Author: TSA Press

This after the finance minister said fuel was considerably cheaper than in neighbouring countries.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa announced the biggest fuel price hike in January — a 150 percent increase — which sparked deadly protests by financially struggling Zimbabweans that left more than a dozen people dead after an army clampdown.

The Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority said late on Friday that effective Saturday, petrol would cost 6.10 Zimbabwe dollars ($0.70) a litre, up from 5.26, while the price of diesel had been increased 13 percent to 5.84 Zimbabwe dollars.

Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube was quoted in a daily newspaper as saying he would be happy if the price of fuel was equivalent to $1 per litre.

While Ncube wants fuel prices to reflect import costs, many Zimbabweans can barely afford to pay them when the unemployment exceeds 80 percent and the entry-level wage for a government employee is about $49 a month — enough to buy a car tyre.

But with no sign of an end to rolling power cuts in the southern African country, demand for fuel has risen as businesses resort to more expensive diesel-powered generators.

Analysts say this is increasing the price of doing business, with companies likely to pass the cost to consumers, who are already grappling with inflation of nearly 100 percent.

There were long queues at service stations selling fuel early on Saturday.

This is among a raft of measures meant to stem the theft of gems, the Zimbabwe Independent learnt this week.

As revealed in February, substantial quantities of diamond ore were stolen from the ZCDC in January by a gang of armed men in millitary gear which overpowered the company’s security staff and held them hostage before escaping with valuable gemstones.

The January robbery was followed by yet another heist at the ZCDC in March, where a gang of armed robbers, in a similar style, overpowered the security staff in the mining area, and escaped with precious ore. The ZCDC said on both accounts the criminals only got away with “valueless” dump tailings.

In the aftermath of the robberies, the ZCDC board subsequently sacked its top executives, led by the then chief executive Morris Mpofu. Mpofu has since been dragged to the courts to answer allegations of corruption, specifically that he approved diamond sales to a blacklisted dealership.

The ZCDC’s acting chief executive officer Roberto di Pretto said that the mining firm would bolster its security system through the adoption of automated technology, while evaluating the assets of its employees, through a “lifestyle audit”.

“We are looking into the process of automation of the value chain which includes the sort-house and all other highly sensitive areas,” De Pretto said, noting that suspects implicated in the two heists were apprehended and appeared in court.

“We are also carrying out multi-layered extensive surveillance and thorough vetting of employees including lifestyle audits. The security around Chiadzwa is being enhanced through additional technological systems with a view to raise our security to world-class standards around the clock.”

The heists, which were preceded by the massive management shake-up at the state-owned mining enterprise, saw the 69th session of the United Nations (UN) plenary resolving to deliberate on whether Zimbabwean diamonds should be classified as conflict gems during the inter-governmental organisation’s 74th general assembly meeting agenda in March.

The meeting, bringing together heads of state from the UN’s 192 member countries, is scheduled to run from September 17-24 this year in New York, United States.

The development follows intense lobbying by a grouping of international civil society organisations affiliated to the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) urging the UN to review its definition of conflict diamonds in order to encompass Zimbabwe’s gemstones.

Zimbabwe will be barred from trading on the formal market, if the move by a consortium of civil society organisations sails through.

Under KPCS rules governing the international trade in the precious mineral, diamond mines must have tight security.

The robbery incidents add impetus to calls for the KPCS to widen the definition of conflict diamonds to also cover those being mined in Zimbabwe, which various interest groups say are being used to finance President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s violent suppression of dissent.

Currently, the organisations feel the definition of conflict diamonds — that they are gemstones which originate from areas controlled by forces or factions opposed to legitimate and internationally recognised governments, and are used to fund military action in opposition to those governments, or in contravention of the decisions of the UN Security Council — is inadequate.

This year, the ZCDC has conducted three diamond auctions with receipts from cumulative sales yet to be consolidated to determine how much the country has generated from the marketing of the precious mineral. Another auction sale will “soon” be conducted this year.

ZCDC, which was established in 2017 following the controversial termination of licences held by seven entities operating in Chiadzwa, is currently sitting on a 3.2 million carat stockpile.

You may think online profiles are relegated to two places: LinkedIn, for your business endeavors, and Facebook, for your family and friends (read: dopamine fix). In reality, however, the web offers so much more for attorneys in terms of profile-creating, brand-building, and business-driving options. Click through for three goals that you – and your firm – should always keep in mind when designing online profiles.

