Author: TSA Press

When I was doing stuff in the rap world, it was eat what you kill. I learned how to hustle, and I learned to go out and get something for myself. It was very difficult. Any revenue I generated was a direct result of me doing it and me figuring it out. Sometimes you fall flat on your face when you’re learning how to do something, and sometimes you have success. I went through those processes. There were a lot of my classmates who were younger—I don’t want to say law school chewed them up and spit them out—but I saw some people have a change of heart or realize, “I don’t want to be in law school after all.” But for me, it confirmed that that life progression I had made was correct. It’s kind of a maturity thing.

— Roosh Williams, a recent graduate of the USC Gould School of Law, commenting on how his experience in the rap world helped him during law school. Prior to pursuing a legal education, Williams was a well-known rapper in Houston, Texas, and even cracked the Top 40 on the iTunes rap chart back in 2015. Williams plans to practice entertainment law after he passes the bar exam, and he already has a job lined up with a firm in Los Angeles.

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.

I’ve been to a lot of IP conferences over the years and have found some to be more useful than others. Still, at each one, I have learned something about IP, gained a valuable contact, or gained professional insights. Ultimately, I’ve always believed that in any endeavor, you get back what you put in and this maxim holds true for conferences. Here are seven tips for making the most out of IP-related conferences.

1) Choose your conferences wisely

After five conferences in eight weeks (four in the last five weeks), I am just about conferenced out. While not all the conferences I went to centered around IP, most had some relevance to the subject. Fortunately, I don’t have any more conferences on my calendar until the fall, but if I had to redo my summer schedule, I would have given more thought to which ones I attended (some required my attendance, others did not).

In choosing which conferences to attend, it’s important to prioritize. No one has unlimited time and resources to fly all over the country, so pick the ones that are most important to you. For some, particularly students and young professionals, going to broad IP conferences where you can have exposure to many types of IP specializations will be better. For others who are already deeply invested in a particular specialty, going to more focused conferences may be a better use of time. Pick conferences that have topics and speakers of interest.

If you’re invited to speak at a conference, find out ahead of time who else is on your panel and what the other sessions are. That can help you determine whether to accept the invitation.

2) Do your research

Following from #1, doing a little research on the conference is essential. A conference that is targeted to in-house counsel who do IP as part of, but not a majority of, their job duties, will be significantly different than one targeted on IP specialists. Likewise, one designed for academia will have vastly different programming than one for practitioners.

Additionally, it’s helpful to know what programs are on the agenda and who the speakers are ahead of time. Personally, I like to attend conferences where panels have a diversity of viewpoints — creators, rightholders, users — as well as diversity of speakers. While “manels” (and all white manels, at that) aren’t limited to the IP space, I’ve been to more than enough conferences where the lack of diversity is the first thought that springs to mind. It’s important to have diversity of viewpoints as I have no interest in attending conferences that serve as echo chambers and offer no true rigor or competing views. I also firmly believe that racial and gender diversity is fundamental and provides for better panels.

Some conferences offer pre-reading or have slides up ahead of time, which is very useful in preparing. Looking up the speakers ahead of time can help you determine what thoughts they have on the subject. You can often find YouTube videos of past speeches as well, which can give you an idea of their presentation styles and how much depth they go into.

3) Plan your conference schedule

Some of my favorite conferences unfortunately have competing programming. Sometimes, I want to attend three different sessions that are happening simultaneously. By doing advance research, you can figure out which speakers you’re most interested in. You can see if slides are up ahead of time to determine which sessions to attend and which to skip. Don’t automatically get sucked in by a catchy title! Some panels and sessions have what appear to be interesting titles, but the actual subject matter is dry or the speakers are hard to follow. If you’re an introvert, plan for breaks as well. Personally, I love the energy from conferences, but some of my colleagues feel drained by back-to-back sessions. If you fall into this bucket, give yourself the grace for self-care instead of feeling the pressure to attend every session and networking event.

4) Seek outside meetings ahead of time

Personally, I often find the highest value not in the programming of the actual conferences, but in the one-on-one, face-to-face interactions. Having been in the field for some time, I know that at any given conference, I’ll run into people who I’ve worked with before but live in different cities. To the extent possible, I find out who else is attending and try to meet up for coffee or dinner to catch up and learn about new projects or developments. While in the digital era it’s certainly easy to exchange emails or even participate in video conferencing, but nothing beats face-to-face communication. My own conference schedules fill up fairly quickly, so plan early if you can. When I was just starting out, I would often just introduce myself at the conference itself, but if there was someone I was particularly interested in meeting, it never hurts to send a cold email in advance. The worst that can happen is that the person ignores you, in which case you’ll still have the opportunity to introduce yourself at the conference.

