there was nothing more you could do, and you know there is always more you can do.

Time constraints and competing priorities often meant that “done” happened only when time was up. But did you feel done? Or did you stay up at night wondering if there was something important you missed?

More likely than not, you’re working up until the very last second because you want to be sure you haven’t missed anything. You write your conclusion, proofread your work, and make sure you have accurately represented the state of the law. It’s here that attorneys turn a final critical eye against their own work. Best-case scenario — any mistakes you find are small.

In the worst-case scenario, when you check your work and determine that you’ve centered your argument around a case that has been overruled by a higher court or overturned by statute, you’re forced to start the process again. While it’s frustrating and time consuming, it’s definitely not optional. Therefore, you do it again and again because there is no alternative.

Until there is.

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You may have heard that three law schools — Columbia, Stanford, and the University of Chicago — reported that their cost of attendance for the current academic year exceeds $100,000. And some of their peer schools are coming close.

Their numbers are based on tuition, fees, and estimated living expenses. These three schools are in some of the most expensive cities in the country. And since they attract students nationwide, I doubt many of them are living with nearby relatives who will provide free food and a place to sleep.

Assuming these students fully finance their law school education with federal loans at a 6-7 percent interest rate, along with undergraduate debt, they will likely graduate with $400,000 in debt. You will need to pay around $4,500 per month to pay it off in 10 years. Or around $2,600 per month to pay it off in 30 years.

The fact that these three schools cost this much shouldn’t be a cause for concern. A good portion of these students will not leave with debt that high. Some come from wealthy families who will pay the tuition up front. Others will have substantial scholarships. And others will pay down their debt with their summer associate salaries at a major law firm. Or all of the above.

Even if they have that level of debt, it is assumed that most will land a high-paying job at some point in their careers and will eventually pay it off while living comfortably.

And some people will gladly get into this level of debt as they consider a law degree from one of these schools to be a status symbol.

What is worrisome is that other law schools will follow suit because they can claim they have to in order to stay competitive. Most schools have been gradually (and quietly) raising tuition every year. And it’s not always the schools’ fault. There are some costs that schools cannot control such as off-campus housing. And inflation plays a role.

But when word gets out that a school costs six figures per year, it crosses a psychological line. People will talk about it. Applicants will think harder about whether they will get their money’s worth. Some schools don’t need to explain themselves, at least not yet. If my alma mater, the late Whittier Law School, cost that much, everyone, including some alumni, would be up in arms. Other schools will be ridiculed mercilessly so they will not dare unless they absolutely have to.

I wonder how law school administrators of the future are going to argue with a straight face that a six-figure cost of attendance is necessary to promote diversity in the legal profession. Does the grand diversity plan involve young lawyers of color being enslaved with $400,000 in nondischargeable student loan bondage? Is a $2,600 minimum monthly payment for 30 years going to encourage them to work in underserved areas? The way things are going now, Income Based Repayment plans, including the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, are overdue for serious reform and are likely to be very different in a few years. And I think that half of Americans are hostile to forgiving student loans in any form and will make their anger known at the voting booth.

I will close by sharing that I have been contacted by young lawyers who are owing over $400,000 in student loans. They have high salaries but they also live in expensive cities. After their expenses, they are basically living paycheck to paycheck. If they can stay at their high-salary firm for five years, they will then be in a position to pay off the loans quickly. Otherwise they will likely be on an income-based repayment plan with a huge tax bomb at the end. Needless to say, they are not happy people.

They haven’t told their friends and family that they owe so much because of the shock factor. No one is “supposed” to owe that much. When I graduated law school many years ago, owing $100,000 in student loans  would be considered shocking. Nowadays, owing “only” $100,000 is considered low. Sadly, recent law school graduates feel somewhat comfortable admitting that they owe $300,000.

One day, law school will cost more than $100,000 per year. I am hoping that people from inside the academy will figure out a way to delay the inevitable for the sake of their students. But in the meantime, it is the student’s responsibility to control their costs so they won’t have to pay $2,600 per month for 30 years.

Steven Chung is a tax attorney in Los Angeles, California. He helps people with basic tax planning and resolve tax disputes. He is also sympathetic to people with large student loans. He can be reached via email at sachimalbe@excite.com. Or you can connect with him on Twitter (@stevenchung) and connect with him on LinkedIn.

