Author: TSA Press

At the Straight Pride Parade in Boston last week, the world came face-to-face with the power of hundreds of fragile male egos and the world laughed hysterically. But it turns out the most pathetic man in Boston wasn’t marching that day. Instead, Boston Municipal Court Judge Richard Sinnott was waiting at the finish line to take up the mantle of saddest man-child in town.

As one might expect of an explicitly fascist trolling event like the Straight Pride Parade, especially when held in Boston — a town that despite harboring more than its fair share of the lowest common denominator of inbred racists is generally pretty cosmopolitan — the affair brought out a number of protestors. The Boston Police — see above about the lowest common denominator — met these folks with riot gear and pepper spray as one does. While there probably was some jackhole in the crowds actually causing trouble, most of the protestors the cops harassed and locked up were just ordinary folks exercising their free speech rights — something District Attorney Rachel Rollins recognized when she ordered the charges dropped for over 30 of the protestors.

That’s when Judge Sinnott decided he would arraign the protestors anyway even though the government wasn’t prosecuting them.

This is, of course, entirely illegal. But Judge Sinnott’s tantrum didn’t end there! When Susan Church, the defense attorney representing a number of the protestors pointed out that, you know, there are centuries of precedent for this whole “rule of law” thing, Judge Sinnott’s personal sense of inadequacy had her handcuffed and hauled away for contempt of court. The Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers called for an immediate investigation of this incident.

DA Rollins filed an emergency petition focused on one of the defendants who was not only arraigned without a prosecutor’s blessing, but had bail set at multiples of the maximum fine for the alleged offenses just to make a scene. This sets up what’s going to be one of the most epic appellate benchslappings in quite some time.

Imagine the glee of some appellate clerk getting ready to tee up this opinion — dripping with references to all the Star Chamber and Revolutionary War iconography that Massachusetts has traded upon for the last 250 years. How many times will they work in a Magna Carta reference?

The credibility of the Massachusetts state courts is on the line.

Boston’s DA wants to dismiss charges against some ‘Straight Pride Parade’ protesters. But a judge won’t let her [CNN]

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.

Boston is a growing and dynamic legal market. Lateral hiring — among new offices and the more established Boston offices — is stronger than ever. If you have a background in tech or the life sciences or if you’re a talented corporate lawyer with any background, you will likely find opportunities in Boston you will not find elsewhere: opportunities that combine sophisticated and cutting-edge work, market or above-market pay, a collegial culture, and clear pathways for advancement.

New players on the Boston scene

In recent years, numerous international firms have opened new offices in Boston, including Kirkland, Sidley, Wilson Sonsini, Morrison & Foerster, Orrick, and White & Case. All of these firms are hoping to carve out a significant share of the market with respect to Boston’s core industries: tech, biotech, health care, and other life sciences-related businesses.

Sophisticated work, top clients

High-profile clients offer challenging and cutting-edge work. Clients of the Boston offices include Pfizer, Raytheon, Staples, Biogen, Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Timberland, Gillette, Dunkin Donuts, General Electric, State Street Bank, New Balance, Liberty Mutual, Bain Capital, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Keurig Green Mountain, HubSpot, and of course the best sports team in the world, the Boston Red Sox.

Top practices

The new Boston offices and the established Boston firms are all looking to expand their corporate practices. Most in demand are private equity lawyers — PE M&A, PE finance, and fund formation. Emerging companies and venture capital work is also booming, as well as technology transactions. For intellectual property lawyers with a hard sciences background, there are numerous opportunities. Real estate lawyers have been consistently in demand in recent years. Even capital markets, a traditionally NY-based practice, is gaining ground in Boston.

Salaries and cost of living

Most of the top Boston offices pay New York market salaries, i.e., first-years start at $190,000. Some of these firms have bonus schemes that will put you above market pay when you bill over the hours target. Pair that with a 5.05 percent state income tax and no city tax (compared to a combined state and city tax rate above 10 percent for most New York associates). Furthermore, every dollar goes further in Boston. NALP statistics from 2018 show that $116,820 will buy you in Boston what $180,000 will buy you in New York City.