As the student walked to his usual seat in the seminar, which was directly in my line of vision, the message on his flaming red hat was unmistakable: “MAGA,” or “Make American Great Again.” …

I was in the first year of a two-year fellowship as a visiting assistant professor of law. Moreover, as an African-American male, I was one of an exceedingly small number of students, faculty and staff of color in the law school. From my (progressive) perspective as a black man living in the increasingly polarized political climate that is America, MAGA is an undeniable symbol of white supremacy and hatred toward certain nonwhite groups. …

[I]n that moment, I was unsure whether the student was directing a hateful message toward me or if he merely lacked decorum and was oblivious to how his hat might be interpreted by his black law professor. I presumed it was the former. As the student sat there directly in front of me, his shiny red MAGA hat was like a siren spewing derogatory racial obscenities at me for the duration of the one hour and fifteen-minute class.

— Jeffrey Omari, a visiting assistant professor in the Center for Civil and Human Rights at Gonzaga University School of Law, in a recent commentary piece published in the ABA Journal where he described his reaction to seeing one of his students wearing a MAGA hat. To break the tension, Omari told the student, “I like your hat.” According to Omari, the student donned a mocking grin and thanked him. Omari believes that the law student was attempting to “intimidate and/or racially antagonize” him.

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

More than a decade ago, I was visiting family in Italy when early one morning I checked my email. It was all “pull” mobile email at that time, which meant that I had to open my email client, push a button to check email, then wait about 30 seconds where messages I wrote before were sent, and the new messages were downloaded to my phone. It was slow by today’s standards, but I still remember being amazed I could send and check email remotely.

I had received an email with an urgent request from a client in California who needed a document “that night” (it was maybe 11 p.m. in California, 2 a.m. in New York, and 8 a.m. where I was in Italy). Our firm was even smaller then, and I had no hope of finding someone promptly to find and send the document. But I was on the streets of Rome. What could I do?

Well, I was somehow able to “remote in” from my Palm Treo “smartphone” to our physical server in the office, find the document, then email it from my workstation in New York — all while standing in front of an Italian caffe (they call them bars) as two older guys argued, in Italian, about how bad the Italian national team was.

It was the first time I remember realizing how you truly can be an advocate for your clients no matter where they are and no matter where you are in the world.

Fifteen years or more later, any lawyer who doesn’t realize that, and who doesn’t ensure that she can be a mobile trial lawyer wherever she is, simply is not going to be able to fight for her clients the way she should.

What does that mean, to be a mobile trial lawyer? Basic mobile phone and email is obvious, but I perhaps also obviously mean more than that. My colleagues and I at our firm know that it means having mobile editing programs on our phones and tablets so we can review and edit our papers. We have Word and similar programs on our mobile devices. We can access any documents or the hordes of data we maintain in our (triple backed up) cloud server from wherever we are in the world.

Younger lawyers do tend to be better about this, and most lawyers do know much of this. But I’m routinely surprised at hearing how lawyers don’t know how to remote into their office databases, or that they can’t write a document on an iPad, or “need paper” such that reviewing and editing documents on a tablet is verboten.

Those lawyers aren’t simply falling behind in being the best lawyers they can be. They are not as available to work for their clients as they should be.

There needs to be a balance between work and non-work, and I’m not suggesting you actually do work wherever you go at any time. But to fight and win for our clients we trial lawyers have to be ready to do exactly that.

John Balestriere is an entrepreneurial trial lawyer who founded his firm after working as a prosecutor and litigator at a small firm. He is a partner at trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at john.g.balestriere@balestrierefariello.com.

The sober curious movement is taking off. When I first heard the term, my baby-boomer, 12-step mentality was to immediately associate it with “alcoholics” wondering what it is like to get sober. I was way off target. It is a lifestyle movement being embraced by millennials at an ever-increasing rate.  A demographic in the legal profession that has a problem drinking rate of over 30 percent. You read that right. Over one in three. As someone who has not taken a drink in over 12 years as a result of problem drinking, I do not think I am the best person to comment on the movement. I reached out to someone with more recent and relevant experience. Here are her thoughts.

Sober curious.  Curious what that means?  So was I when I first heard it.  The simplest definition that I have found is this.  “In a nutshell, identifying as sober curious means you know from experience that alcohol doesn’t make you feel great and you don’t drink it often, but you’re not willing to put an all-or-nothing label on yourself.”

I had not heard the term when I first started living it.  I love to run, and I was listening to the Spartan Up! Podcast when they had an episode with the founder of One Year No Beer.  OYNB has a simple premise — you don’t have to be an alcoholic to choose not to drink, and if you give it up for a year, you will feel amazing.

My first reaction was a properly British “pish posh,” as I was not ready to give up my nightly beer.  But given my fitness goals, I had started giving it up regularly for a short period before racing events.  I sat with the idea for a while and eventually started growing the length of time that I went without a drink.  It was amazing — I actually did feel better, despite my initial reluctance.