5) Ask questions

Most panels have a Q&A session for the audience. Having a question prepared — because you’ve done your conference research, right? — can make it much easier to go up to the microphone and engage (thoughtful comments are also welcome, since most speakers will respond to comments). I like questions for two reasons. First, if you’re thinking about this issue, you’re probably not the only one. Plus, it gives you a bit of exposure and others may seek you out to follow up with you afterward. Additionally, audience questions are a gift to the speakers and moderators. I certainly feel there is a certain awkwardness when no one has any questions. Was the presentation too boring? Was anyone even paying attention? Finally, asking questions helps you stay engaged. Just don’t be a microphone hog.

6) Introduce yourself to speakers and attendees

Don’t be shy in introducing yourself to speakers. Tell them what you appreciated about their presentation or ask them to expand on a certain point. Ask for advice on a particular topic, including career advice. Ask if you can follow up with them. The Q&A portion is often not long enough or the conversation you want to have might diverge from the presentation topic. Making the most of IP conferences (or any conferences, really) means taking advantage of the great talent there. I’ve made numerous connections networking at conferences. And, don’t forget, it’s not just the speakers who can provide valuable insights and connections — attendees are there for a reason, so introduce yourself to others in the audience, make small talk at lunch, ask people you know for introductions. Take advantage of being at a conference in person.

7) Make time for those who want to meet you

Finally, I suggest making time for those who might want to meet you. This is a bit of a pay-it-forward moment, but if you’re a young practitioner, there may be law students who want advice. While I do like to have some meetings scheduled ahead of time, I often meet people at conferences who I want to have a more in-depth conversation with — or someone will introduce themselves to me and ask if I have time to chat. I am so grateful to those who make time for me and am more than happy to try to do the same for others.

Krista L. Cox is a policy attorney who has spent her career working for non-profit organizations and associations. She has expertise in copyright, patent, and intellectual property enforcement law, as well as international trade. She currently works for a non-profit member association advocating for balanced copyright. You can reach her at kristay@gmail.com.

In the long arc of history, when an insular racial minority seeks to rule unchallenged over a larger racial majority, the polity devolves into unrest and war. That’s the lesson of colonialism, that’s the lesson of Rwanda. Racial minorities cannot indefinitely wield political and legal power without giving the larger population a fair chance at representation and legal protections. A political system is not high school, it cannot indefinitely survive in a state where the few people who wear the right jersey dominate over the many who wear different colors.

A polity can’t survive that way in the long term, at least. In the short-to-intermediate term, it can survive just fine. It is that short-term thinking that animates not just Chief Justice John Roberts and the rest of the conservatives on the Supreme Court, it’s also what animates Donald Trump and his legion of white supremacist supporters. Left unchallenged and unrevoked, Roberts’s decision today in Runcho v. Common Cause (a consolidated case looking at political gerrymandering in North Carolina and Maryland) will lead to violence. It will lead to violence just as surely as Dred Scott v. Sanford, decided in 1857, led to the outbreak of violence in 1860.

But the timing will be more forgiving than in Dred Scott, and Roberts likely theorizes he’ll be dead or overturned before the hot war he here invites convulses the country.

The problem Roberts (specifically) and white people (generally) face is that they are losing their numeric majority in this country. Most people now living will live to see America become a majority minority country. That demographic reality scares the crap out of some white people, mainly the ones who vote Republican. That white people are frightened is an empirical fact. Why they’re frightened is up for some debate. My view, for what it’s worth, is that white people have a habit of projecting their worst instincts onto everybody else. It’s hard for them to imagine being nonwhite, so they imagine that all nonwhite people would act like them, given the slightest chance. Sometimes that makes them think that we all secretly want to be like or marry Becky. In this context it makes them think that nonwhites won’t be coming for reparations, we’ll be coming for retribution.

It’s an irrational and unfounded fear, but the white people I’m talking about don’t listen to me no way. They’re afraid and they’re not about to take their diminished numerical status lying down. So they proceed to defend themselves from this browning threat in two ways.

One is the Trump way. It’s best embodied by the brutal ethnic cleansing he has set this country upon. Of course his white supporters are excited to see the Trump administration brutalize children; it’s the children’s fault, to their mind, that white people might not be numerically decisive anymore.

