Top-Ranked Florida Biglaw Firm Issues Vaccine Mandate

Law firms continue to reverse course and change their plans when it comes to the reopening of their offices across thanks to the emergence of the COVID-19’s Delta variant. Vaccination mandates now seem to be the way of the future, and one by one, law firms are joining in to protect their employees and their local legal communities.

For reference, the following firms are requiring all employees to be vaccinated before they return to the office: Akin GumpArent FoxBallard SpahrBoies Schiller Flexner, Carlton Fields, Cleary GottliebClifford ChanceCooleyCozen O’ConnorCrowell & MoringDavis & GilbertDavis PolkDavis Wright TremaineDebevoise & PlimptonDickinson WrightFaegre Drinker Biddle & ReathFenwick & WestFried FrankGoodwinHanson BridgettHogan LovellsHueston HenniganLowenstein SandlerMcDermott Will & EmeryMintzNorton Rose FulbrightPatterson BelknapPaul WeissReed SmithRopes & GraySanford HeislerSchiff HardinSeyfarth ShawSheppard MulllinSimpson Thacher, Skadden, Stroock & Stroock & LavanWeil GotshalWilson Sonsini, and Winston & Strawn.

The latest firm to issue a vaccine requirement is Greenberg Traurig, the first Florida-based Biglaw firm to announce such a measure. With Florida continuing to set COVID-19 case records and state government staunchly against mask mandates and other rational restrictions and safety measures, it’s no wonder that GT announced this new policy.

According to the Daily Business Review, the firm has mandated COVID-19 vaccines for all employees across each and every one of its U.S. offices.

A firm spokesperson said individual office leaders were asked to consider mandating vaccines after the Delta variant caused a spike in case numbers and hospitalizations. The firm is nearly 90% vaccinated, the spokesperson said.

Holland & Knight, another Florida-based firm, is reportedly considering a vaccine requirement for employees but has not yet come to a final decison on the matter.

Will your firm be changing its plans when it comes to vaccination for attorneys and staff thanks to the Delta variant? Please let us know.

What has your firm announced as far as a reopening plan is concerned? The more information is out there, the more likely it is that firms will be able to establish a market standard for a return to the office.

As soon as you find out about the reopening plan at your firm, please email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Office Reopening”) or text us at (646) 820-8477. We always keep our sources on stories anonymous. There’s no need to send a memo (if one exists) using your firm email account; your personal email account is fine. If a memo has been circulated, please be sure to include it as proof; we like to post complete memos as a service to our readers. You can take a photo of the memo and attach as a picture if you are worried about metadata in a PDF or Word file. Thanks.

Greenberg Traurig Mandates Vaccines Across US Offices [Daily Business Review]


Staci ZaretskyStaci 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.

Evolving Partnership Economics: The Equity And Non-Equity Models Are Starting To Blur

The “partner” title holds undeniable cachet in law firms. Elevation to the partnership is treated as a key professional milestone. But in the current law firm landscape, the fact that a lawyer has been designated a partner often conveys very little about the economic arrangement between that lawyer and the firm. A few firms have a single tier of partnership, but the majority have at least two. In some firms, there are as many as four tiers, each with a different set of benefits and obligations.

The traditional equity model

In simpler times, partnership meant equity partnership. If you made partner, you received an ownership interest in your firm and the right to vote on firm governance matters. In exchange for that equity interest, you were required upon joining the partnership to contribute a lump sum of capital. The firm held onto your contribution for the duration of your partnership tenure, and upon your retirement from the partnership, you sold your interest back to the firm and reclaimed your capital. As for annual compensation, longer tenured partners typically took home a larger slice of the pie than the newly elevated, but no partner was paid a fixed salary. As the general fortunes of the firm rose or fell, all members of the partnership rode the wave together.

