Author: TSA Press

We Use A Lot Of Concrete

I spent this Labor Day at one of my favorite museums. You really can’t help but learn something useful every time you go there. I’d gone in already having a pretty good idea as to what I’d be writing about this week, and as luck would have it, stumbled upon a little something that helped me along in my research.

Human beings need a lot of resources to survive, and especially to survive in style with iPhones and whatnot. The most-consumed material on earth is probably not a surprise to you. It’s water. But the second most-consumed material isn’t as obvious: reinforced concrete.

Each year, we use three metric tons of the stuff for every person on earth. That’s a lot of concrete. Reinforced concrete is the world’s most common building material, and ever since French gardener Joseph Monier came up with the stuff in 1867, the artificial environment we construct for ourselves has never been the same. Thanks for the helpful background info, Science Museum!

Concrete Is Awful For The Earth, But What If You Could Make It Out Of Ganja?

While reinforced concrete has proven terribly useful over the last century-and-a-half, it’s also proven terribly, well, terrible in terms of its environmental consequences. Cement makers can take credit for about seven percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. The limestone kilns required to produce cement, and therefore to produce concrete, are not exactly ecofriendly. The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere in the process of making cement weighs half as much as the cement produced, according to the European Cement Association.

Now, bear with me here, because a possible solution to this problem at first sounds like a half-baked idea that came from your fully-baked friends: what if we just all built our houses out of weed?

Thanks to some wonderful reporting from Bloomberg, we now know that this is sort of already a thing. It is not actually marijuana that is being used as a building material, of course, but rather marijuana’s industrious (and non-psychoactive) cousin, hemp.

Hemp is a pretty useful plant. In addition to its many other applications, hemp has been used as a building material since the days of the Roman Empire, when engineers mixed its strong fibers into the mortar they used to hold up bridges, many of which stand to this day. In newer structures, we use modern hempcrete, a combination of the inner woody core of the hemp plant and a lime-based or clay-based binder. Like its reinforced concrete antecedent, hempcrete was also developed in France.

Fully cured hempcrete weighs only about a seventh or an eighth of the weight of concrete. Compared to their concrete counterparts, hempcrete buildings have better temperature regulation, ventilation, and fire resistance. Maybe best of all, hempcrete is carbon negative. Growing hemp absorbs CO₂, and the plant continues to soak up carbon as it’s mixed with lime or clay. According to Canadian builder Just BioFiber, each cubic meter of its hemp-based structural material entraps 287 pounds of carbon dioxide, which is more CO₂ than is emitted during production.

Maybe The U.S. Should Get Over Itself And Stop Ceding The Hemp Market To Europe And Canada

Hempcrete is not a replacement for concrete in all circumstances. It does not have the same load-bearing capabilities of traditional concrete. Still, in Europe, buildings as high as 10 stories have been built using hempcrete.

Hemp’s proven utility abroad is finally winning it some fans again in North America. The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology reported that Canadian hemp sales reached $140 million last year, and could hit $1 billion within five years. In the United States, over the last half-century growing hemp has been largely illegal because of its resemblance to marijuana. However, the 2018 Farm Bill removed hemp from the controlled substances act and legalized its cultivation under certain circumstances. A number of states have since taken steps to ramp up production, although at this point it’s still a bit of a legal nightmare to actually get from a hemp seed to a building component in the U.S. Only a few dozen homes nationwide contain hemp as a building material.

Hempcrete is a hearty, sustainable, environmentally friendly, and profitable building material that can be produced in close proximity to the buildings it is actually used to construct. Sounds like a good way to help out the struggling farm economy, and maybe even gin up some work for the legal industry in unentangling over half a century of misguided regulation.

Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

According to Student Loan Hero’s 20 Best Law Schools for Avoiding Six-Figure Student Debt, which law school comes in at the top spot?

Hint: The average law school debt at graduation at this school is only $58,113, but it comes with a significant caveat.

See the answer on the next page.

