Author: TSA Press

As was reported here yesterday, the London-based contract-management company Juro announced a $5 million Series A investment round led by the U.S. investment banking firm Union Square Ventures. What does the investment mean for the company’s expansion in the U.S. market?

In a conversation yesterday, I put that question to Richard Mabey, CEO of Juro and cofounder together with Riga-based Pavel Kovalevich, the company’s chief product officer.

Juro already has customers who are headquartered in the United States, Mabey said. “Even though our business is based in Europe, we’ve seen demand coming from the U.S.,” he said.

During 2020, expect to see Juro expand “gently” within the U.S., Mabey said. He expects to open a U.S. office this year and have employees here.

That said, the thrust of the company’s sales efforts and expansion plans will remain focused on Europe. “We will continue to double down on selling into the E.U. broadly,” he said.

Noting that some European companies that receive U.S. investments are forced to flip their sales towards the U.S., “that is not our plan,” Mabey said, adding that USV supports that strategy.

Founded in 2016, Juro currently has 20 employees in London and Riga. By year end, Mabey expects the headcount to be around 55, with “a handful” in the U.S.

Much of this new investment will go to further development and refinement of the product. “In an area where there’s been so much failure to execute well, then quality of execution is absolutely a priority,” he said.

(Juro is transparent about its product roadmap, posting it publicly for anyone to see.)

Contracts As Data

In a market crowded with contract management, review and automation products, Juro seeks to stand apart by its focus on turning contracts into machine-readable data. Its proprietary editor automatically tags key terms and provisions as data and captures all amendments and approvals in an audit trail.

Inspired by his experience as an associate at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Mabey wanted to figure out why contract management continued to have so many pain points. The problem, he decided, was not one of efficiency, but of design.

“Whenever you’re creating unstructured, static Word documents and PDFs, it is deeply problematic,” he said. “You have to go back and manually tag the data to make it useful. That’s work you can avoid.”

Juro’s approach, he said, was to create a new format for legal documents, one that is “super easy” to use and that makes the data “structured from the get-go.”

So much of current contracts technology is focused on unpacking unstructured data — going through individual contracts or collections of contracts and using sophisticated technology to structure and extract data.

“Core to our mission,” Mabey said, “is to convince the legal community that there’s a better way to do this.”

Connecticut has joined the ranks of states that have formed task forces in recent years to examine potential changes to regulation of the legal industry.

Connecticut Bar Association President Ndidi Moses said the creation of her organization’s State of the Legal Profession Task Force was driven by the access-to-justice gap, as well as the challenges lawyers face in the current system.

“The legal industry needs to take a hard and fast look at how we are operating,” Moses said. “I feel like there is a way for everyone to win. It is just a matter of being more creative.”

Various task force subcommittees will examine alternative business models, how technology can be leveraged to advance the legal profession and ethics rules.

Additionally, the task force will review reforms law schools may need to implement to properly prepare future lawyers.

“If you want to make changes that will last and be effective, you have to start at the law-school level,” Moses said.

Jayne Reardon, a member of the Connecticut task force’s advisory committee, said the focus on law schools and the skill set aspiring lawyers will need differentiated the state’s panel from some of the other task forces nationwide.

She praised the consideration of such issues, noting the time and financial investment required of law students.

“If they are not being trained in the skills that are going to be needed tomorrow, then that is not a good investment,” said Reardon, who is a member of Illinois’ Task Force on the Sustainable Practice of Law & Innovation.

The Connecticut task force held a kickoff meeting in December and is aiming to produce a report by 2021.

Moses said the panel is certainly keeping an eye on the work of task forces across the country, such as those in Illinois, California, Utah and Arizona.

But she emphasized that the task force’s objective is developing solutions that will work in her state.

The goal is to make sure we do what is right for Connecticut,” Moses said.

