Author: TSA Press

Everyone loved Jurassic Park. It was one of the most groundbreaking films of all time, had a massive cultural impact, and the CGI still holds up today. Then came The Lost World, which recycled much of the what made the first film a success, to lesser effect. Next was  Jurassic Park III, to lesser effect yet. Fourteen years later, the franchise returned with Jurassic World, which largely repeated the plot of the first, but was well received because of the long wait, but then came Jurassic World: Lost Kingdom, which was less so.

The franchise’s diminishing returns came because it kept doing the same thing. Afraid to take chances, it repeated itself to its detriment.

So too is it dangerous to fall into the trap of boilerplate. Both in contract drafting and briefing, it can be tempting to reuse material without enough thought.

DON’T REPEAT YOURSELF

But you shouldn’t reuse that material. You can always do better if you take the time to rewrite it. You’re in the business of producing bespoke products, not mass produced ones.

Following a formula is fine, but any time you just drop in text you’ve used before, the reader zones out, just like you did when you watched Fallen Kingdom. And that’s especially bad when the reader is you or a judge.

DON’T JUST COPY LANGUAGE FROM OTHER CONTRACTS

One of the worst possible attitudes when drafting contracts is that anything is “boilerplate.” That attitude is how sloppy language gets unthinkingly copied, half amended, and eventually results in a rambling, tangled mess that no one reads until there’s a dispute, while the writer justifies it by telling themselves and anyone who asks that it’s “standard boilerplate.”

Don’t do that. Do your own work and actually write the provisions you’re drafting. It’s fine to look at precedent, but if you don’t understand why something’s there, you shouldn’t be putting it in your contract.

WRITE YOUR OWN BRIEF

You should also write your own brief. It doesn’t matter if it’s the fourth similar motion in a row in the case and you really want to just reuse the same statement of facts. Write it again and make it different and better.

First, the reader will stop reading. Every reader zones out if they think the writer didn’t put thought into what they’re reading, and often the reader will just skip ahead. You have limited briefing space and you don’t want to waste it on filler. And if it is wasted, it shouldn’t be there at all.

Second, almost anything you write will be improved by rewriting it, especially after a break. No matter how great what you wrote three months ago was, doing it again now will make it better.

TAKE EVERYTHING YOU WRITE SERIOUSLY

In short, you should treat what you write seriously. You’re a professional writer and you should act like it. Stephen King doesn’t phone it in, even if his works are similar. You shouldn’t phone it in either. Instead, take some pride in your work, sit down, and give it another go. Then maybe watch Jurassic Park again, because the original really does hold up.

Matthew W. Schmidt has represented and counseled clients at all stages of litigation and in numerous matters including insider trading, fiduciary duty, antitrust law, and civil RICO. He is of counsel at the trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at matthew.w.schmidt@balestrierefariello.com.

There seems to be some recurrent confusion about Section 230: how can it let a website be immune from liability for its users’ content, and yet still get to affect whether and how that content is delivered? Isn’t that inconsistent?

The answer is no: platforms don’t lose Section 230 protection if they aren’t neutral with respect to the content they carry. There are a few reasons, one being constitutional. The First Amendment protects editorial discretion, even for companies.

But another big reason is statutory, which is what this post is about. Platforms have the discretion to choose what content to enable, because making those moderating choices is one of the things that Section 230 explicitly gives them protection to do.

The key here is that Section 230 in fact provides two interrelated forms of protection for Internet platforms as part of one comprehensive policy approach to online content. It does this because Congress actually had two problems that it was trying to solve when it passed it. One was that Congress was worried about there being too much harmful content online. We see this evidenced in the fact that Section 230 was ultimately passed as part of the “Communications Decency Act,” a larger bill aimed at minimizing undesirable material online.

Meanwhile Congress was also worried about losing beneficial online content. This latter concern was particularly acute in the wake of the Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy case, where an online platform was held liable for its user’s content. If platforms could be held liable for the user content they facilitated, then they would be unlikely to facilitate it, which would lead to a reduction in beneficial online activity and expression, which, as we can see from the first two subsections of Section 230 itself, was something Congress wanted to encourage.

To address these twin concerns, Congress passed Section 230 with two complementary objectives: encourage the most good content, and the least bad. Section 230 was purposefully designed to achieve both these ends by providing online platforms with what are ultimately two complementary forms of protection.