Steven Chung’s recent post about the closing of Whittier Law School was a perfect eulogy. I, too, am a graduate of Whittier, but some 30-odd years before him. Take a trip with me in Professor Peabody’s wayback machine to the 1970s, long before most, if not all, of the ATL readership was alive.  I had written my own requiem for Whittier when the school first announced it was closing.

Most of the lawyers in this country are what Bill Henderson calls “people lawyers,” those who represent individuals and small businesses in cases that are what I call “one-offs.” One divorce, one bankruptcy, one estate planning, and so on. Clients come for help for these kinds of cases and there is usually no repeat business, but possible future referrals. These are the cases that have composed the bread and butter of so many lawyers’ practices for so many years.  Whittier was that kind of law school, a “people law” school.

Just thinking back on my law school class, there was those of us who went into government (both the DA and PD offices), and one enterprising duo set up an unlawful detainer practice. Many of us went into solo or small firm practices, doing exactly the kind of work representing people, not big hulking behemoth corporations.

Ha, but you reply, none of you were ever hired by Biglaw, which wasn’t even a term coined back then. (I don’t know if any of the “Biglaw” firms then even had enough lawyers to qualify for the term.) We were not naïve about hiring practices at the “chichi” law firms.

One of the reasons that most of us became lawyers was for autonomy, for independence, for the ability to represent people to the best of our abilities or to fire those clients who wouldn’t take our advice or who complained about the bills once too often. That is enormous freedom, and one of the reasons that many lawyers practicing in this country are either solos or in small firms.  (I’ve never understood how lawyers, who have a reputation for being independent, can shoehorn themselves into the corporate milieu that Biglaw has become. But that’s a topic for another time.)

In the early days, Whittier classes were composed of second careerists, those who had decided that there had to be something more rewarding, more challenging, and yes, even more lucrative than what we had been doing. Granted, it was a lot easier in those long-ago days to switch careers and to attend law school without incurring ginormous debt. We had no illusions about Biglaw careers. No one bothered to even interview at such places, as rejection was a fait accompli. We knew that we didn’t have the purportedly important credentials such as law review or Order of the Coif, but that didn’t matter to us.

We knew what we did have: a legal education that allowed Whittier to enjoy for a time the highest bar passage rate in the state. We understood the law and what it took to be a lawyer.  For the most part, our classes were not taught by academics, those far from the maddening crowd of practice, but by adjuncts who balanced their practices with teaching us not only law, but about real life situations they faced as lawyers.

Some of the early Whittier graduates were appointed to the Superior Court, the Court of Appeal, and the United States District Court for the Central District, despite the lack of “pedigree.” The school’s alumni today include judges and general counsels, but mainly lawyers practicing in the trenches.

Until a decade or so ago, I thought that pedigree referred to dogs, not people. I was misinformed. If I could cartoon, I would draw a pure-bred Golden Retriever puppy (not that I know what a purebred looks like, but work with me here) sitting anxiously at the feet of a lawyer who barks (pun intended) commands to the puppy, who looks confused and uncertain. “Pedigree” shouldn’t and doesn’t matter.

What matters is the kind of lawyer you become, the kind of lawyer you are, 10, 20, 30 years out. In fact, there is a school of thought that thinks that where you went to law school is irrelevant, that pedigree should be confined to canines. There’s evidence that a focus on law school pedigree does not help firms hire successful attorneys.

Malcolm Gladwell thinks that once out of law school, lawyers should adopt a version of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Employers shouldn’t ask where you went to law school, and you shouldn’t tell them where. Works for me and probably many others. Law school pedigree confers a false sense of security about a person’s ability to be a good lawyer.

Whittier is gone. A lamentable bar passage rate doomed it, since if you didn’t have a ticket, you didn’t get to participate. I lay at least part of the failure at the feet of the school. Declining enrollment, difficulties in finding jobs, tuition increases, and student debt all contributed. However, at the end of the day, it’s the bar passage rate that controls a school’s success, and Whittier either should have flunked students out who didn’t have a decent chance to pass or provided more help to those who were floundering.