But that’s the stupid way. You can’t deport or kill enough brown people to make the white numbers hold up, unless you are willing to industrialize the terror. Thankfully, as of now, there just aren’t enough white people who are willing to go along with that.

So, as a backup for when Trump’s pogroms fail, we have the second way. That’s the Federalist Society’s way. The goal of the Federalist Society is not to exclude nonwhite people from the country — I mean, they’ll go along with that but they know that’s not really sufficient — it’s to limit the legal and political power of nonwhite people, so that even with a numerical advantage they can’t wield significant power. Thanks to Mitch McConnell, and the vestigial Electoral College bestowed upon us by earlier white supremacist rulers, that way has been far more successful than all of the terror tactics Trump and Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller have been able to dream up.

It is in that context, the protection of white rule even as a minority population, that we must understand John Roberts’s decision in the gerrymandering case. On its face, his ruling is a Kafkaesque nightmare that would appear merely misguided or ignorant. Roberts holds that political gerrymanders are non-justicible political questions. Instead, he thinks the political branches must decide how much gerrymandering is “too much.” The obvious problem with that is if the political process producers a gerrymander that is wholly unfair to one side or the other, than there is no political way to redress the situation. As Agent Smith might say: “What good is a phone call, when you are unable to speak, because I’ve changed the code and mapped your voice out of existence?”

Roberts’s decision is that his court and NO court can even weigh in on whether a “political” gerrymander is unconstitutional, which is actually worse than ruling that the political gerrymanders in front of him were constitutional. It makes literally every gerrymander that can be successfully argued as “political” not only legal, but unreviewable. That’s what makes it so dangerous. It’s one thing to say that “you have no rights to your vote in this case,” but Roberts is saying, “you have no rights to your vote if it’s gerrymandered away.” When you are being oppressed, and when you can’t even appeal to a higher authority, that’s when fights break out.

Roberts must know that his result is trash, so we have to look at the reason for that result. And as he explains it in his majority opinion, you can see the fear of minority status:

Partisan gerrymandering claims rest on an instinct that groups with a certain level of political support should enjoy a commensurate level of political power and influence. Explicitly or implicitly, a districting map is alleged to be unconstitutional because it makes it too difficult for one party to translate statewide support into seats in the legislature. But such a claim is based on a “norm that does not exist” in our electoral system—“statewide elections for representatives along party lines.” Bandemer, 478 U. S., at 159 (opinion of O’Connor, J.).

Partisan gerrymandering claims invariably sound in a desire for proportional representation. As Justice O’Connor put it, such claims are based on “a conviction that the greater the departure from proportionality, the more suspect an apportionment plan becomes.” Ibid. “Our cases, however, clearly foreclose any claim that the Constitution requires proportional representation or that legislatures in reapportioning must draw district lines to come as near as possible to allocating seats to the contending parties in proportion to what their anticipated statewide vote will be.” Id., at 130 (plurality opinion). See Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U. S. 55, 75–76 (1980) (plurality opinion) (“The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does not require proportional representation as an imperative of political organization.”).

You see it, right? The sneer at the “instinct that groups with a certain level of political support should enjoy a commensurate level of political power and influence.” It sounds like he’s writing a defense of majoritarian rights, but he’s not. Gerrymandering is not about the protection of majoritarian rights, it’s about the promotion of minority interests over and above what would be achieved from math-based geometry. As white people lose their numerical grip on the country, it will be these gerrymanders, the one Roberts refuses to let courts review, that will be the basis of white control in various states and in Congress, while the anachronistic “compromise” of two senators per state will do the work in the Senate and in presidential elections.

You can also see Roberts’s ultimate intent by which kind of gerrymandering he still wants the courts to be able to strike down. Political gerrymanders are unjusticiable, according to Roberts, but “racial” gerrymanders are not:

Unlike partisan gerrymandering claims, a racial gerrymandering claim does not ask for a fair share of political power and influence, with all the justiciability conundrums that entails. It asks instead for the elimination of a racial classification.

Well, that’s one way of putting it. Of course Mr. “Stop discriminating on the basis of race” Roberts here thinks that the goal of reviewing racial gerrymanders is the “elimination of racial classification.” But, ANOTHER way of looking at “racial” gerrymandering is: trying to ensure non-white representation in Congress when the white majority would rather you not have it. See, racial gerrymanders can be good, from the perspective of representation, or can be bad. You have to REVIEW IT to know. And Roberts is all here for that kind of review, because striking down gerrymanders that ensure black or Latino people have an opportunity to choose their own representatives is something that Roberts (and Clarence Thomas) desperately want to strike down.