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Lyle Moran is a freelance writer in San Diego who handles both journalism and content writing projects. He previously reported for the Los Angeles Daily Journal, San Diego Daily Transcript, Associated Press, and Lowell Sun. He can be reached at lmoransun@gmail.com and found on Twitter @lylemoran.

Five years after leaving the Federal Reserve, when Ben Bernanke thoughtfully strokes his beard and surveys his former domain, sure, he sees some issues come the next recession. Thanks to his avid slashing and his successors’ rather ginger approach to raising them, there’s not a lot of room to move down with interest rates (unless you want to go less than zero, which frankly Bernanke doesn’t think is all that horrible an idea). But even if Jay Powell or whoever succeeds him don’t have as much room for maneuver as he did, there are still plenty of tricks in the old Bernanke playbook to save us from economic annihilation.

The managing partner of an elite Biglaw firm once told me, “you have no idea how many resumes I get from Kirkland partners… people are desperate to get out of there.” We’d been talking about a piece I was working on about the rise of the “non-equity partner,” a cynical faux partnership tier allowing firms to better market their special counsel and slap golden handcuffs on senior attorneys that might balk at being forced to accept a title demotion to move anywhere else.

Roy Strom at Bloomberg Law conducted a decade-spanning review of Kirkland’s non-equity partnership ranks and there’s a lot to crunch in this article, but it comes to a clear conclusion: they really are desperate to get out.

Among the 84 lawyers in [Former Kirkland partner Matthew] Topic’s 2012 class of those promoted to non-share partner, fewer than 40% remain at the firm and only 14% are publicly identifiable as equity partners, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis. Bloomberg Law compiled 10 years of data on Kirkland non-share partners. Among the 2009 class, only about 20% remain at the firm.

Topic managed to build a small practice out of his pro bono work. He was responsible for the FOIA fight that led to the release of the Laquan McDonald shooting video. Most non-equity partners who leave Kirkland end up in some role that still requires putting on a brave face in public about the firm that still sends referrals. Privately, former Kirkland attorneys told Strom a different story:

Ultimately, [one unnamed former Kirkland attorney] lasted about four years as a non-share partner. In the meantime, he said he was billing close to $2 million a year and making, at most, $500,000.

“I was a money maker for them,” said the partner, who declined to be named to protect relationships with the firm.

That’s not an uncommon tale. Strom’s post notes that non-equity partners at Kirkland are bringing in roughly $2 million more than they’re getting paid. As leveraged assets go, that’s about as good as a firm can get. Equity partners are averaging a take home ten times as much with an annual take of around $5 million. Even the most junior equity partners are making almost $2 million.

Unfortunately, the Kirkland model may be taking over Biglaw. The ranks of one-tier, lockstep firms shrinks every year. Cleary just had the high-profile defection/firing of partners seeking a bigger slice of the pie. Old school partnership models are disappearing like Elves departing to the West at the end of Lord of the Rings and similarly leaving a less magical world. The old model brings an air of collegiality to the practice, a sense that every partner is pulling the same direction because everyone benefits from the firm’s success. Partners aren’t going rogue and hoarding their private book of business and fighting internal conflict turf wars. That’s the price the firm pays to be able to award the spoils to those making the most rain and part of that model is keeping the equity spoils tightly guarded.

And because it’s a strategy that’s working — and working at Kirkland better than anywhere else — it’s going to continue to spread. And Kirkland’s legion of “partners in name only” are going to continue taking their titles and moving elsewhere.

How Kirkland ‘Partners in Name Only’ Live in Limbo [Bloomberg Law]

Earlier: Repeat After Me, ‘Partnership Without Equity Is Not A Partnership’
Major Lateral Moves: It’s ‘Open Season On Cleary Partners’

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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.

Disclaimer: For someone who has a severe drinking problem, the sudden stoppage of alcohol intake can cause serious health issues. Please consult a qualified addiction physician before doing so.

What do you feel like the morning after a couple of drinks? Have you ever considered trying a month without booze as a social experiment and note the changes, if any? This is the perfect month to do it. It is “Dry January.”