Many Whittier grads today are solos and small firm lawyers, the kinds of lawyers we need if we ever have any hope of increasing access to justice — in other words, “people lawyers.” Kudos to Whittier, which had a very diverse student body, a pipeline for the profession in terms of diversity and inclusion, something very much needed if the profession is to reflect ever how we truly look. The more inclusive the better.

Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for over 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.

Home DNA kits are bringing sperm and egg donor anonymity to an end. The popular holiday present has provided a new mode of easy access to reliable information on our genetic makeup and, more importantly to some, our genetic relatives. Donor-conceived persons are now finding out information that was previously kept intentionally unavailable — the identity of their genetically connected donor parent.

While the reality of information access has changed practically overnight, the law, at least in the United States, has been slow to shift. In some countries — Australia and much of Europe, to name a few — donor anonymity is not an option. These countries give donor-conceived persons the ability to have access to their biological history, even where a donor would prefer to remain anonymous. In many countries, this means that upon becoming a legal adult, the donor-conceived person will learn the identity of his or her donor.

The U.S. has been reluctant to regulate gamete donations, but we are starting to see the sprouts of change. In 2011, Washington State was the first to challenge sperm and egg donor anonymity with a law that requires sperm banks and egg donation agencies with gametes from Washington State to provide the donor’s medical histories and, importantly, full names to donor-conceived persons upon turning 18 years of age. Of course, the law has a major caveat. The agencies and banks are only required to provide the information if the gamete donor did not affirmatively opt out of being identified.

California is now taking a similar path — only with a little more effort to help out donor-conceived persons. As of January 1, 2020, California’s new Health and Safety Code Sec 1644.3, will lead to additional donor identity disclosure. The new law provides that:

(a) On request of a child conceived by assisted reproduction who attains 18 years of age, a gamete bank licensed in this state … shall provide the child with identifying information of the donor who provided the gametes, unless the donor signed and did not withdraw a declaration under paragraph (2) of subdivision (b) of Section 1644.2. If the donor signed and did not withdraw the declaration, the gamete bank shall make a good faith effort to notify the donor, who may elect under subdivision (c) of Section 1644.2 to withdraw the declaration and agree to release the donor’s information.

So even if the donor did opt out of having his or her identity revealed, upon the request of a donor-conceived person, the gamete bank has an affirmative duty to notify the donor as to the request, and allow that donor another chance with withdraw the declaration. The law didn’t go so far as to insert a guilt trip call from the child desperate to have knowledge of their biological parent, but close enough.

The new law goes on to provide that regardless of whether the donor signed a waiver, the donor-conceived person or, prior to the age of 18, his or her parents, shall have a right to the donor’s non-identifying medical information. Theoretically, the parents and donor-conceived person should already have that from when they went through the donor process. But it is still good to have legal confirmation of the child’s right to access information that could be important to the donor-conceived person’s health.

I spoke with California assisted reproductive technology attorney Amira Hasenbush about the new law. She thought it was a positive step for those conceived via gamete donation. She pointed out an interesting quirk in the law. In cases where the clinic failed to offer or keep a copy of a donor’s waiver, the clinic will be obligated to disclose the donor’s identity. Of course, she also noted that based on her experience with donors and recipients, it is not the donors who are as concerned about anonymity — and for those who are, they can choose to stop donating. She finds that it is more commonly the recipient parents who fear the repercussions of a  donor entering their child’s life. The law in California is clear that the gamete recipients are the legal parents, but for some, the fear appears to be more about the emotional impact than the legal impact.

Time — a lot of time — will tell the impact of this new law. The effective date of January 1, 2020, applies to gametes collected after that date. Meaning that the first child to turn 18 from such gametes will not occur until at least 2038. And, at this rate, we may all have been taken out by a hurricane by that time.

Ellen Trachman is the Managing Attorney of Trachman Law Center, LLC, a Denver-based law firm specializing in assisted reproductive technology law, and co-host of the podcast I Want To Put A Baby In You. You can reach her at babies@abovethelaw.com.