The first is the one that people are most familiar with, the one that keeps platforms from being held liable for how users use their systems and services. It’s at 47 U.S.C. Section 230(c)(1).

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

It’s important to remember that all this protection provision does is say that the platform cannot be held liable for what users do online; it in no way prohibits users themselves from being held liable. It just means that platforms won’t have to be afraid of its users’ online activity and thus feel pressured to overly restrict it.

Meanwhile, there’s also another lesser-known form of protection built into Section 230, at 47 U.S.C. Section 230(c)(2). What this protection does is also make it safe for platforms to moderate their services if they choose to. Because it means they can choose to.

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or (B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).

Some courts have even read subsection (c)(1) to also cover these moderation decisions too. But ultimately, the wisdom of Section 230 is that it recognizes that to get the best results – the most good content and also the least bad – it needs to ensure platforms can feel safe to do what they can to advance both of these things. If they had to fear liability for how they chose to be platforms, they would be much less effective partners in achieving either. For instance, if a platform had to fear legal consequences for removing user content, they simply wouldn’t. (We know this from FOSTA, which, by severely weakening Section 230 has created disincentives for platforms to try to police user content.) And if platforms had to fear liability for enabling user activity on its systems, they also wouldn’t do that either. They would instead end up engaging in undue censorship, or cease to exist at all. (We also know this is true from FOSTA, which, by weakening Section 230, has driven platforms to censor wide swaths of content, or even cease to provide platform services to lawful expression.)

But even if Section 230 protected platforms for only one of these potential forms of liability, not only would it not be nearly as effective at achieving Congress’s overall goal of getting both the most good and least bad online as protecting them in both ways would, but it wouldn’t be nearly as effective for achieving even just one of those outcomes as a more balanced approach would. The problem is that if ever platforms find themselves in the position of needing to act defensively, out of fear of liability, it tends to undermine their ability to deliver the best results on either of these fronts. The fear of legal liability forces platforms to divert their resources away from the things they could be doing to best ensure they facilitate the most good, and least bad, content and instead spend them on only what will protect them from whatever the threat of legal liability is causing them to spend outsized attention on.

As an example, see what happens under the DMCA, where Section 230 is inapplicable and liability protection for platforms is so conditional. Platforms are so fearful of copyright liability that this fear regularly causes them to overly delete lawful, and even often beneficial, content, despite such a result being inconsistent with Congress’s legislative intent, or waste resources weeding out the bad takedown demands. It’s at least fortunate that the DMCA expressly does not demand that platforms actively police their users’ content for infringement. Because if they had to spend their resources policing content in this way it would come at the expense of policing their content in a way that would be more valuable to the user community and public at large. Section 230 works because it ensures that platforms can be free to devote their resources to being the best platforms they can be to enable the most good and disable the most bad content, instead of having to spend them on activities that are focused only what protects them from liability.

To say, then, that a platform that monitors user content must then lose its Section 230 protection is simply wrong, because Congress specifically wanted platforms to do this. Furthermore, even if you think that platforms, even with all this protection, still don’t do a good enough job meeting Congress’s objectives, it would still be a mistake to strip them of them of what protection they have, since removing it will not help any platform, current or future, from ever doing any better.

What tends to confuse people is that curating user content appearing on a platform does not turn the content into something the platform should now be liable for. When people throw around the imaginary “publisher/platform” distinction as a basis for losing Section 230 protection they are getting at this idea that by exercising editorial discretion over the content appearing on their sites it somehow makes the content become something that the platforms should now be liable for.

But that’s not how the law works. Nor how could it work. And Congress knew that. At minimum, platforms simply facilitate way too much content for them to be held accountable for any of it. Even when they do moderate content, it is still often at a scale beyond which it could ever be fair or reasonable to hold them accountable for whatever still remains online.

Section 230 never required platform neutrality as a condition for a platform getting to benefit from its protection. Instead, the question of whether a platform can benefit from its protection against liability in user content has always been contingent on who created that content. So long as the “information content provider” (whoever created the content) is not the “interactive computer service provider” (the platform), then Section 230 applies. Curating, moderating, and even editing that user content to some degree doesn’t change this basic equation. Under Section 230 it is always appropriate to seek to hold responsible whomever created the objectionable content. But it is never ok to hold liable the platform they used to create it, which did not.