As this website has covered at length for over a decade, layoffs are common within the legal profession.  Mass reductions in force can occur at law firms for a wide variety of reasons.  For instance, economic conditions, such as those experienced during the Great Recession, might lead to less demand for legal service.  As a result, law firms may need to reduce their headcount in order to account for the decrease in demand.  In addition, clients often choose to work with different legal counsel, and this might mean that firms must eliminate attorneys who worked on matters that are no longer handled by a firm.  Furthermore, cases settling or partners retiring can all impact a firm’s decision to reduce headcount.

Although there are many times when firms need to terminate employees due to performance, in the vast majority of instances, layoffs have absolutely nothing to do with a lawyer’s work.  Indeed, attorneys usually have no impact on the more global conditions that influence layoff determinations.  However, attorneys who are laid off may still face biases and stigma when searching for new positions.

I recently went to an attorney social event and met a lawyer who had been laid off because of the collapse of LeClairRyan.  This attorney has been applying to jobs for weeks, and had some interviews lined up for a variety of roles.  I told this lawyer that he was looking for work in a relatively strong job market, and he should expect to have a new job before too long.  This attorney had an excellent background, and employers should know about all of the craziness at LeClairRyan that precipitated this attorney being let go.

However, I couldn’t help but think that this attorney might be at a disadvantage when looking for work.  Surely, any reasonable person should know that an associate at a bankrupt law firm was not terminated because of job performance, but because of a number of external factors.  However, people may think that this attorney might have landed at another firm with a departing partner if their work was up to snuff or that this attorney otherwise had some ownership over the situation.

I faced a similar sentiment when I was laid off at the beginning of my career.  A little more than a year after I started practicing, I was laid off in a mass reduction of force along with dozens of other attorneys and staffers.  The layoffs were motivated by a number of external factors, including a major matter settling and economic issues with our firm.

However, even though I was laid off with dozens of other lawyers, and many articles were published about the troubles at our firm, I couldn’t help but feel that people thought I was responsible for my situation.  Based on the questions I received at interviews, I felt like attorneys held the belief that I could have avoided my fate if I had worked harder.  Despite any logic to the contrary, I felt that it was impossible to shake this flawed perception among legal professionals, and this made it difficult to get hired at other shops.

Another unfair issue with being laid off is that it places an indelible dark mark on your career.  Attorneys are oftentimes addicted to prestige, and hiring partners like to recruit people who are on an upward trajectory in their careers.  Getting laid off along the way, even if the attorney had nothing to do with this process, can put a lawyer at a disadvantage when compared to attorneys who were never laid off.

Many lawyers, especially those who practiced during the Great Recession, were laid off at some point or another, or know someone close to them that was.  Being laid off is a traumatic experience that leads to isolation, depression, and a number of negative outcomes.  Attorneys who are laid off from firms deserve kindness and understanding, since the are likely experiencing a difficult time in their lives.

As a result, it is important for people making hiring decisions to understand that many layoffs have absolutely nothing to do with an attorney’s work performance.  In most instances, there is nothing that an attorney could have done to avoid getting laid off, since external factors beyond the attorney’s control contributed to the layoff.  Hiring partners should not hold an associate liable for the bad decisions of senior partners or the choices of clients that likely motivated the reduction in force.  In addition, hiring staff should understand that being laid off is not a huge blemish on a legal career, and will not affect an associate’s performance at a new firm.

I wish everyone searching for work as a result of the LeClairRyan bankruptcy and other mass reductions in force the best of luck in finding new jobs.  Professionals within the legal industry should be compassionate to these individuals and should not unfairly judge applicants because they were laid off.

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.

* Uh, no collusion? In a lawsuit over the TRUST Act, Trump’s lawyers have accused congressional Democrats and New York state officials of colluding to expose the president’s financial information. [New York Law Journal]

* “You may recognize some of this. I hope I’ve improved it a little bit since you’ve last seen it.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg welcomed Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court by gifting to him the clerk manual that he was assigned to create for Justice Byron White while he was clerking, who later gave it to his successor, the Notorious RBG. [CNN]

* Was Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings politically motivated? Comments made by one of her lawyers reportedly seem to indicate that Ford spoke out to protect Roe. v. Wade. [Newsweek]

* “Being a lawyer is the most stressful yet boring job in the world. I’d never recommend it to anyone. Ever.” About half of attorneys working in U.K. Biglaw firms have experienced mental health issues like depression and stress due to their jobs. [Legal Week]

* “Can y’all play nice or do I have to attend these depositions?” A completely reasonable request from a judge after one of the lawyers on a case allegedly slapped another lawyer in the face before a prior deposition. [Texas Lawyer]

* Morrison & Foerster wants all of the employment records from the new firm of a former associate who’s anonymously for gender discrimination, claiming they’re relevant to her “negative reference” retaliation allegations. Sheesh… [Big Law Business]

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.