In a world of “do more with less,” corporate legal operations teams are often faced with an increasing contract volume but with no additional resources. Whether you use a homegrown or an older solution that’s just not working anymore, or you have no solution at all, chances are that the growth in your contract volume and complexity are difficult to manage and resource intensive. Join us for a webinar that will focus on:

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Click here to learn from our panel of experts on Friday, September 27, at 1 p.m.  Our panel will be moderated by Jared Correia, the CEO of Red Cave Consulting, and he will be joined by Stephanie Corey, a widely respected veteran in the legal ops field and co-founder of UpLevelOps, and Matt Patel, a CLM solution expert with over 15 years of experience in CLM technology and co-founder of Malbek.

A tipster writes:

So WMU-Cooley reduces tuition by 21% and it’s reported everywhere but you clowns don’t even mention it?

Sorry, we cover law schools, not profit centers. While we’re at it, the headline should probably have some air quotes in there.

But, yes, as the ABA Journal pointed out yesterday, the program known as Thomas M. Cooley Law School before hitching up with Western Michigan University for branding purposes — despite the affiliation with a public institution, Cooley remains a private school — just announced that they will slash tuition 21 percent and close one of its four campuses. It’s the latest in the sad tale of Cooley’s sagging reputation — seriously, when Michael Cohen went there it was a perfectly fine school — and rather than being welcome news of a tuition reduction, only highlights how wildly out of hand its tuition had gotten.

Closing a campus is part of the natural ebb and flow for Cooley, which closed its Ann Arbor campus five years ago. The tuition cut is more “newsworthy” given that the school had hitherto exhibited the gall to charge a non-discounted price tag of $267,747 for the “honor” of graduating from a school with only 32.4 percent of grads in jobs requiring bar passage and a bar passage rate that sunk to 43.7 percent last year. This was, of course, after the ABA backed off of its accreditation challenge after Cooley filed an intimidating lawsuit against the organization for daring to adhere to its standards.

So dropping the tuition portion of that down makes it, what, $220K? This puts the school back to where it was in the early years of this decade when it was still overpriced and underperforming. It’s been “Rank Not Published” by USNWR for so long it’s forgotten what numbers even mean.

But the school will always be second to Harvard in our hearts.

In any event, yes, Cooley is lowering its tuition to a still absurd level despite no obvious change in the school’s performance. And so, we shall dutifully clown them.

Cooley Law School cuts tuition and seeks to close satellite campus [ABA Journal]

Earlier: Yet Another Subpar Law School Sues The ABA In ‘Accreditation-By-Lawsuit’ Strategy
Cooley Law School To ‘Cease Operations’ At One Of Its Campuses
Latest Cooley Law School Rankings Achieve New Heights of Intellectual Dishonesty

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.

I don’t fly American Airlines unless I absolutely have to. And by “absolutely have to,” I mean that my company buys me a ticket on American and is willing to withstand me complaining about my (free) ticket for a week while making veiled threats at filing a hostile work environment claim. American Airlines is not good to black people, says the NAACP. Air travel, in general, is not good to people, but if you can’t distinguish between the experiences of black passengers versus white ones, you’re a racism apologist. And if you can’t distinguish between American and other airlines — which are also crappy — then you are one of those “both parties are the same” idiots.

Yes, things are bad for everybody, everywhere, but American is worse. The latest evidence of that comes from Dana Holcomb. Holcomb is a black man who was trying to fly, first-class, from Vegas back to Austin. The flight had a layover in Phoenix. A woman got on and sat next to him with an “emotional support” lapdog. Holcomb is allergic to dogs. And then American did its thing. From RawStory:

Admitting that he was [allergic to her dog], he said the woman attempted to find another seat but could not be accommodated which led to flight attendants and then a pilot to become involved, telling him to move to another seat in the back of the plane.

According to Holcomb, the flight attendant, “Began to get really irate because he was insisting that I go to that seat.”

Holcomb’s attorney, Reginald McKamie Sr., explained the lawsuit he filed on his client’s behalf against the airline, stating, “At that point (workers) told him you’re going to go to the rear of the plane or get off the plane.”

Holcomb was removed from the flight, which left without even getting his bags off. Those bags included his medications. He had to spend the night in Phoenix. American Airlines claims, in a statement, that Holcomb was removed because he became “confrontational.”