Explainer: How Letting Platforms Decide What Content To Facilitate Is What Makes Section 230 Work

More Law-Related Stories From Techdirt:

No, Your Kid Isn’t Growing Horns Because Of Cellphone Use
Can’t Have Copyright Enforcement Without Destroying Privacy Protections
Kim Kardashian Deep Fake Video Removed By Copyright Claim

“S**t, I like to think that at every opportunity I’ve ever been threatened with resistance, it’s been met with resistance.”— Tupac

Last week, the New York Times published Timothy Williams’s insightful article “Black People Are Charged at a Higher Rate Than Whites. What if Prosecutors Didn’t Know Their Race?” In his article, Williams writes:

The [San Francisco District Attorney’s Office] has begun experimenting with an approach it describes as “blind charging,” which prevents prosecutors in one of the nation’s busiest district attorney’s offices from seeing demographic information before making an initial decision on whether to charge someone.

Criminal justice experts said San Francisco appeared to be the first such office in the nation to test that approach…. ‘The question we want to ask ourselves is, would you charge based just on the behavior, without the race and other demographic information?’ said Mr. Gascón. ‘We wanted to see what might be causing a disparate application of the law….’

The experiment in ‘blind charging’ comes as prosecutors’ offices across the nation have been instituting policy changes to grapple with what has been found to be extensive racial bias in the criminal justice system, which has led to disproportionate levels of incarceration among African-Americans….

Legal analysts said the San Francisco policy appears to go a step further [than other cities’ policies] by directly confronting ingrained racial bias that leads some prosecutors, for example, to file charges against African-Americans for low-level drug offenses more frequently than against whites, even though studies show that white people use illicit drugs at higher rates.

During the recent political campaign season, some candidates claimed it was unfair to “to use a broad brush to accuse law enforcement of — of implicit bias or institutional racism.” The truth is that implicit or unconscious bias should not be deemed an insult. In fact, these biases are part of a reality that we all suffer from. In other words, justice is not blind. Unconscious racial bias can lead to racial inequality.

Implicit or unconscious bias is a mental shortcut “that fills in gaps in our knowledge with similar data from past experiences and cultural norms.” It is a normal part of how we make decisions. National Public Radio notes, “There are big racial differences in how school discipline is meted out: students of color are much more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students, even when the infractions are the same.”

A U.S. Department of Education of Civil Rights 2014 Report revealed that “black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than white students.” The disproportionately high suspension rates start suspiciously early. Although black children make up 18 percent of preschool enrollment, they account for almost half of the children who receive more than one out-of-school suspension. In addition, the Washington Post highlights, “black teens who commit a few crimes go to jail as often as white teens who commit dozens” (e.g., the absurd results from our “war on drugs”).

It is important to be conscious of our hidden biases, but as Richard Banks and Richard Thompson Ford of Stanford Law School point out, “The goal of racial justice efforts should be the alleviation of substantive inequalities, not the eradication of unconscious bias.”

Unconscious bias based on race pervades our law, education, and politics. In 2015, former FBI Director James Comey spoke specifically on this subject, as noted by the New York Times:

Previous FBI directors had limited their public comments about race to civil rights investigations, like murders committed by the Ku Klux Klan and the bureau’s wiretapping of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But Mr. Comey tried to dissect the issue layer by layer. He started by acknowledging that law enforcement had a troubled legacy when it came to race.

‘All of us in law enforcement must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty. At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo, a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups.’

Mr. Comey said there was significant research showing that all people have unconscious racial biases. Law enforcement officers, he said, need ‘to design systems and processes to overcome that very human part of us all…. Although the research may be unsettling, what we do next is what matters most.’

For some, it is race-consciousness that is perceived as racism. For others, racism is reality and history. I sometime wonder if Chief Justice John G. Roberts ever regrets writing, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Ironically, it was Justice Clarence Thomas who added the sentiment in the respective concurring opinion: “If our history has taught us anything, it has taught us to beware of elites bearing racial theories.”