The way Roberts has it set up, if Democrats want to make sure there are some districts where nonwhite representatives are likely to get elected, he can strike it down as an illegal “racial” gerrymander. But if Republicans want to move people around so that no nonwhite people are likely to be elected, no court can review it because it’s a “political” gerrymander.

And, that is exactly the way you’d set it up if your ultimate goal was to preserve white supremacy even in the face of minority status.

His plan will work, for a time, until it doesn’t. But one day, there will be a majority nonwhite population which is sick of being subjected to the rule of the white minority without fair representation. And when that day comes, y’all better hope that nonwhite people don’t act like white Americans have acted in the past when faced with taxation without representation.

Runcho v. Common Cause [Supreme Court]

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.

By November 2016 when the 2 Bond note was introduced to be followed by the 5 Bond note a month later, the USD effectively disappeared.

At first, withdrawals were half-bond, half-USD, and thereafter subsequently dwindled until they were all bonds. Interestingly to note was that Bond and USD withdrawals were done separately.

The Bond withdrawals were done using a withdrawal slip while the USD withdrawal was done using the ATM card. Later on, all this disappeared and everything was collated together into bond notes. For good measure, the Bond and USD was pegged at 1:1 so that it appeared natural for one to buy using a USD10 and above to be changed using the Bond.

However, under little circumstances could one get a USD change having bought using a Bond note.

This was daylight robbery.

Later on, supermarkets were seen hoarding the USD and slowly but surely, the USD disappeared from the market and became a scarce commodity for the general populace but a preserve for Osipatheleni (illegal money changers) and top government officials and those with such mentality.

Over time, the general populace got the shock of their life to realize that all their hard earned forex had turned into Bond notes.

At this juncture, I shall remind the readers of this blog that to open those accounts people had used forex and they were, therefore, foreign currency accounts. But later on, the account holders were told that those accounts were no longer forex accounts but had become Bond notes accounts. As to how they had overnight transformed into Bond notes only accounts, it is only Mangudya and the top ZANU-PF officials who know.

People were then told to open fresh accounts of forex called Foreign Currency Accounts (FCA) commonly known as the Nostro Accounts.

What is important however is to note that in each transitional period, the government most likely stole large sums of money from the poor masses. To prove that, one can make reference to the USD10 million dollars that was recovered by the soldiers from Ignatius Chombo’s house or the millions recovered at Kudzanayi Chipanga’s house during Operation Restore Legacy in November 2017 but whose fate was never made public.

One may not be far from the truth to conclude that the money that was stolen during that period may actually be the same money that was given to the illegal money changers (Osiphathelani) whom most of the unverified reports claim they are linked to top government officials.

From the above, it becomes substantial to conclude that more than a result of carelessness; the Zimbabwean economic crisis was most likely a deliberate creation by the government so that it legitimizes its ways of stealing from the general populace and I hereby hold it responsible for the long-suffering of the Zimbabwean people.

In this blog, however, I do not detail all the contents of S.I. 142 of 2019 and my interest is Section 3 (1) (a) and (b) of the instrument.

It reads: 3 (1) Nothing in section 2 shall affect –

(a) The opening or operation of foreign currency designated accounts, otherwise known as “Nostro FCA accounts”, which shall continue to be designated in the foreign currencies with which they are opened and in which they are operated, nor shall section 2 affect the making of foreign payments from such accounts;

(b) The requirement to pay in any of the foreign currencies referred to in section 2(1) duties of customs in terms of the Customs and Excise Act [ Chapter 23:02] that are payable on the importation of goods specified under that Act to be luxury goods, or, in respect of such goods, to pay any import or value-added tax in any of the foreign currencies referred to in section 2(1) as required by or under the Value Added Tax Act [Chapter 23:12 ].

Looking at the above, in all legal terms and honest, the act sounds good and promising, giving hope to the Nostro account holders.

But it coming from a government which is not known for keeping promises, it is only a matter of time before the Nostro account holders cry foul.

Again one will not be far from the truth to conclude that just like the introduction of bond notes in 2014, or any other financial/monetary policy before that or thereafter, this is just another way of this government to symphony money that they never worked for and that they do not deserve.

It was going to be better if the stolen money could be used to bring this tottering economy back to its feet but knowing the traits of those in charge, the money will be channelled to self-enrichment and other nonsensical ventures.