Pathways to Partnership

Making partner at a major law firm is always difficult and never guaranteed. However, joining a new office or an established office at the start of a growth phase can often give you a leg up when it comes time for advancement decisions. No matter how impressive your legal skills, firms won’t promote unless there’s a business case. Where practices and client bases are growing as they are now in Boston, that business case is more certain.

Hiring Trends

Needing ties to Boston to find a job in Boston or to succeed in that job is a thing of the past. Of course firms will want some assurance that you won’t just leave after your first winter in Beantown. But they also recognize that bringing in associates with training from other major markets, especially New York, only adds to a firm’s ability to handle the most sophisticated work. They encourage the idea that Boston is no longer just a market for associates “moving home”; Boston has become a destination for lawyers looking to advance their careers.

Despite high standards for hiring, Boston firms are often more flexible than New York firms when it comes to more superficial factors. For example, they will often consider associates outside the traditionally coveted 3-5 years’ experience range, and they will be more willing to relocate associates even without the local bar.

***

This is an exciting time to work in Boston. Whether you join a new firm to the Boston market or an established Boston firm, you’ll have the chance to be part of building the firm’s practice at a time of real growth and innovation.

It’s important to work with a recruiter who is knowledgeable about the specific market. Lateral Link is unique in that each recruiter specializes in one or just a few markets where we have practiced ourselves and/or where we are on the ground to build relationships with the firms’ key players. I work closely with a wide range of Boston firms. I can help you navigate the lateral hiring trends and can help answer questions such as:

• How important is it that I have the Massachusetts before starting my search?
• When in my career and when in the calendar year is the ideal time to move to or within Boston?
• Would a particular lateral move bring me closer to my ultimate career goals?
• Which Boston firms will be most interested in a candidate with a profile and skill set such as mine?
• Which Boston firms will allow me to broaden/focus my practice?

Please reach out to me at agordon@laterallink.com to learn more about the best Boston opportunities for your specific skills and experience.

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on lateral associate and partner moves from Lateral Link’s team of expert contributors. Abby Gordon is a Senior Director with Lateral Link’s New York office. Abby works with attorney candidates on law firm and in-house searches, primarily in Boston, New York and Europe. Prior to joining Lateral Link, Abby spent seven years as a corporate associate with Cleary Gottlieb, focusing on capital markets transactions for Latin American clients in New York and for the last five years for European clients in Paris. A native of Boston, Abby holds a J.D., cum laude, from Georgetown University Law Center and a B.A. in government and romance languages, magna cum laude, from Dartmouth College. Abby also worked with the International Rescue Committee as a Fulbright Scholar in Madrid, Spain. She is a member of the New York, Massachusetts and Maine Bars and is fluent in French and Spanish (and dabbles in Portuguese and Italian). You can view additional articles by Abby here.

Lateral Link is one of the top-rated international legal recruiting firms. With over 14 offices world-wide, Lateral Link specializes in placing attorneys at the most prestigious law firms and companies in the world. Managed by former practicing attorneys from top law schools, Lateral Link has a tradition of hiring lawyers to execute the lateral leaps of practicing attorneys. Click ::here:: to find out more about us.

Katie Sears works as a criminal defense attorney in Iowa but in her spare time she flies to Nevada to work in a brothel. While attorneys going into prostitution have made news before, the narrative is usually an unfortunate tale of women who went into sex work because they needed the money. Thankfully, Sears is available to offer the counter-narrative that gets overshadowed by troubling tales of coercion and human trafficking — a lot of sex workers actually just like their jobs:

“I like sex,” Sears said. “Sex is fun and I can get paid for it.”

Sears, who took on prostitution three years ago, hopes that opening up about her other job can help change people’s attitudes about it:

“You can say, ‘No sex without a condom.’ You can say, ‘No sex until we’re married.’ But you can’t say, ‘No sex until you pay me’? And that feels like it really undermines what consent means,” Sears said.

While Sears said she’s shy, she feels empowered being a sex worker.

“I think the more we talk about it, the better our chances are of getting decriminalization that we’re pursuing,” Sears said. “We’re not going to have legislation change if we’re passive about it.”

Sears, who works with her husband at the firm of Clark & Sears, carries her side hustle into her advocacy, taking on prostitution cases pro bono to help sex workers in trouble, suing brothels that allegedly fail to pay their workers, and advocating for decriminalization to help combat sex trafficking practices that flourish while the industry is kept in the shadows.