Roberts’s prior statements or race seems to ignore the legacies we have all inherited, the reality we each individually face. Eric Liu, the former presidential speechwriter, may have stated it best when he wrote, “The experience of African-Americans is exceptional in its systematic, multigenerational, reverberating effects. And it’s exceptional in its centrality to the founding and building of our nation. No experience reveals more than the African-American experience both the hypocrisy and the possibility of our national creed.” I often wonder why citizens against policies that seek to make up for previous discrimination become so enraged upon the broaching of such subjects.

According to the Sentencing Project, “If current trends continue, one of every three black American males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime, as can one of every six Latino males — compared to one of every seventeen white males.”

Cornell Law School notes, “Race matters in the criminal justice system. Black defendants appear to fare worse than similarly situated white defendants. Why? Implicit bias is one possibility… Judges hold implicit racial biases. These biases can influence their judgment.”

Judges are not colorblind. Teachers are not colorblind. Our society is not colorblind. To believe you are colorblind is to be naive; to believe the justice system is colorblind is to be clueless. We should all be conscious of our hidden biases. We should be mindful of the legacies we have all inherited. It is important to understand how the media influences us. We are wired for prejudice, but this does not have to remain fatal for those most at risk in our society.

It is evident that unconscious racial bias pervades our law, education, and politics. It remains inexcusable for us to permit negative hidden biases to continually operate in our blind spots. These biases must be brought to light. We must be cognizant and cautious of our automatic behaviors and established beliefs. Our implicit biases continue to tear at the fabric of our society. The question is, what are we as a profession going to do about it?

Renwei Chung is the Diversity Columnist at Above the Law. You can contact Renwei by email at projectrenwei@gmail.com, follow him on Twitter (@renweichung), or connect with him on LinkedIn.

The Biglaw firm of LeClairRyan has been banned by their lender from paying former partners’ capital contributions, according to a report from Law360.

As you may recall, the firm has a lot of former partners floating around these days — the firm lost almost 10 percent of its headcount in 2018 due to lateral moves, and partners continue to depart for greener pastures in 2019. Indeed, just this week, the firm lost four attorneys from their Boston office to McGlinchey Stafford, three IP partners to California firm Burke Williams & Sorensen, and another five attorneys across the northeast to Duane Morris. (Though the firm did expand with the addition of a Dallas office earlier this year.)

According to the letters obtained by Law360 from ex-partners, the firm’s general counsel is letting them know they can’t get back the money they put into the firm as scheduled as it would violate the leverage ratio in their loan documents:

In the first of the letters, the firm’s general counsel Lori D. Thompson informed the former LeClairRyan attorneys that the firm’s lender said in February that disbursing capital redemption payments would put the firm in violation of its loan covenant regarding its leverage ratio.

She wrote that the Virginia-based national firm expected to resume payments to the former shareholders as quickly as it can, and would keep them apprised when that would happen.

“We have been working closely with our lender in an effort to have that restriction lifted,” Thompson wrote.

In a subsequent status update letter, Thompson said the deferment on payments was still in place and offered the former shareholders an opportunity to review additional details about the firm’s finances, provided they signed and returned a nondisclosure agreement.

In a statement on the matter, Thompson stressed the firm intends to resume the return of capital when it’s able:

“Our firm’s corporate documents prescribe when and how capital will be redeemed and impose limitations on making such payments, as I would assume every law firm’s governing documents would do,” Thompson told Law360 on Thursday.

“The purpose of the limitations is to protect the financial position of the firm,” she added. “Consistent with those documents, redemption of capital has been deferred and payments will resume when those limitations are no longer applicable.”

While it is not unusual for firms to have restrictions on the redemption of capital, the volatile composition of LeClairRyan’s partnership has put the issue into sharp relief.

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).

Cass Sunstein famously loves Star Wars and reading this review of his new book, How Change Happens (affiliate link), made me think a lot about The Phantom Menace. While many — if not most — people deride the cinematic war crime that George Lucas vomited onto the screen to trample whatever goodwill his original films had garnered, I’ve always found a soft spot for it because without that film and its even more atrocious sequels, we would never have gotten Mr. Plinkett’s scathing and obsessively detailed disemboweling of the film. Whatever the merits or demerits of The Phantom Menace, its greatest contribution to the world is the response it produced. And maybe Darth Maul.