One wishes one could say “rest in peace”. One can only say, “may there be more peace for Zimbabwe’s people, now that Robert Gabriel Mugabe has retired permanently”. Zimbabwe’s former president has died, aged 95.

His failures are legion. They might start with the 1980s Gukurahundi massacres in Matabeleland and the Midlands, with perhaps 20 000 people killed. Next, too much welfare spending in the 1980s. Then crudely implemented structural adjustment programmes in the 1990s, laying the ground for angry war veterans and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), a strong labour union and civil society based opposition party.

In 1997 Mugabe handed out unbudgeted pensions to the war-vets and promised to really start the “fast track land reform” that got going in 2000, when the MDC threatened to defeat Zanu (PF) at the polls. That abrogation of property rights started the slide in the Zimbabwean dollar’s value.

From 1998 to 2003 Zimbabwe’s participation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s second war cost US$1 million a day, creating a military cabal used to getting money fast. Speedy money printing presses led to unfathomable hyperinflation and the end of Zimbabwe’s sovereign currency, still the albatross around the country’s neck.

In 2008, the MDC’s electoral victory was reversed with a presidential run-off when at least 170 opposition supporters were murdered. Hundreds more were beaten and chased from their homes. Even Mugabe’s regional support base could not stand for that, so he was forced to accept a transitional inclusive government with the MDC.

Over the next decade, Mugabe was unable to stop his party’s increasing faction fighting. His years of playing one group off against the other to favour himself finally wore too thin. When in early November 2017, at his wife Grace’s instigation, he fired his long-time lapdog Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa, the generals with whom he’d colluded for decades turned on him. A coup petit ensued and returned Mnangagwa from exile, soon to be elevated to the presidency and heavily indebted to his comrades.

Where did Mugabe gain his proclivity for factionalism? And how did he learn to speak the language all wanted to hear – only to make them realise they had been deluded in the end?

The beginning

Mugabe and many other Zimbabwean nationalists were jailed in 1964. Ian Smith was preparing for the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, and the first nationalist party had split into Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union and Ndabaningi Sithole’s Zanu. Mugabe had been Nkomo’s Publicity Secretary.

As far back as 1962, Mugabe was registering on the global scales: Salisbury’s resident British diplomat thought Mugabe was “a sinister figure” heading up a youthful “Zimbabwean Liberation Army … the more extreme wing of Zapu”.

But almost as soon as Mugabe was imprisoned, a man in her majesty’s employ travelled down from his advisory post in newly free Zambia to visit the prisoner. Dennis Grennan returned to Lusaka having promised to look after Mugabe’s wife Sarah, known as “Sally”. Grennan and people like Julius Nyerere’s British friend and assistant Joan Wicken played an important role in Mugabe’s rise.

The Zimbabwean nationalists emerged from Salisbury’s prisons late in 1974, as Portugal’s coup led to Angola and Mozambique emerging from colonialism into the Soviet orbit. The fifties generation of Zimbabwean nationalists were to participate in the Zambian and South African inspired détente exercise. This inspired much competition for Zanu’s leadership: Mugabe arrived in Lusaka after ousting Ndabaningi Sithole, Zanu’s first leader.

Samora Machel, freshly in Mozambique’s top office, wondered if Mugabe’s quick rise was due to a “coup in prison”. Herbert Chitepo’s March 1975 assassination  (which got many of Zanu’s leaders arrested and its army kicked out of Zambia) was only one marker of the many fissures in the fractious party that by 1980 would rule Zimbabwe.

In late 1975 the vashandi group emerged within the Zimbabwean People’s Army. Based in Mozambique’s guerrilla camps, they tried to forge unity between Zimbabwe’s two main nationalist armies and push a left-wing agenda. They were profoundly unsure of Mugabe’s suitability for leadership.

When Mugabe found his way to Mozambique also in late 1975, Machel put him under house arrest in Quelimane, far from the guerrilla camps. In January Grennan helped him to London to visit a hospitalised Sally. He made contacts around Europe and with a few London-based Maoists.

Soon after Mugabe’s return the young American congressman Stephen Solarz and the Deputy Head of the American embassy in Maputo, Johnnie Carson, wended their way to Quelimane. Mugabe wowed them.