And, yes, we did say that she works with her husband whom she met in law school. As for her other job, “I don’t really care that much,” John Sears said.

The question is: which job has the higher billing rate?

Des Moines attorney unveils her life as a prostitute [KCCI]

Earlier: Law Student Turned Prostitute In Legal Battle Over ‘Sex Contract’ With Lawyer
Down Goes Bajaj: Reema Pleads Guilty To Prostitution

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.

A federal court has dismissed a defamation lawsuit brought against the Splinter website by a former Trump staffer. Jason Miller, a Trump campaign spokesman, sued after Splinter published an article that included allegations made by another Trump staffer Miller had an affair with. The allegations being sued over weren’t your normal allegations. These allegations were made in court by A.J. Delgado, Miller’s affair partner who later had Miller’s child.

Whether or not the allegations made by Delgado were true is irrelevant. Miller may have been correct his reputation had been damaged by the publication of these court documents (but $100 million-worth?), but the fact remains they were court documents. Filing a defamation lawsuit over reporting on court documents is per se stupid.

The thing about allegations made in court is that, while they can be defamatory, they cannot be sued over. Miller understood at least this much, it appears, because he didn’t sue the staffer he had an affair with. He instead sued Splinter, which published an article containing the court document with the allegations in it. Miller may have thought he had found a softer target. But he was wrong, as the federal court points out.

Reporting on court documents is protected under New York law. Splinter invoked this law to defend its reporting. The court agrees the law applies. Because it does, it has no reason to examine any other of Miller’s claims. From the decision [PDF]:

Under New York’s fair report privilege, codified in section 74 of its Civil Rights Law, “A civil action cannot be maintained against any person, firm, or corporation, for the publication of a fair and true report of any judicial proceeding . . . .” N.Y. Civ. Rights Law § 74 (alteration and emphasis added). The purpose of the statutory privilege is to protect reports of judicial proceedings “made in the public interest.”

Because Splinter was honest about how it obtained this document and, crucially, included the document itself in its post so readers could draw their own conclusions about the contained allegations, the court finds it fulfilled the requirements of the state law on court document reporting.

With the summary judgment standard in mind, review of the record shows the Article: (a) states the allegations come from an “explosive new court filing” in the “ongoing custody battle” between Plaintiff and Delgado (Article 2); (b) describes the “acrimony” between Plaintiff and Delgado (id. 4); (c) describes how Delgado obtained the information (see id.); (d) quotes the victim’s alleged reaction to the journalist, exactly as it is quoted in the Supplement (see id. (quoting Jane Doe stating: “Yes, that happened to me — how did you know? Who told you?” (internal quotation marks omitted)), see also Supplement 9 (same)); and significantly (e) embeds a full copy of the Supplement, so readers can review the Supplement without leaving the webpage (see Defs.’ SOF ¶ 91). Considering these undisputed facts, the Article is a substantially accurate report on the Supplement under New York law.

Always post documents. It’s amazing how many reporters treat court records as privileged information, limiting readers to the journalist’s interpretation of a ruling or filing. More generally, suing over reporting on court documents is a bad idea. If you can’t sue people for what they say about you in court, it would seem to follow that suing for reporting on what people said about you in court is a non-starter.

Court Tosses $100 Million Defamation Suit Brought By Former Trump Spokesman Over Reporting On Court Documents

More Law-Related Stories From Techdirt:

Ring Let Cops Know How Often Their Requests For Camera Footage Were Ignored
Judge Orders White House To Restore Reporter’s Press Pass It Illegally Removed
Federal Court Says The DHS’s Terrorist Watchlist Unconstitutionally Deprives Travelers Of Their Rights

Listen… typos happen. I get that. After all, I churn content daily for a blog, so I am well aware that that these small mistakes often happen in the rush to publish. Sometimes your brain just moves faster than you can type, or you mishit a key, or a sentence gets badly mangled in the self-editing process. All of which is to say, I really do sympathize and acknowledge that mistakes shouldn’t be a big deal.