Writing in The New Republic, Aaron Timms has some thoughts on Cass Sunstein’s latest book and it’s fair to say his feelings about How Change Happens are not appreciably far off of Mr. Plinkett’s feelings about the prequels. And, in its own way, the review may actually be more important than the underlying book — a scathing antithesis that could prompt a much-needed synthesis. Hegelian dialectics at work, but with more sarcasm.

The thrust of the review is that Sunstein’s latest book is a rehash of his earlier work:

To call it his “new book” you’d have to accept that there is something meaningfully distinguishing it, beyond the physical barrier of its cover and binding, from his previous books—an assumption that in Sunstein’s case is easily disproven. Like an unstuck Mallarmé, Sunstein does not produce books so much as The Book, a single volume of ideas that’s recycled, with only minor variations, from title to title.

The rhetorical brutality is real and consistent throughout the review. He’s really bringing the heat here and it’s pretty hilarious.

He begins with some meandering thoughts on the rapid evolution of social norms on questions such as sexual harassment and smoking, which he attributes to (note the italics) norm entrepreneurs and availability entrepreneurs, a class of individuals the rest of the world might be tempted simply to call “leaders.”

Can we coin a term for this? I’m calling it “Gladwelling” and it’s the process of unnecessarily making up fancy terms for obvious stuff. This is, of course, also Gladwelling on my part.

This is, after all, the man… who followed up his 2008 blockbuster, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, which set out the case for using welfare-oriented behavioral prompts or “nudges” in the design of regulation, with 2014’s Why Nudge?, which valiantly addressed the question already answered six years earlier.

As someone who’s always appreciated Sunstein’s enthusiastic evangelism for technocracy, that stings. I’m a big fan of benevolent managerialism. I’m the sort of guy who legitimately thinks Disneyworld is the happiest place on Earth not because of the rides or parades but because they’ve worked out the most efficient placement of garbage cans to minimize litter. I f**king love that stuff. Timms feels the weakness of Sunstein’s thesis is that “[t]he world Sunstein legislates for is a world of reasonable individuals steeped in the minutiae of food safety regulation and brought to a peak of arousal by the promise of a clean data download.” Hell yeah he does, and I’m totally here for it.

An America concerned about regulating the dangerously bright headlights that every jackass seems to sport these days would be legitimately fantastic. Instead, we have raw milk and anti-vaxxers.

The problem is not that there Sunstein’s wrong but that he’s consistently overplaying his hand in these books. Regulatory incentives to promote the kind of practical governance that no one consciously thinks about but that in reality saves our lives at least 50 times a day really should be the most important stuff facing the country. But it’s not. Instead, we’re systematically stealing children from their families. Sunstein’s prescriptions are invaluable for building a functional bureaucracy and curing minor market failures, but can’t be so easily ported to solving the truly big struggles facing the country. Some of this is the fault of the publishing game — there’s always going to be pressure to stretch the thesis to its breaking point and give the audience a way to solve everything. But internment doesn’t really get solved by nudges.

When he does bother to refresh his research, the results often negate whatever point he’s trying to make. Arming people with information, Sunstein argues in How Change Happens, is the most effective nudge of all…. Among the apps brought to us thanks to this energizing bop of government and enterprise is eRecall…. But eRecall, to judge from its Twitter account and non-responsive website, died some time last year. If you want evidence of the effectiveness of governmental transparency in fostering innovation and promoting individual welfare: Please enjoy the example of this service that no longer exists. Correctives to the Sunstein worldview are rarely more than a Google search away.

But the failure of this program isn’t necessarily because it was a doomed endeavor, it’s that the administration is now managed by sycophants and incompetents who weaseled their way into the halls of power by stumbling to a degree from some warmed over segregation academy. If Sunstein’s problem is in overplaying his theories, the problem Timms brings to table is throwing too much of the blame for technocracy’s failures on the proposals themselves. Managerialism isn’t solving climate change — at least not without more aggressive accompanying policies — but as long as one keeps it in perspective it’s probably doing more practical good than much else.