Imbibers across the country are checking out what it feels like to abstain from drinking alcohol for thirty one days. While it’s always a good idea to evaluate alcohol intake and how it impacts your life, you can be part of ever-growing, sober curious movement, if just for a few weeks.

We are already well into the month but there is still time to give Dry January a try. Thirty one days sound daunting? Two weeks works as well.

It’s not about being an “alcoholic.” It’s not about addiction — it is about merely evaluating lifestyle. We need to move away from associating abstinence from alcohol as something that means problem drinking.

For me, it’s admittedly a dry lifetime by choice. It started as my awareness of a severe drinking problem. Today however, it’s a lifestyle. I do not consider myself an “alcoholic.” The term, while important as a tool of self-awareness starting out, no longer has meaning to me as a self-label. As a lifestyle choice, here are the benefits, I have found:

• I enjoy a higher quality level of sleep. Even when I was not getting hammered, a couple of drinks became a sleep aid, and it was never a deep sleep. I woke up with that pressure in the head that comes with a lack of real rest.

• The mornings are lovely without the distraction of even a minor hangover or just the “blechs” that a couple of glasses of wine can bring. I am more alert mentally acute. This allows me to  get right into the day rather than “ease” into it.

• My eating habits are more balanced. Even a few drinks would invariably lead to choices more towards more “impulsive munchie” food choices. Don’t get me wrong, I am big believer in “eat to live” not “live to eat” but I also believe in balanced options and alcohol skewed that for me.

• My morning energy level is much better and overall more balanced throughout the day. That does not mean I don’t get the “sleepies’ like everyone else but without the low level, alcohol disruption, I can get my workout in more consistently. I am more focused in the work I do.

• Without question, my personal relationships have improved. Even a low-level hangover can make a person irritable, causing conflict that would not otherwise be there.

This month or any month, consider a timed reset on your relationship with alcohol. No judgment. No stigma. If you decide it’s not for you, have one for me.

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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.

Last September, Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) resigned his House seat and announced that he’d be pleading guilty to securities fraud and lying to a federal agent.

Collins famously raced out of a White House picnic to call his son and shout, “SELL!” after getting word that the drug he’d hoped would cure AIDS and cancer and MS and probably athlete’s foot, too, had failed its clinical trial.  Which is what those spoilsports at the SEC refer to as “classic insider trading.” Collins went on to win re-election in 2018 despite having an 11-count federal indictment hanging over his head, and proclaimed his innocence and intention to run again in 2020 right up until September 30, 2019, when he finally tapped out.

The U.S. Probation Office is recommending a year and a day in custody for the former politician, which is a significant downward departure from the 46 to 57 months laid out in his plea agreement. But Collins has a better offer — how about no jail time at all! And he compiled a whole 58-page motion with 10 attachments full of letters all attesting to what a good, kind, honest man he is and telling U.S. District Judge Vernon S. Broderick that this living saint deserves to serve any sentence on home confinement at his new house in Florida.

Collins even went so far as to send a mass email to all his supporters — and former supporters, apparently — pleading with them to send letters to the court pleading for leniency on his behalf. This may have been something of a tactical error, however as evidenced by the 88 pages of letters Judge Broderick entered into the docket yesterday. While House Speaker John Boehner may think his former colleague is entitled to leniency, but it appears Mr. Collins’ former constituents have other ideas.

In advocating for a stiff [and] severe sentence for Mr. Collins, including substantial jail time, I can only say this: if this man does not serve an extended period in jail, something is seriously wrong with our judicial system. There’s no one for whom a lengthy period of incarceration is more appropriate. — David Wiles

Ouch.

It is my opinion that he shows no remorse but his actions show only the desire to escape responsibility for his actions. My hope is that the maximum sentence would fit the crimes and damage done. — Harry E. Winnicki

Perhaps that email request was a tactical error.