But then, it was time for another legal conference.  And the pressure.  Finish checking in on the first night of a conference, and where has everyone gone, to the bar of course. Walk in, and offers of drinks (or the drinks themselves) pop up left and right.

I am no teetotaler; I’m an Irish girl who loves a good strong beer.  But there is a serious issue when we have a profession that we already know is stressful, that we already know suffers widely from problem drinking and high levels of depression, then encourages and cultivates a drinking culture without any counterbalance.  The options as I see them are to participate in the ritual, stand out like a sore thumb (and make everyone think you’re an alcoholic) by publicly abstaining and drinking nothing but water, or stay home.

Megan Zavieh

The pressure to make these choices starts in law school, often amid brutal peer pressure to fit in.  My law school tenure was unique to some degree. I entered at 18 years old and was not legal drinking age until the final semester of my third year.

The 1L class regularly congregated at local watering holes for TGITs (Thank God It’s Thursday). I wanted to fit in and felt intense pressure to attend. My age was never a barrier to either my classmates or the bouncers.  Drinking culture and peer pressure don’t care about age.

It seemed that every law firm that came to court students threw a cocktail party, and every student club trying to attract members hosted an open bar.

In my experience since graduation, the Biglaw social networking culture still revolves around drinking, making it easy for summer associates to assume that everyone drinks every night. They are not too far off.

Firms love to keep associates inside the office. The firm I worked at held networking evenings with on-site alcohol (from which we were expected to return to our desks and continue working).  I remember raiding the kitchen with some other associates one ultra-late night looking for a wine bottle opener.  We drank while cite-checking a brief.

This troubling culture also extends to conferences.  The booze flows shockingly free.  I have even seen a hangover bar at morning sessions of a legal conference — complete with Emergen-C, Lifesavers, and coffee.

In attending these events, I have learned that I am not the only one with reluctance to drink.  Friends and colleagues who saw me order water often boldly started conversations with me, asking if I was pregnant or had a drinking problem (amazing what being less-than-sober will do to your filter when talking to professional colleagues).  Once I assured them I was neither pregnant nor an alcoholic, many opened up that drinking also made them feel awful, and they wish there were less of it in the legal culture.  Sober conversations at morning events included the same topic.

How can we begin to bring the cultural shift of the sober curious movement to our legal life?

I would like to see the growing sober curious movement start to take hold within the legal profession, offering a far better alternative — a new normal where events look much as they do now, but there is room on the menu for non-alcoholic options that take the stigma out of choosing not to drink.  Let the sober curious among us have a place at the proverbial bar.

1. Talk about it openly. Instead of the conversation being a heavy-handed “we need to stop drinking in this profession” message that falls on deaf ears, we need to open conversations into choosing to drink little or not at all as an issue of health.  Look how easily we talk about food allergies now; no reason we cannot be talking about a choice not to drink just as openly.
2. Remove the focus from alcohol. Events that tend to get very alcohol-heavy could be just as good with the main focus being some other aspect of them.  Clio’s Cloud Conference is a great example.  The Clio After Dark event is alcohol-heavy, but it is also a big showcase for Clio’s Reisman Awards and often for the venue that they choose to host the event.  The company really does an excellent job of encouraging attendance for reasons other than the alcohol.  Of course, attendees do manage to often take the party elsewhere across town and into the streets for lots of after-party drinking.
3. Offer the sober curious a drink. If you have ever been the one choosing not to drink at one of these events, you probably noticed that your options were water or soda.  I don’t drink soda, so my choice is usually water.  For those consuming alcohol, there is often an extensive menu of specialty cocktails, sometimes themed to the event and sounding really enticing.  The sober curious would love comparable mocktail menu. Water gets really dull and is very obvious.
4. Start early with sober curious events. This movement really needs to hit the law schools and law firm summer associate and new associate events.  Start making sober curious a viable option early, when currently excessive drinking is the cultural norm.
5. Offer early morning activities that are genuinely can’t-miss. Legal conferences have gotten onboard the wellness train by offering events like group runs and yoga at hours like 6:30 or 7:00 a.m.  They are fantastic but sparsely attended.  If early morning events catered to the broader audience who would otherwise stay out late excessively drinking, there might be more incentive to skip the whiskey.

Given the culture around drinking and the overall societal interest in sober curious, it’s time for the legal profession to open its eyes to the possibility that maybe not everyone is looking to drink, and offer more options for those who choose to abstain.

Megan Zavieh is the creator and author of “The Playbook: The California Bar Discipline System Practice Guide.” At Zavieh Law, she focuses her practice exclusively on attorney ethics, providing representation to attorneys facing disciplinary action and guidance on questions of legal ethics. Megan is admitted to practice in California, Georgia, New York and New Jersey, as well as in multiple federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court. She podcasts on Lawyers Gone Ethical, blogs on ethics at California State Bar Defense and tweets @ZaviehLaw.