My point is that the earlier you withdraw your forex from these unreliable banks the better, and the earlier you caution those who are sending you forex to stop sending it the best. Zimbabwe should have its Zim-dollar than to reap where it did not sow.

In a nutshell, the black market is there to stay until this government completely reforms (if ever they are willing to).

As a parting shot, Osiphatheleni is there to stay as long as things are like this. It needs proper, serious and well-thought reforms, not these piecemeal and haphazard temporary measures that will do nothing than worsening a situation already in the decaying stage.

What Zimbabweans are rejecting is not the Zimbabwean dollar but useless money that does not buy anything and useless policies that are meant to enrich a few individuals and leave the masses suffering.

Post published in: Business

Today nearly four out of every five Zimbabweans just about survives in absolute poverty. On average, Zimbabweans are poorer now than they were at independence in 1980. Informal employment is at 95% , which is why the civil service has more than doubled over the last ten years to 600,000 employees – this is the only place the government can create jobs.

Whole communities today live on less than 35 cents per person per day. In practice, this pays for a small dollop of maize, four leaves of vegetables, and a cap of cooking fat. We have a term for this, Tsaona, which means living by “accident”.

But the crisis Zimbabwe faces is no accident. This is a man-made calamity. Over the last 39 years of independence, ZANU-PF has presided over the disintegration of the productive sector of the economy. Driven by sheer incompetence, greed, and the need for regime survival, the party has completely destroyed a once thriving economy.

Firstly, industries closed in the face of government parties as opposed to foreign investment. Secondly, infrastructure failed to be maintained and no investments were made; even today, Zimbabwe continues to rely on the Kariba hydro-electric facility opened in 1959 by Queen Elizabeth II. Thirdly, the backbone of Zimbabwe’s economy was ripped out when the farming sector was politically redistributed through ill-planned and badly-executed land reform exercises, aimed not at the empowerment of citizens but the enrichment of elites. Fourthly, to paper over these deep problems and continue to make profits for the elites, monetary policy became a tool for further enrichment, resulting in Zimbabwe’s inflation reaching 500 billion percent.

In today’s Zimbabwe, the elites prosper, in spite of the misery, and because of mal-governance. They use their preferential access to dollars to arbitrage against other local, artificial digital currencies. Furthermore, they have created cartels that are able to entirely control the import and distribution of fuel coming into the country.

Meanwhile, the military and other favoured clients are offered mining concessions that are then parcelled out opaquely to friends, local and foreign. Finally, the government’s agricultural scheme, appropriately named “command agriculture”, amounts to a $4 billion private piggy bank used to finance everything from private vehicles to dowries.

ZANU-PF cannot realistically be expected to reform a system that it not only profits from but on which its rule depends. Future reform has to dismantle the corrupt political economy, whilst also expanding the productive sector.

The only time in the last four decades there has been a serious attempt at reform was during the Government of National Unity between 2009 and 2013, when I served as the Minister of Finance. During this period, three critical actions were introduced.

One, it was recognised that the government could not spend what it did not have. We described this as the “eat what you kill” philosophy. This immediately provided confidence and clarity to foreign investors and our international partners. Two, we dollarised the economy, thereby ridding the country of the opportunities for arbitrage against the inflating Zimbabwean currency. Three, we opened up the economy thereby incentivising the private sector.

Without governance and transparency, the only investors we will get in Zimbabwe are cowboys and opportunistic traders, a mafia by another name. Without political change and the necessary will, reform will only amount to empty words. As I often say, it’s just putting lipstick on a crocodile.

Major political, institutional, and socio-economic reforms are required in Zimbabwe. To achieve the confidence required to boost the productive sector, the country requires a transitional mechanism to implement agreed reforms and track economic revival.

Political dialogue should open the way for these long overdue and much-needed changes.

Moreover, the opposition should be incorporated into the government. This is our only choice of a more positive future. Only the opposition has the credibility to create such change.

Partners interested in the plight of Zimbabwe’s people, and not just short-term profiteering, should urge Zimbabwe’s government to the negotiating table. A failure to do so will be measured in a loss of hope and a grave humanitarian crisis which can only be met by increased state repression.

The main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) is ready to play its part in Zimbabwe’s recovery. The ball is now in the court of ZANU-PF and its supporters, foreign and local.

On March 2, 2019, Alan Dershowitz said that his “accusers are Virginia Roberts and Sarah Ransome… I hereby accuse my false accusers of committing the felony of perjury and challenge them to sue me for defamation.” Most plain readings of this statement assumed he was daring them to put their facts on the table so he could disprove them. Apparently, what he actually wanted was to make a technical argument about the statute of limitations time-barring their claims.