Mr. Collins violated the rules of conduct for a member of congress. Mr. Collins assured his fellow members of congress, (lied to them), that he always followed ethical rules in his investments. Mr. Collins defamed Louise Slaughter, a fellow member of congress. These actions reveal that Mr. Collins is not remorseful for his actions. — William C. Fine

That would be a reference to Rep. Louise Slaughter, whom Collins described as a “despicable human being” who filed “fabricated allegations” of insider trading against him with the House Ethics Committee out of blinding hatred for Donald Trump. It appears that his former constituent James Renfrew also remembers that, after Slaughter’s death in 2018, “Mr. Collins, vindictively, was the only member of Congress from New York who voted against naming the local post office in her memory. He owes Ms. Slaughter’s family an enormous apology!” That, too, might possibly have been a tactical error.

During his lazy years winning our gerrymandered, 27th congressional district, Mr. Collins made no effort to visit or otherwise personally stay in contact with his constituents. He has used his political power to misrepresent and swindle. Mr. Collins has demonstrated distaste for the rule of law. He’s selfish, profiteering for himself and his family has been on full display diss honoring the Congress. Though his lawyers may plead for leniency, I hope you give him the full measure of his convictions. — Hal Bauer, PhD (PS: Collins stole our trust in the federal government.)

And speaking of profiteering, The Buffalo News reported Monday that Collins appears to have liquidated all the donations from his 2020 campaign account and transferred them to … himself.

On Dec. 20, Collins transferred $146,393.71 out of the campaign committee he’s been using in recent years and sent it to his 1998 campaign committee. That same day, he repaid himself $146,393.71 out of that 1998 campaign committee — 22 years after he loaned that committee hundreds of thousands of dollars to wage his race against [then-Rep. John J.] LaFalce.

Told about Collins’ move, LaFalce seemed less than impressed.

But will Judge Broderick be impressed? Or will he heed the recommendation of Cynthia Lankenau, DVM, “to help Mr. Collins clearly see his [serious]  wrongdoing and sentence him to the maximum amount allowable under the statute”? Tune in on January 17 to find out.

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Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Troutman Sanders and Pepper Hamilton have voted to merge, creating a 23 office, 1100 attorney Am Law 50 firm they’re calling Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders. The deal will take effect on April 1.

The merger, which we’ve been tracking for awhile, is actually one of the rare Biglaw mergers that makes a lot of sense. The two firms don’t overlap all that much with only 3 redundant offices to be sorted out and while Troutman was roughly 40 slots ahead of Pepper Hamilton in Am Law’s ratings, the firm’s RPL numbers were in the same ballpark, greasing the wheels for the merger.

When we last discussed the mechanics of a dying law firm, we talked a lot about how overaggressive mergers often kick off the countdown to a firm’s demise. Looking into the next decade, mergers are going to continue to ramp up and the demarcation between the firms that make it and the firms that don’t — putting aside the elite Am Law 25 or so — is likely to be whose mergers make the most sense. Troutman and Pepper think they’ve hit the sweet spot.

Troutman Sanders, Pepper Hamilton Vote to Seal Merger Deal [American Lawyer]

Earlier: Pepper Hamilton And Troutman Sanders Planning To Merge
In Memoriam… To All The Law Firms We Lost Last Decade

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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.

After his arrest for alleged membership in a wide-ranging global insider-trading ring, Goldman Sachs VP Bryan Cohen said there was a perfectly innocent explanation for the $24,000 in cash he’d hidden in a sunglasses case in his apartment, the reason having something to do with Frenchness and cultural hoarding or whatever. And maybe there is a perfectly innocent explanation for it, and maybe that’s it, but Cohen does have one confession to make: There’s no innocent explanation for the aforementioned, no-longer-merely-alleged membership in said insider-trading ring.