Brian Cuban (@bcuban) is The Addicted Lawyer. Brian is the author of the Amazon best-selling book, The Addicted Lawyer: Tales Of The Bar, Booze, Blow & Redemption (affiliate link). A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, he somehow made it through as an alcoholic then added cocaine to his résumé as a practicing attorney. He went into recovery April 8, 2007. He left the practice of law and now writes and speaks on recovery topics, not only for the legal profession, but on recovery in general. He can be reached at brian@addictedlawyer.com.

The death by suicide of Sidley Austin partner Gabe MacConaill continues to rock the world of Biglaw. Not only did he die in a dramatic fashion — his body was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the firm’s parking garage — but after his death, his widow, Joanna Litt, wrote a provocative op-ed titled “Big Law Killed My Husband.” That one-two punch put a lot of attention on the stresses of Biglaw and the mental health and services available in the industry.

Now MacConaill’s death has become part of a larger conversation. Financial Times has written an article about mental health issues in the workplace, and MacConaill is featured in the story. The details of the stress MacConaill was under before his death are familiar to those who know his story — and  anyone who’s spent time in Biglaw will recognize the outlines — and are rehashed for this new audience. He was working on the massive Mattress Firm bankruptcy case and other partners in his department had recently left, pushing him into a leadership role and leaving MacConaill without the support of partners. In prepping to file the Mattress Firm bankruptcy in Delaware, MacConaill worked himself to exhaustion, going to the ER with cardiac symptoms but when there were early indications his health issues were caused by dehydration, he left the hospital without being seen by a doctor so he could return to work. As FT reports, that was a critical warning sign:

That evening, Litt called one of MacConaill’s close colleagues. “I said, ‘My husband’s in crisis. What do I do?’” she remembers. “And she told me, ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘Who do I call?’ She said, ‘I don’t know.’ ” Litt arranged a mobile IV to come to their home, give MacConaill fluids and prepare him for the final stretch of the case. He then flew to Delaware to file. When he returned to LA, he called in sick from work, stayed at home and stopped answering his work emails.

On Sunday morning, MacConaill told Litt he was going into the office. A few hours later she received a call from [Dan Clivner, managing partner of Sidley Austin’s Los Angeles office]. They had found MacConaill’s body in the Sidley Austin parking lot, next to his car.

Dan Clivner, managing partner of Sidley Austin’s Los Angeles office, told FT that it was MacConaill’s responsibility to come forward and ask for help when he was overwhelmed:

“When you call in with something like cancer or stress, in a discreet and professional way the firm will respond,” he says. “On the first day of every orientation that I’ve done for decades, I say, ‘You have to raise your hand.’ In a place like this, you have to be able to say, ‘I haven’t done deals, I’d like to do deals,’ or ‘I’d be interested in travel,’ or ‘I’m overworked.’ You have to trust somebody.”

And, despite the criticism Litt has leveled at the firm, Clivner stands by the firm’s response to MacConail’s death:

“Simply put, I’m exceptionally proud of the way the firm handled the announcement and communication of his death without stigma, without embarrassment, without hiding it,” says Clivner. “They don’t teach you this in law school and for myself personally, and for the firm, we did it right.”

But in the FT article, Litt doubles down on holding the firm to account for the events that led up to her husband’s death, and is angry at the firm’s lack of a robust response since MacConaill died:

In the months since, she feels Sidley Austin’s response has been minimal. “The two managing partners of the bankruptcy division did not call me, email me, send me a letter,” she says. “I still haven’t heard from either partner. I also didn’t hear from the slightly senior partner who Gabe was working Mattress Firm with. None of them.”

Clivner says he is proud of the firm’s wellness program, though he admits it hasn’t change since MacConaill’s death. But FT also spoke with an anonymous source at the firm who agreed that whatever wellness program the firm has in place, folks at Sidley aren’t comfortable availing themselves of it:

“There are resources available, of course,” says a former colleague. “But there is not a culture or feeling of safety right now in that set of offices. You can have resources in place, but unless you have the right culture, people aren’t going to feel safe using them or approaching someone to ask for help.”

Litt titled her op-ed “Big Law Killed My Husband,” not the firm killed my husband, and that rings true because whatever the particulars of what led to MacConaill’s death, the attitudes are industry wide. Too often the demands of the profession mask real mental health issues, and the overachievers drawn to the law don’t feel able to avail themselves of these necessary services. The stigma is something we see throughout the legal industry, and is what needs to be dismantled to prevent more of these tragedies.

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).