Solarz and Carson reported back that Mugabe was “an impressive, articulate and extremely confident individual” with a “philosophical approach to problems and … well reasoned arguments”. He claimed to control the “people’s army”. Yet by January 1977, he persuaded Samora Machel to imprison the young advocates of unity with Zapu. His many reasons included their initial refusal to support him at a late 1976 conference in Geneva organised by the British, helped immeasurably by Henry Kissinger, the American Secretary of State.

At a hastily called congress in March 1977 to consecrate his ascension, Mugabe uttered his leitmotif: those appearing to attempt a change to the party’s leadership by “maliciously planting contradictions within our ranks” would be struck by the “the Zanu axe”.

This was Mugabe’s strategy, embedded at an early stage: tell foreign emissaries what they wanted to hear, use young radicals (or older allies) until their usefulness subsided, and then get rid of them. All the while he would balance the other forces contending for power in the party amid a general climate of fear, distrust, and paranoia.

Dealing with dissent

It is not certain if Margaret Thatcher knew about this side of Mugabe when they met less than a month after his April 1980 inauguration. He seemed most worried about how Joshua Nkomo’s Zapu – which he had dumped from the erstwhile “Patriotic Front”, and the violence against which had put Zimbabwe’s election in some doubt – was making life difficult for the new rulers. He warned that he might have “to act against them soon”.

In as much as Zapu was linked with the South African ANC and Thatcher and her colleagues tended to think the ANC was controlled by the South African Communist Party, Zapu intelligence chief Dumiso Dabengwa’s perspective might be more than conspiracy theory. Perhaps Thatcher’s wink and nudge was a green light for the anti-Soviet contingent to eliminate a regional threat. Gukurahundi followed. It was certainly the biggest blot on Mugabe’s career and created the biggest scar over Zimbabwe. The scar is still there, given the lack of any effort at reconcialitation, truth, or justice.

Four years later the ruling party’s first real congress since 1963 reviewed its history. Mugabe tore the Zipa/Vashandi group that had annoyed him eight years before to shreds. “Treacherous … counter-revolutionary … arms caching … dubbed us all zvigananda or bourgeois”. Thus it “became imperative for us to firmly act against them in defending the Party and the Revolution… We had all the trouble-makers detained”.

The great helmsman recounted the youthful dissenters’ arrest and repeated the axe phraseology.

But few saw these sides of Mugabe’s character soon enough; those who did were summarily shut up.

The end

After he’d been ousted, Mugabe could only look on in seeming despair over the ruination he had created. Sanctimonious as ever he wondered how his successor, current President Emmerson Mnangagwa, had become such an ogre. At his 95th birthday, February 21 2019, a few weeks after Mnangagwa’s troops had killed 17 demonstrators, raped as many women, and beaten hundreds more in the wake of his beleaguered finance minister’s methods to create “prosperity from austerity”, Mugabe mused to his absent successor:

We condemn the violence on civilians by soldiers … You can’t do without seeing dead bodies? What kind of a person are you? You feed on death?

He only had to look into his own history to see what kind of people he helped create.

Professor David Moore is based at the University of Johannesburg. This article first appeared on  The Conversation

ZIMBABWE – The family of former president Robert Mugabe says there’s no feud between the government and the family over where he will be buried.

Family spokesperson, Leo Mugabe, says they have been meetings with the government and everything is going according to plan.

“To say there is a feud is not correct, it’s not true. We’ve been meeting with government and everything has been very smooth. There’s understanding, there’s clarity on responsibilities and therefore there’s no feud whatsoever,” said Leo Mugabe.

He says the family and the chiefs in Zvimba will decide where the former president will be laid to rest.

“The chiefs in Zvimba still regard him as a chief and in terms of tradition they are the ones that determine where is he going to be buried, how is he going to be buried, the procedures that must be followed in his burial. This is a cultural thing and nobody can push the chiefs to divulge where they are going to bury [Mugabe],” he said.

Mugabe died in a Singapore hospital on Friday, aged 95.

His funeral is expected to take place on Sunday, 15 September.

There have been a number of books written on Robert Mugabe in his many leadership roles.  As a leader of a guerrilla movement/army, as a prime minister, as a president and even from a western perspective as a complicated/sophisticated dapper dictator.  And make no mistake, many more will be written about him.  As an ousted or disgraced long ruling repressive leader and also as a belatedly glorified Pan Africanist.

And it is the assumptions of future published perspectives on Mugabe’s long rule that are of interest. What I am however concerned with is the lived realities of Mugabe’s legacy.  And by legacy here I am not inferring something to be celebrated but more something to be understood.