With the 2010s wrapping up, Joe and Kathryn focus on all the law firms we’ve lost over the last decade. Industry pressures, bad strategies, and fraud allegations managed to put several former mainstays to rest over the last 10 years. What lessons can we take from the demise of these once-proud firms? Where is this whole profession heading? Will this next recession finish off what 2009 started?

Protecting a company from nation-state actors was likely not an elective for many attorneys now practicing in the field. And lawyers are generally trained to trust subject matter experts so even if cybersecurity had been part of the curriculum, there would still be a sense of overwhelming deference to our counterparts in the security world. But in today’s digital world where cyber threats don’t limit themselves to just one stakeholder, there’s an undeniable need for lawyers to be part of the collaborative drumbeat of cyber vigilance within any organization.

So when the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — a federal agency that was established two years ago to serve as “the Nation’s risk advisor” under the Department of Homeland Security — disseminated guidance this week on how companies should be thinking about the increased risk of nation-state actors attacking U.S. companies in light of heightened conflicts with Iran, lawyers took note.

That a U.S. corporation could face cyber consequences from the United States’ killing of top Revolutionary Guards commander, Major General Qassim Suleimani, is the new normal for corporate counsel given the declaration by the government of Iran and its supreme leader of Iran’s intent to strike back at the U.S.

The threat of cyber attacks against the U.S., its companies, and its critical infrastructure is imminent. Iran has long been an active source of Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks which were quelled since 2015 when former President Barack Obama signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Tehran.

A year ago, CISA came out with its user-friendly Cyber Essentials guidance in line with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cybersecurity framework, propagated by the Department of Commerce, to help small businesses understand the importance of cybersecurity. That guidance is a jumping off point for cyber readiness within organizations, broken down into six “Essential Elements of a Culture of Cyber Readiness” where organizations “living the culture” demonstrate best practices within those elements. The guidance concludes with list of steps that small businesses can take immediately to increase organizational preparedness against cyber risks. These include backing up data, implementing multifactor authentication, enabling automatic updates, patching, and having experts on standby for help.

Years later, as general counsel of a technology-enabled cyber services and investigations firm, I no longer have the luxury of sitting on the sidelines of debates about what it means to properly protect the organization from security threats. But, quite frankly, none of us lawyers do. Ask any board member — cyber risk is no longer just a problem for the IT department.

Actively Defending Against Cyber Threats

Proactively addressing a company’s security posture means adopting an approach that proactively identifies and solves against known and unknown threats using best-in-class tools and experts. That stance -– call it “Active Defense” — includes advanced threat hunting and attack methodologies, the use of deception technologies to confuse attackers, and elite intelligence collection and analysis techniques. Within companies, there is a growing sense that internal teams can learn from external teams of experts who bring in varied backgrounds and see things differently, as an outsider. The purpose of these so-called purple teams, where an internal blue team is paired with an external red team to identify and shut down weaknesses within an organization’s security stance (whether physical or virtual), is to strengthen the organization against outside threats. Beyond the color spectrum, this recognition of the ever-growing risk presented by sophisticated malicious actors operating unchecked against the private sector is mirrored by the ever-growing opportunities for threat actors who can access advanced exploits more readily than ever before.

The calculation of the proper level of threat protection is specific to the organization. Assume that if you’re a company doing business with the U.S. government or part of the nation’s critical infrastructure, you’re going to need to lodge a stronger defense. Recommendations for shoring up on cyber from CISA include:

• More frequent backups of data and storing backups offline, including backups of information critical to company operations
• Creating and rehearsing an incident response plan
• Implementing multi-factor authentication
• Minimizing account privileges
• Regularly scanning networks and systems
• Automatically patching vulnerabilities
• Monitoring network traffic
• Whitelisting applications so that only approved programs are allowed to run on the network
• Temporarily increasing the frequency of password changes on your system
• Increasing the logging functions on your system to better monitor activity
• Training staff on cybersecurity best practices
• Conducting a cybersecurity risk analysis of the organization

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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.