But…

But when a publication is THE authority on legal citations that the law school perfectionist/overachievers known as gunners worship, well, then we’re going to take notice. After all it isn’t the first (or likely last) time Above the Law has documented a slew of errors in these pages. There’s just something so satisfying about seeing a a mistake in the tome that causes so much angst in law students. So we just had to post about it when an eagle-eyed tipster sent us a picture of a clear error in the Bluebook.

Now, is it a giant mistake? No, of course not. But it still elicits a smirk when I see it.

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).

Robert Mugabe, who led Zimbabwe for almost four decades, has died aged 95, leaving behind an indelible stain on his country’s human rights record, said Amnesty International.

His early years as leader of Zimbabwe, following the transition from British colonial rule, saw some notable achievements through his heavy investment in social services. Areas including health and education saw dramatic improvements, with the country still enjoying one of the highest literacy rates in Africa. However, he later eroded his own track record.

During his 37 years in power, he presided over the brutal repression of political opponents and established a culture of impunity for himself and his cronies, while his government implemented a series of policies that have had disastrous consequences.

“While casting himself as the saviour of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe inflicted lasting damage upon its people and its reputation,” said Muleya Mwananyanda, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for Southern Africa.

As a leader of the resistance to the white minority government of what was then known as Rhodesia, Mugabe began his political life fighting against injustice. Imprisoned and later exiled for his political activities, he was one of more than 900 prisoners of conscience adopted in Zimbabwe by Amnesty International between 1965 and 1979.

Boosted by his image as a champion of the victims of imperialism, Robert Mugabe became Zimbabwe’s first post-independence prime minister in 1980 on a platform of reconciliation.

However, shortly after taking office, he deployed the repressive machinery of the state against political opponents. During the 1980s, in a military crackdown, known as Gukurahundi – loosely translates as “the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains”, that widely targeted suspected opposition supporters, some 20,000 people were killed in Matabeleland and Midlands provinces. Many of the dead were unarmed civilians.

Amnesty International’s calls for the prosecution of suspected crimes committed by his supporters and by the security services went unheeded. In a warning that would prove prophetic, the human rights organization said at the time that a failure to hold anyone accountable for the Matabeleland and Midlands violations would set a dangerous precedent.

Though he came to office on a wave of popular support, Mugabe’s tenure as prime minister, and then as president, was defined by a stubborn determination to hold on to power – an end to which he sacrificed Zimbabwe’s economy, institutions, and society.

Throughout his presidency, general elections were marred by spikes in serious human rights violations and abuses by state security agents and ZANU-PF activists. Opposition supporters suffered torture, harassment, intimidation and even death. Some were disappeared without a trace.
In 2008, following his first-round ballot loss to the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) candidate Morgan Tsvangirai, the army unleashed a wave of violence in which more than 300 people were killed and thousands injured or tortured on suspicion of having voted for the opposition. The response saw opposition MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, withdrawing from the second round of voting.

Again, Amnesty International called for the crimes to be investigated. Again, the call went unheeded.

“Whenever Mugabe felt under pressure he defaulted to sanctioning human rights violations, publicly defending the actions of his officials’,” said Muleya Mwananyanda.

The early progress made by Mugabe’s government on economic, social and cultural rights was wiped out by a series of disastrous government policy decisions.

In 2000, Mugabe sanctioned a violent land reform programme, ostensibly to redress skewed land distribution resulting from 90 years of colonial rule.  While the need for land reform was legitimate, Mugabe used the redistribution programme as a system of patronage, rewarding his supporters with land while denying those considered political opponents. The programme was also used as a front to disguise the violent targeting of farm workers who had supported the opposition.

In 2005 Mugabe presided over one of the most disastrous forced eviction campaigns in African history. Known as Operation Murambatsvina – a Shona word meaning “drive out trash” – it targeted urban shack dwellers. The United Nations estimated that 700,000 people had their homes, livelihoods, or both, destroyed.  The evictions drove most of the affected people deeper into poverty, with many continuing to live without access to health, education and other basic services.

An increasing reliance on his security services to suppress dissenting voices within and outside his party became a hallmark of the latter years of his rule. Opponents including human rights defenders, journalists and opposition party activists were locked up on politically motivated charges or under draconian laws. The less fortunate were killed. Mugabe was also uncompromising in his opposition to LGBT rights, saying that they were “worse than dogs and pigs”, and favoured more anti-homosexual legislation.