I’m mildly allergic to cats. Not nearly as allergic as Holcomb appears to be to dogs. If a cat were in the seat next to me, it would make my flight bad, but I probably wouldn’t make a whole thing about it. UNTIL THEY TOLD ME TO SIT AT THE BACK OF THE PLANE. That is about when I’d lose my ever-loving mind. I’ve got a first-class ticket and you’re going to tell me, but not the lady with the animal, to move to the BACK of the plane? No. Nah, son. I get “confrontational” AF when I have to remind people to Google Rosa Parks.

Holcomb plans to sue American for racial discrimination. I know some white people are reading this and thinking “that could happen to anybody, why you gotta bring race into it?” First of all, I hate you people, please know that. But the core of the discrimination point is not about American choosing dogs over people, it’s about kicking a black man off a flight because he refused to be treated worse than a dog.

Holcomb stated that woman did eventually find another passenger willing to switch seats with her, but that he was booted from the plane — as well as the airport — by American anyway and was accused of being “confrontational.”

That’s what doesn’t happen to white people. The situation resolved itself. The woman (and while I’m not on board with the proliferation of emotional support animals, the woman in this story seems generally blameless) found another seat. The tempest was quelled. But American STILL kicked Holcomb off the plane and out of the airport. Why? Did he do anything that necessitated the pressing of charges? Evidently not. No, they kicked him off and out because they didn’t like his “attitude.” They decided to humiliate him, because he refused to be moved to the back of the plane like freaking chattel.

The lesson, as always: Do Not Fly American. If it’s cheaper, it’s not worth the cost savings. If it’s quicker, it’s not worth the time savings. They’re the world’s largest airline and, therefore, hard to avoid. It’s nearly impossible to fly into or through Dallas or Charlotte or Miami or Phoenix without them. But it’s always worth it to try. Make American your airline of last resort, and if you are black, make sure you wear a body camera if you take one of their flights. You’ll thank me later.

American Airlines booted allergic black man from plane so dog could fly first class: lawsuit [Raw Story]

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.

Sure, it’s possible to close a firm and wind down operations sans a bankruptcy filing, but that was simply not in the cards for LeClairRyan. And since we already knew the firm was having issues paying monies owed, well, it isn’t particularly surprising they went this route.

Yesterday, LeClairRyan filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the Eastern District of Virginia. According to the filing, the firm has two secured creditors to which they owe almost $15 million — ULXP, which is the joint venture between the firm and alternative legal services provider UnitedLex as part of the attempt to start a “law firm 2.0” and ABL Alliance LLLP, the firm’s primary lender. In addition, LeClairRyan noted its unsecured creditors — more than 200 but fewer than 1,000 — were owed somewhere between $10 million and $50 million.

As reported by Law.com, former LeClairRyan general counsel Lori Thompson is heading up the firm’s wind down activities and is busy reducing overhead:

Thompson’s declaration in support of the bankruptcy petition revealed that since the firm’s members voted to dissolve July 29, a move it confirmed to the public 10 days later, she and securities attorney Christopher Lange were the only two names left on the committee. Former CEO Erik Gustafson and former New Haven, Connecticut, office leader Richard “Deke” Bowerman have since stepped down.

Thompson said that between the dissolution vote and the Chapter 11 filing, LeClairRyan has taken steps to reduce its overhead, closing down operations at all of the 25 offices it once operated around the country, with the exception of fewer than 10 employees who are overseeing the firm’s wind down.

Though the move was not unexpected, it is not necessarily easy. As Leslie Corwin, partner at the boutique firm Eisner, told Law.com, things are bound to get messy:

“I’ve never seen these things go smoothly,” said Corwin, who has handled the bankruptcies of former legal luminaries Heller Ehrman and Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault, and also represented now-defunct WolfBlock in its years-long, out-of-court liquidation process. “I think it’s hard on the former partners and staff of LeClairRyan. Their lives are going to be disrupted for a long period of time.”

It’s clear that though LeClairRyan may be gone, their legal (and financial) woes are far from over.

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).