Timms points to the failings of the Obama years — the way that they “ended with rising inequality, stalled social mobility, a spiraling climate disaster, and the Trumpian revolt against expertise” — and asks simply why Sunstein doesn’t address this legacy while fundamentally doubling down on the bedrock principles of the administration. It’s a pretty compelling question. Expertise is important in a lot of fields, yet the fetishizing of credentialism in the Clinton-Obama era spilled beyond “Ph.D.s drafting food safety regulation” into turning over the bond market to Harvard bros who earned their “expertise” by being lucky enough to have accidentally cashed in before the house of cards crumbled. When every dummy was an “expert” then experts seemed a lot less impressive.

Despite the promise of its title, How Change Happens works neither as narrative history nor as a sociology of change. But it does raise, however unintentionally, a more interesting question: Can liberals change? In recent months several economists and thinkers prominent in the Clinton-Obama years have publicly acknowledged the failings of neoliberalism and the need for a new policy direction on the left. On the evidence in these pages, a hair shirt will not be in Sunstein’s future. What emerges most powerfully here is the refusal of this proud steed of technocratic managerialism to engage with new circumstances, even as many in his own liberal camp reevaluate their priors.

Is it fair to lump Sunstein’s regulatory republic in with broader neo-liberal policy? He may rub elbows with the sort of investment bank liberals who thought letting Lehman Brothers gut the economy for the LOLZ was good policy, but Sunstein’s quest for regulation puts him at odds with many of the villains in this tale. Just because they all boast “market” solutions doesn’t necessarily put them all in the same camp. As much as I agree with Timms that politics requires bolder contestation, I think a political revolution is about as valuable to electrical wiring standards as managerialism is to climate change.

We tossed out Hegel earlier, so let’s come back to it. Whether or not one agrees with all of the charges leveled in this review, it’s the sort of antithesis that Sunstein’s work needs. It’s time for Sunstein to reboot a bit — to make his own personal The Force Awakens — and start explaining how the big ticket items get addressed. In the book, he suggests that managerialism can triumph over partisanship, but there’s not a real story for how the questions that really are profoundly moral get solved technocratically. At some point we have to have it out over child separation and algorithms aren’t going to get that done. How does his brand of managerialism address unintended consequences like the way nudges can be used to blunt support for more ambitious solutions? Is there a balance and where is it? When might the answer be a Shove.

Sunstein’s written a book on conspiracy theories and edited a work on rising authoritarianism. He knows he’s not living in a world of people like me who thoroughly enjoy data-driven regulation. He can produce the kind of nuanced synthesis of where his theory fits into the larger political climate. Hopefully, this New Republic review is that nudge.

The Sameness of Cass Sunstein [The New Republic]

Earlier: Talking About Star Wars With Cass Sunstein

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.

Under cover of overruling ‘only’ a single decision, today’s opinion smashes a hundred-plus years of legal rulings to smithereens.

— Justice Elena Kagan, expressing her concern in a 19-page dissent in the 5-4 decision of Knick v. Township of Scott, that the Supreme Court has done away with yet another precedent this term, this time in a takings case.

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.

Gary Farris, the group leader of Burr & Forman’s lending practice group, was killed in 2018. According to investigators, Farris was shot and then his body burned. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s crime lab recently completed their autopsy report, and while the badly burned body created challenges for the medical investigators, law enforcement has arrested a suspect. Farris’s wife, Melody Farris, has been charged with malice murder, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and concealing the death of another.

As reported by Law.com, investigators believe the killing was the result of marital issues:

[Cherokee County sheriff’s Capt. Jay] Baker said Melody Farris was charged after sheriff’s investigators “recovered evidence indicating Ms. Farris shot and killed her husband inside their home and then tried to dispose of his body and evidence by burning it on their… property.”

He said that at the time, “It appears that the Farrises had been having some marital issues. … Basically we believe it culminated in a homicide.”

Melody Farris was arrested on Tuesday night in Tullahoma, Tennessee, and was extradited to Georgia. Though she has not yet entered her plea, according to one of her attorneys, Manny Arora, she maintains her innocence. However, according to a statement by one of the couple’s children, Chris Farris, to the Atlanta Constitution Journal, most of the children do not support their mother:

“Our father was the best person in the world,” Chris Farris said late Thursday. He disputed a claim by one of his mother’s attorneys that Melody Farris’ family was standing behind her. “We are shaken.”
“This is very embarrassing for our family,” he continued.

Melody Farris will be making her first appearance before Cherokee County Magistrate Court Chief Judge James Drane later today.

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).