After a detour into a motion to disqualify Virginia Roberts Guiffre’s counsel, Dershowitz has moved to dismiss the defamation claims.

On the one hand, it’s unfair to assume someone should waive an opportunity to squelch a lawsuit out of the gate when they think there’s a good faith motion to dismiss. On the other hand, at some point you have to put your money where your mouth is when you’re publicly calling on people to sue you so you can prove they’re wrong. Do you want your day in court or not?

So the primary argument Dershowitz offers for bouncing this case is that despite making a number of recent statements — including the explicit claim quoted above — Dershowitz says he’s been calling her a liar for years so the claim is time-barred because everything he’s saying now is part of the same “publication” from when he went on TV in 2015.

New York has a one-year statute of limitations and it follows a “single publication” standard, meaning that publishing a story once begins the limitations period and even if additional copies are made down the road, the period is not reset. That doesn’t hold for a republication — if the speaker is repeating the claim and “the second publication is intended to and does reach a new group” then the period is reset. Examples might be “a morning and evening edition[] of a newspaper” or “a rebroadcast of a television show.”

Dershowitz claims that his recent appearances to defend himself by calling Virginia Guiffre a liar should be considered a single publication of his calling her a liar years ago. But that really hinges on the idea that his recent statements were not — to quote from a case that he cites — “an attempt to reach a new audience that the statement’s prior dissemination did not encompass.” Except, he says the reason he’s been speaking about this recently stems from a new Miami Herald story that renewed speculation about the case. So he’s saying that new people have started believing these allegations and that’s why he needs to make these public claims in his defense which… would seem to prove that he’s intending to reach a new audience that was not reached with the prior dissemination.

The case he cites here is actually interesting since it held that new articles repeating the prior claims posted on an internet news site couldn’t be a republication because the material on an accessible internet board is presumptively broadcast to the universe, which makes sense. But does a TV appearance — that isn’t readily accessible to anyone just banging around the internet — get the same leeway? It would seem that the Restatement claim that a rebroadcast of a television show constitutes republication would prove that it doesn’t, but it’s an argument.

Dershowitz’s secondary argument is that the First Amendment’s protections for self-defense — especially for a public figure — shield him from defamation here. There’s a pretty good case to be made that if someone is accused of rape, they get to call their accuser a liar. More complicated is if one can start making specific allegations about the accuser being involved in an extortion plot run by her attorneys. That pushes the envelope a little further and whether or not it pushes it too far will be up to Judge Preska.

Let’s see what this case has in store for us next.

(Check out the whole motion on the next page.)

Earlier: Some (Tentative) Good News For Alan Dershowitz… And Some More Bad News
Dershowitz’s Motion To Disqualify Boies Schiller Immediately Dumped For Hilarious Reason
Harvard Law School’s Dershowitz Moves To Disqualify Boies Schiller In Sex Trafficking Case
Dershowitz Wanted A Trial Over Sex Trafficking Accusations — He’s Getting One

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.

We’re nearly midway through summer associate season, and on-campus interviews begin in about a month at law schools across the country for next year’s crop of summer associates. What better time to release Vault’s closely watched rankings for the best summer associate programs?

Hot on the heels of Vault’s rankings of the most prestigious law firms and the law firms with the best quality of life comes the career website’s ranking of the best summer associate programs in Biglaw. Junior associates (first- through third-year attorneys) who summered at their current firms were asked to rank their experiences on how much fun the program was and how well it prepared them for life at the firm through six different categories (attorney interactions, substantive assignments, training & mentoring, preparation for associate life, quality of events, and satisfaction with firm-sponsored social opportunities and social interactions). From those ratings, Vault the best summer associate programs in three categories: Attorney Interactions, Career Development, and Social Experiences. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of the firms that made the Top 10 list for having the best quality of life made the Top 10 for having the best summer associate program.

There was a huge amount of movement in the Top 10 this year. Which firms made the cut? Without any further ado, here are the Top 10 Firms With the Best Summer Associate Programs based on Vault’s Annual Associate Survey for 2020:

1. O’Melveny & Myers (no change)
2. Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe (+7)
3. Clifford Chance (US) (+5)
4. Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld (+11)
5. Crowell & Moring (-2)
6. Thompson & Knight (not ranked; first time in Top 10)
7. Choate Hall & Stewart (+4)
8. Eversheds Sutherland (US) (-6)
9. White & Case (-3)
10. Williams & Connolly (+10)

O’Melveny, Orrick, Clifford Chance, and Choate Hall each made appearances in the Top 10 for firms with the best quality of life. Let’s give these firms a round of applause for keeping their attorneys happy from their days as summers through their days as junior associates. (We’re sure their salary raises didn’t hurt, either.)