Escaping repression and a shrinking economy, an estimated three million Zimbabweans have left the country since 2000.

Finally forced to resign in November 2017, his long-time lieutenant Emmerson Mnangagwa – later his political rival in the jostling for the control of Zimbabwe with the ruling ZANU-PF – engineered his exit from the presidency with the backing of the army.

“Mugabe leaves behind permanent scars of his brutal rule. Going forward, those who come after him must forge a national healing programme, beginning with accountability for the past human rights violations. Zimbabweans deserve the truth,” said Muleya Mwananyanda.

Post published in: Featured

The end of an era in Zimbabwe’s history has come. Robert Mugabe died in Singapore on 6 September 2019 aged 95. Ironically he did not die in his own country which he ruled for 38 years or in a Zimbabwean government hospital where doctors are on strike and where hospital staff were last week reprimanded at Chitungwiza Hospital for eating patients’ food.  He did not die in a Zimbabwean hospital where patients must pay cash upfront for everything from medicines, splints, bandages, syringes and needles to drips, injections, anaesthetists, specialists and surgery.

Robert Mugabe   21 February 1924 – 6 September 2019.
Prime Minister and President of Zimbabwe  April 1980 – 21 November 2017.

17 April 1980 on the eve of Zimbabwe’s Independence, Robert Mugabe said: “An evil remains an evil whether practiced by white against black or by black against white. Our majority rule could easily turn into inhuman rule if we oppressed, persecuted or harassed those who do not look or think like the majority of us. Democracy is never mob-rule.”

About the massacre of 20,000 people in Matabeleand by the 5^th Brigade of the Zimbabwean army between 1983 and 1987, Robert Mugabe said:” it was a moment of madness.

2000: Referring to white Zimbabweans during the invasions of commercial farms by Zanu PF supporters and war veterans: “You are now our enemies because you really have behaved as enemies of Zimbabwe. We are full of anger. Our entire community is angry and that is why we now have the war veterans seizing land.”

2006 on the arrest and torture of fifteen trade union activists in Zimbabwe: “Some are crying that they were beaten. Yes you will be thoroughly beaten. When the police say move you move. If you don’t move, you invite the police to use force.”

2008 in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe: “Only God who appointed me will remove me, not the MDC, not the British.”

2010 in Zimbabwe about gays and lesbians:  “Worse than pigs and dogs… Those who do it, we will say, they are wayward. It is just madness, insanity.”

Cathy Buckle, Zimbabwe.  6 September 2019. www.cathybuckle.co.zw

Post published in: Featured

The spousal privilege is the privilege I understand the most. It’s the privilege that, to me, seems most grounded in real, equitable concerns. Sure, the attorney-client privilege is necessary from a pure “process” standpoint. Other privileges allow other professional classes to their jobs free of criminal concerns. But that spousal privilege just seems like a thing that gets to the heart of keeping the state out of your life. The fact that nothing you say to your spouse can be used against you in a court of law makes me feel safe. If you ask me, I think the spousal privilege should extend to Alexa.

According to the state of New Mexico, not only am I wrong, but I am advocating for a misogynistic anachronism that no longer tracks with the real world. The New Mexico Supreme Court has become the first court in the nation to abolish the spousal privilege! The fact that this isn’t somehow front page news leading the entire legal press perhaps shows just how out of touch I am. From the ABA Journal:

The court said the privilege “has outlived its useful life,” report the Legal Profession Blog and the Associated Press. Justifications that have been cited for the privilege “seem little more than soaring rhetoric and legally irrelevant sentimentality,” the court said in its Aug. 30 opinion.

“We believe that the privilege is a vestige of a vastly different society than the one we live in today and has been retained in New Mexico simply through inertia,” the court said in a majority opinion by Chief Justice Judith Nakamura.

I mean, sure, the spousal privilege can be abused. So can all privileges. And sure, it comes from an inherently flawed view that a “wife’s” legal existence was inseparable from her husband’s. That’s bad. If that was sum total of the privilege’s continued existence, we should burn it to the ground. But the court goes this far:

But the privilege rests on assumptions that spouses are aware that the privilege exists, and that they rely on it when deciding how much information to share, the New Mexico Supreme Court said. Those assumptions are untested and do not survive scrutiny, according to the court.