In the aftermath of the coup that toppled him, Mugabe has largely been holed up in his Borrowdale mansion and giving the impression of a bitter self-righteousness.  He emerged publicly at least twice.  The first time to endorse the mainstream opposition presidential candidate in a long drawn statement and questions and answer session with the press. The second time to vote for the latter in Highfields, Harare.

I am sure he has had other interviews and publicized conversations with visiting leaders from African countries.  Or his wife as his spokesperson has occasionally put out the same.  Together with his still many apologists and runners either in remnants of the G40 faction he spawned or on social media and in the mainstream opposition.

Beyond the immediacy of his ouster from power, we are however reeling from the effects of his leadership of the state.  And there is little that is positive that can be objectively discerned from it or assumed to be as a result of his own individual leadership effort.

Having ridden on the noble but painful cause and struggle that was the liberation struggle, Mugabe managed in his at least 37 years in power, to undermine the values and principles that the liberation struggle was motivated by.

While conveniently embracing socialism as his then ruling party’s ideological foundation, he was to actively undermine it in practice.  Foregoing the democratic values of socialism, he went on to attempt a violent clampdown on his then main opposition rivals in the form of Joshua Nkomo’s Pf Zapu under the pretext of preventing a civil war in the southern parts of the country.  An attempt that has come to be infamously called ‘Gukurahundi’.

After co-opting the same opposition, Mugabe was to try to establish a ‘one party state’ which was eventually rejected via the activism of his former colleagues in the struggle but also due to the fact that it was no longer popular in Southern Africa after Nyerere had abandoned the same in Tanzania.

What was to prove colossal in his intentions at retaining power with global western power endorsement, was his economic about turn to embrace neoliberalism/ capitalism as advised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

Where he had previously had some sort of obligation to collective and people centered economics he abandoned this to begin his worship at the altar of free market economics.  Contrary to the values of the liberation struggle.  And this was the beginning of the unraveling of our national consciousness as had been established by the liberation struggle.  It quite literally became about Mugabe and his hold on power while serving the interests of global capital.

It was labour that was to try and rein in Mugabe’s neoliberalism by first of all recalling the values of the liberation struggle and using the same to challenge an elitist political economy.   The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) and its allies in the students and womens’ movements as well as human rights focused civil society organisations went on to establish what was then referred to as a working people’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Mugabe in populist turn decided to by embark on what we officially know to be the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP. All in a vainglorious and individualist attempt at retaining the loyalty of war veterans and the peasantry.  While at the same time echoing long abandoned principles and values that had motivated the liberation struggle.

It worked, albeit briefly.  Mugabe’s neoliberal economy could not sustain the FTLRP and it expectedly reeled under not only sanctions but also the fact that its populism was never going to make it revolutionary.

That it happened and has been said by Mnangagwa’s government to be irreversible does not make it any less violent or populist in serving Mugabe’s intention at retaining power.

Even by the time he was forced by SADC to form an inclusive government with the opposition, Mugabe’s particular version of individualism in politics would not allow him to even consider his own succession.  In his own party nor for posterity.

And where we fast forward to his ouster from power, his particular streak of individual political stubbornness eventually led him to be hoist by his own petard. He quite literally fell on his own sword. Even if he didn’t see it coming.

It is a combination of Mugabe’s inability to see into the future or beyond himself and his deliberate abandonment of liberation struggle socialist democratic values as accompanied by neoliberal/free market economics that led Zimbabwe to its current parlous state.

The end effect of this on our own society has been catastrophic.  Not only just in relation to our one time critical national consciousness as informed by the liberation struggle but also to our own individual perceptions of what should be a progressive society.

Mugabe’s long rule has the unenviable legacy of having created a highly individualized, materialistic and populist society.  One that perceives progress by the day and rarely considers collective posterity.  And with a default admiration of neoliberalism and ideological austerity.  Mugabe, via his ruling party Zanu Pf have taken us into the trap of ‘millennial capitalism’ where a combination of free market economics, superstition (religion), gambling and individualism have stymied the collective national consciousness.

There are many ways to regain a critical collective national consciousness.  The first step to doing so is to identify what caused its demise.  Historically and in the contemporary, that begins at identifying Mugabe’s real legacy and role in getting us to where we are as a country. Where we are saddled with a nasty/violent, materialist and populist individualism.

This article was first published in April 2019 on http://takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com/  

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