Here are the Top 3 Best Summer Programs for Attorney Interactions:

1. Thompson & Knight
2. Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton
3. O’Melveny & Myers

Here are the Top 3 Best Summer Programs for Career Development:

1. O’Melveny & Myers
2. Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe
3. Crowell & Moring

Here are the Top 3 Best Summer Programs for Social Experiences:

1. O’Melveny & Myers
2. Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson
3. Thompson & Knight

Congratulations to all 50 of the Biglaw firms that made the latest edition of the Vault Best Summer Associate Program rankings. How did your firm do? Email us, text us at (646) 820-8477, or tweet us @atlblog to let us know how you feel.

Best Summer Associate Programs (2020) [Vault]

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.

CKR Law LLP is facing a new lawsuit, filed in New York state court yesterday, that alleges the firm allowed a “sexually hostile” environment in its New York office. Plaintiff Catherine Acosta was the former marketing director based in the firm’s New York office, and alleges she was subjected to repeated inappropriate comments that the firm was unwilling to do anything about.

According to the complaint, one attorney reached out to Acosta after work hours for a “chat” and asked “if she had any less professional pictures to share.” Additionally, Acosta alleges she was the recipient of inappropriate comments after her marriage to a same-sex partner. In one particularly galling alleged incident, an attorney commented on Acosta’s marriage asking “if she was done with men forever or if he could do anything to change her mind.”

As reported by Law360, as a result of these allegedly inappropriate interactions, Acosta sought permission to work remotely from the managing partner, Jeffery Rinde. Though that request was initially granted, the complaint alleges it was rescinded when it was revealed Acosta was aware of compromising information about Rinde:

Acosta, who says she suffers from anxiety, got permission from CKR managing partner Jeffrey A. Rinde to work from home after these purported incidents, her suit says. However, she says the firm’s and Rinde’s attitudes toward her abruptly changed after she told her assistant that security cameras had recorded Rinde and the assistant kissing in an elevator.

Ultimately, Acosta was let go from the firm, “allegedly due to her inability to work in the New York City office.” But as the complaint goes on to allege, her assistant, who took over Acosta’s position when she was fired, was allowed to work from home.

You can read the full complaint on the next page.

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).

Ed. note: This is part two of a two-part series on how law firms can address critical vulnerabilities in their security posture.  Part One focused on setting the stage for an external expert assessment and used a case study to examine physical security issues law firms should be examining.  Part Two will continue with the case study by addressing assessment techniques including attack simulations, social engineering and open source intelligence review.

A hostile threat environment that requires lawyers to critically consider how to adequately protect their clients’ communications in the digital age is something the ABA tackled head-on in ABA Formal Opinion 477 in May 2017 stating that cybersecurity recognizes a world where law enforcement discusses hacking and data loss in terms of “when and not if.”

Law firms are logical targets for hackers because they collect and store highly sensitive information about clients.  Small and medium-sized firms often struggle with ensuring they allocate proper attention to the electronic infrastructure in which to be productive and adequately protect data and communications.  Additionally, client data notwithstanding, law firms have their own data, business practices, intellectual property, and employee data to protect.  So it comes as no surprise that sophisticated hackers actively test the perimeters of law firms’ networks and cloud environments and are targeting employees to gain the fastest path into databases and other systems containing this valuable information.  What’s on the line: reputational damages, lawsuits, and risk of regulatory enforcement.

Outside experts can help law firms reduce the risk of a harmful and costly breach.  In part one, we discussed the benefit of physical security assessments.  Now let’s get into additional attack simulation exercises which can bring great value to uncovering and shoring up vulnerabilities.

Attack Simulations

Typically, law firms have invested a great deal of hours and funding into what they believe are strong enough security stacks to withstand hackers.  To create a truly resilient environment, however, it’s useful to vet this assessment against the realities of what sophisticated hackers can achieve.  Traditionally, adversaries approach exploitation of a target through social engineering, email compromise, public websites, or gaining physical access to a facility.