Look, if we judged privileges by whether people know they exist and how they work, no privileges would exist. Whether a person knows that post-coital pillow talk (with your spouse) is inadmissible should be irrelevant. The issue should be whether people have a reasonable expectation that their communications are private. I’d argue that the confines of one’s relationship is where the expectation of privacy is the strongest. I don’t have to know how it works to know, and justifiably rely upon the fact, that when I fantasize with my spouse the six people I’d like to see die in a structure fire, that’s not going to come back on me if one of those people ends up falling down an elevator shaft in our building. I don’t think that because I went to law school, I think that because I know the difference between private and public speech.

We don’t need to abolish the marital privilege because it started from a place of sexism and traditional relationships, we need to expand it to include all of the private relationships we now have that aren’t officially licensed marriage. I can think of nothing more relevant to the modern world than expanding the scope of privacy that we can justifiably rely upon, given technology’s ever present encroachment on our private lives. You shouldn’t have to be “married” to expect that the things you say to your partner while you’re both getting ready for work are subject to some basic legal privileges. I mean, as long as you keep it to yourselves and don’t act like social media is also private, the privilege should extend to a wider array of relationships and choices.

On the other hand:

The court also noted that the privilege was adopted at a time when the wife’s legal existence was deemed to be suspended during marriage or incorporated into the husband’s legal existence. Critics point to that history and say the privilege creates a disparate gender impact because it is more often invoked by men than women and is often used to isolate families from state interference, the court said.

“The misogynistic history of the privilege is obvious and odious,” the court said.

I mean, they’re not wrong. I’m arguing about how the privilege should be used, the court is arguing about how the privilege has been used. The court has the right of that battle.

And if people would like to agree with me, maybe the New Mexico state legislature could re-write this thing along more progressive and modern lines.

Spousal communication privilege ‘has outlived its useful life,’ state supreme court says [ABA Journal]

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.

LeClairRyan, once a 400-attorney firm with offices across the country, has filed for bankruptcy. The filing has been expected ever since the firm’s dramatic, highly public meltdown began in July with the departure of its founding partner, Gary LeClair, which I’ve been tracing in this column for the past month.

For this last of three pieces about LeClairRyan, I spoke with former firm partners who were there for a key transitional point in the firm’s management culture. The portrait they painted was one of a firm culture that shifted from openness to secrecy, and from meritocracy to patronage, and from smart growth to a desperate search for cash to cover for past mistakes. But more than anything, the story that starts to emerge is one that reads more like that of a would-be emperor imperceptibly and unwittingly transforming into an ersatz Bernie Madoff. Gary LeClair aggressively pursued growth for his firm, at first for its own sake, but later because that growth may have been all that was keeping the firm afloat. When that unsustainable growth stopped, the wheels came off, and the knives came out.

 The Golden Era

Business was booming throughout the legal industry in the mid-1990s, and LeClairRyan was taking advantage. According to former partner David Nagle, Gary LeClair was successfully growing his firm by luring over young business generating partners from throughout Virginia with his mantra of “mutual trust and respect.” A primary selling point was a transparent, open compensation system. “It had one of the most appealing and novel approaches to compensation, called the ‘consensus exercise,’ where all of the equity partners essentially took the total compensation budget, calculated by Gary, and submitted their own charts as to how it should be divided amongst the various partners.” While not binding, this open forum for discussion made sure every equity partner felt heard, and understood why final compensation decisions were made.

Another former partner, John Fitzpatrick, referred to the LeClairRyan of the 90s as a “true meritocracy,” one where the people who produced got rewarded for their effort, far better than they would have at older firms that were more interested in maintaining the older partners’ salaries.

The tech bubble collapse of 2001 was what first put those ideals to the test. Both Gary LeClair and the firm he built relied heavily on servicing entrepreneurial tech companies. LeClair’s book was reportedly decimated, seemingly overnight, and the firm’s financial bedrock was shaken. Firm lawyers, including LeClair, who once commanded top-tier compensation, faced a far more uncertain future.