With a deep dive assessment that mimics a real-world attack by a malicious actor, an outside expert can demonstrate the ability to gain access to an office through a “red team” approach: this simply means that an outside team (the red team) will stage an attack against all potential attack vectors to evaluate the effectiveness of the firm’s security infrastructure and response capabilities.

Aside from attempting to compromise physical security assets such as badge reading systems and closed-circuit TV (CCTV) once inside the physical perimeter, an additional goal of a red team exercise within this context is typically to perform lateral movement within a network to other geographically disbursed offices, highlighting any vulnerabilities in network segmentation. Shared applications and resources between different global locations are prime targets within the internal network and pose unique threats to organizations with global locations.  These resources could range from file shares to intranet web pages, allowing unintended jump points between networks bypassing any segmentation between those systems.

Another tactic is to target key administrators with access to production systems and/or to attempt bypassing or compromising sensitive Security Operations Center (SOC) assets and tools.  This delivers a clear view of the SOC’s ability to properly monitor against risk and gauges the ability and response time of automated security technology alerts and IT personnel.

Finally, the red team will try to compromise internet-facing applications and network infrastructure including open ports and vulnerable services. They do this by performing credential stealing, executing two-factor authentication bypass, and applying other attack methodologies.

After these attack simulations are complete, the red team compiles a final report containing findings, precise remediation recommendations, and a gap analysis demonstrating areas for improvement.

Targeted Social Engineering Simulations

Another form of attack simulation is a highly tailored social engineering campaign directed at agreed-upon initial targets such as global help desk operations or other personnel who are typically on the front lines of inbound communications.

The primary objective of social engineering is to circumvent network defenses, leveraging an approach that targets trusted users to gain access to privileged information or resources.  Attackers often use social engineering to establish initial access and gather intelligence to prepare for a future remote attack.

Additional objectives of social engineering attack simulations include:

• Identify remote code execution vulnerabilities on workstations.
• Collect data on likelihood that your personnel will click on potentially malicious links or open emails yielding network credentials. This can be used to measure effectiveness of anti-spear phishing training.
• Bypass security controls, restrictions, and boundaries.
• Inform and prioritize risk mitigation and avoidance to prevent catastrophic effects from such attacks.

An important goal of these assessments is to determine a firm’s maturity in withstanding phishing attempts.  Broadly speaking, phishing denotes an adversary’s attempt to exploit a target by gaining entry (physical or electronic) by convincing employees or contractors to take an enabling action allowing entry or assets transfer to an attacker.  Phishing can take many forms including the following:

• Email/Chat Spearphishing
  • Emails impersonating fictitious entities which may contain malicious links, embedded malicious content, or attachments that contain malicious code.
  • The attack effort can include:
    • Establishing whether the email infrastructure is properly flagging spam.
    • Enticing users to click or execute malicious messages which ultimately would provide a hacker with access to a corporate endpoint.
    • Enticing high-level individuals (think: C-suite) to take actions more productive to the adversary because of the access and actions available to the high-level target (aka “whaling”).
    • Enticing targeted administrators to take enabling actions (aka “spearphishing”).
  • Phone Phishing
    • Phone calls in which operators attempt to elicit sensitive corporate data, reset a users’ password, or paired with email phishing, establish remote access to a user’s workstation through “pretexting,” which amounts to pretending to be someone else to obtain private information.
• Physical Phishing
  • Attempts to gain physical access to a corporate environment with the purpose of either collection of sensitive data, or installation of remote connectivity (see: physical security assessments).

Deploying the proper training, monitoring, email scanning/filtering, and policies designed to segment off critical assets can fend off even the most clever social engineering hackers. Understanding the capabilities of a firm’s people and systems is an important first step.

Open Source Intelligence Assessments

Through reviewing publicly available information on the internet, law firms can gain a better grasp of how hostile actors may be building profiles of their organizations.  Physical and digital vulnerabilities often begin with a small thread discovered online, such as in an employee’s social media postings or client files entrusted to a firm now being sold on the dark web.  Experts use a full suite of open source research tools and methodologies including social media to comprehensively identify personally identifiable information, leaked credentials, or breached data.  With an understanding of what hackers can learn about their executives, practices, clients, and physical assets online, firms can shore up their defenses and create a more secure perimeter around their critical assets.

No organization, law firms included, can fully reduce the risk of being a target of hacking.  The best approach is to understand the risk more comprehensively through sophisticated and tailored external assessments.  From there, detailed recommendations can direct internal resources to fix technical gaps.  The goal is not to extinguish the threat altogether, but to at least do so better than the next law firm.

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.