In response, the old open-compensation system was progressively closed, and compensation decisions were increasingly vested in the hands of LeClair and his compensation committee. Per Nagle, “we went from a real meritocracy, where compensation was based on full disclosure of numbers, to a system that, by the time I left, had evolved where there was very little input from anyone beyond the core leadership group, and there was very little tolerance for dissent or desire for disclosure.”

With decisions now made behind closed doors, the mutual trust LeClairRyan was built on started to erode. A perception began to arise that LeClair and his favored lieutenants were keeping their salaries buoyed by the profits of more productive partners. Not only did the move toward a functionally closed system make lawyers, who are skeptical by nature, concerned about what was happening with compensation, but it seems that it contributed to driving away lawyers and practices that were profit centers for the firm. When rainmakers don’t see the benefits of their own hard work and growth, they become poised to leave for a new firm more willing to pay them what they’re worth. LeClairRyan found itself vulnerable to the same poaching of profitable attorneys it had been so successful at just a few years earlier.

The Band-Aid of Growth

Rather than make the hard choices such as cutting unproductive partners’ salaries (or his own), LeClair instead made a play for growth. In the short term, the plan was to take in existing practices, bringing in new profit centers to shore up declining profits elsewhere. In the long term, the hope was to expand the firm’s national footprint and top-line numbers to entice a fat corporate buyout once state bars began to allow non-attorney ownership of law firms.

The long-term plan fizzled when the predicted sea change in legal ethics rules never came to pass. But the short-term effects of this rapid expansion were also more detrimental than helpful. LeClairRyan expanded aggressively, bringing in small practices with questionable profitability on guaranteed, multi-year salary contracts. Small offices are notoriously expensive, and rarely benefit from the economies of scale that larger law firm satellites enjoy. LeClairRyan’s top line kept expanding, as did Gary LeClair’s empire, but expenses kept pace, and in some cases exceeded the new revenue brought in.

In the last few years, it appears LeClairRyan found itself chasing endless cash infusions to cover the losses its prior decisions had wrought. The ill-fated preferred stock plan, discussed in my last column, kept funds flowing for a while on the promise of a big payout once the firm was bought out. LeClairRyan received a $20M cash injection when it announced its partnership with alternative legal services provider UnitedLex, which I profiled previously. That partnership is now listed as being owed $8M plus interest in LeClairRyan’s bankruptcy schedules.

I don’t believe Gary LeClair set out with anything but the best of intentions in mind. But by the end of the road, LeClairRyan stumbled into being both the perpetrator and the victim of an inadvertent Ponzi scheme. It made bad decisions that cut into its profits, and so made more bad decisions to bring in new sources of funding to cover the shortfall. Then it needed more funding to replace the new funding it brought in, and on, and on, until the company had grown itself into a sudden and thunderous collapse.

Why This Matters

These past few pieces have been close to my heart. I manage a law firm that, up until a few weeks ago, I would have considered a peer of LeClairRyan. I needed to understand why and how such a seemingly forward-thinking firm, one that in some respects seemed to be a model of the forward thinking and experimentation that I champion, could go so wrong so quickly.

While we’ve only gotten a glimpse of the problems LeClairRyan faced, it’s apparent now that their biggest enemy was ignoring an unsustainable present by hoping for a possible future. A firm that doesn’t compensate and retain its dollar-producing partners isn’t going to last. Accurately valuing and pricing the contributions, both monetary and intangible, of each partner is more crucial than ever in a legal market poised for further contraction and more ruthless competition. Similarly, a firm needs confidence in the good faith of its leadership, and leaders need to earn that over time. A partnership needs to know that its leaders will make the tough choices — even when those choices are unpopular or difficult. Some decisions have to be made behind closed doors. When those decisions spawn fear and skepticism, rather than trust, nothing good can or will follow.

LeClairRyan forgot the lessons it built itself on, and died as a result. The only question remaining is how many of us left behind will learn from this collapse, and how many will continue marching proudly toward catastrophe.

James Goodnow

James Goodnow is an attorney, commentator, and Above the Law columnist. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and is the managing partner of NLJ 250 firm Fennemore Craig. He is the co-author of Motivating Millennials, which hit number one on Amazon in the business management new release category. As a practitioner, he and his colleagues created a tech-based plaintiffs’ practice and business model. You can connect with James on Twitter (@JamesGoodnow) or by emailing him at James@JamesGoodnow.com.