At a few major law firms the traditional model remains largely intact. Firms like Cravath and Debevoise are the purest examples: they continue to have only equity partners and to pay lockstep, seniority-based partner compensation. Firms such as Davis Polk have done away with lockstep compensation but still feature an all-equity partnership. However, firms committed to awarding equity to every partner comprise a shrinking minority of the legal industry.

The non-equity alternative

As early as the 1970s, some law firms began to introduce a bifurcated partnership model: there were equity partners and non-equity partners (sometimes described as income partners or non-share partners). Non-equity partners did not become owners of the firm, did not have full voting rights, and were not expected to contribute capital. Instead, they effectively were paid a salary. Becoming a non-equity partner meant you received the “partner” title but not the partner economics.

In some firms, the non-equity partnership tier was pitched as a stepping stone to equity partnership. The intermediate non-equity tier was a conceit designed to lengthen the track to true partnership while providing some social capital in the interim. It enabled lawyers who were effectively still senior associates, as traditionally defined, to market themselves externally as “partners.” Delaying the elevation of some senior associates to equity partnership by a couple of years may have been helpful for firm economics in the short term, but there is always the next generation of associates rising through the ranks. So the notion of non-equity partnership as simply a way station on the track to the equity tier was never especially credible, and before long, non-equity partnership became a common terminal status for many lawyers.

Blending equity and non-equity

The distinction between equity and non-equity partnership has become increasingly blurred at many firms. For example, several firms in the Am Law 100 now require non-equity partners to contribute capital. This is sometimes sold as a means of giving non-equity partners “skin in the firm game.” But in a world where only a small proportion of non-equity partners are likely to ascend to the equity ranks, one can understand why non-equity partners would be unenthusiastic about the capital contribution trend. They are being required to bear a burden of equity partnership with no guarantee of receiving the corresponding benefit.

Some firms are creating multiple partnership tiers (sometimes called compensation bands), with each tier featuring its own combination of rights and obligations that may not neatly correspond to either the equity or non-equity models. Perkins Coie has four tiers. The lowest tier is similar to the standard non-equity model, in that partners in that tier are paid a straight salary. The higher tiers are differentiated both in the level of compensation offered and in the voting rights afforded to the partners in the tier.

As the economic models of partnership have grown increasingly complex and differentiated, so have the implications for current and potential partners. In our next installment, we will explain how non-equity partnership can be a superior option for lawyers in certain scenarios.


Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts from Lateral Link’s team of expert contributors. Gloria Sandrino is a Principal and the Global Chair of Partner and Group Recruiting based in the Los Angeles office. She focuses exclusively on partner and group placements nationwide. Gloria leverages her vast network of partner and executive contacts to help partner and group candidates make lateral moves. She also assists law firms with their partner hiring needs. 


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.

The Supreme Court’s Legacy On Race

In the latest episode of The Jabot, I speak with Orville Vernon Burton and Armand Derfner, the authors of Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court. We discuss how several issues in the past affect the general rulings of the Court in the present. We also speak about different cases involving discrimination and race, as well as how the Court will get better, not only by doing it itself, but with the help of the President, the congress, and its people.

The Jabot podcast is an offshoot of the Above the Law brand focused on the challenges women, people of color, LGBTQIA, and other diverse populations face in the legal industry. Our name comes from none other than the Notorious Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the jabot (decorative collar) she wore when delivering dissents from the bench. It’s a reminder that even when we aren’t winning, we’re still a powerful force to be reckoned with.

Happy listening!


Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. 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).

Oops! Biglaw Partner Sent Private Strategy Presentation To Adversary In ‘CC’ Snafu

As an attorney, I made the “inadvertent email” mistake just once. Thankfully, it was an innocuous note about an associate lunch to co-defendant’s counsel because they had the same first name and Outlook trades expediency for common sense if you don’t turn off its “suggested recipients” feature with extreme prejudice.

It’s unclear if it was a “suggested recipients” problem or a “reply all” issue, but Proskauer partner Michael Lebowich, representing the New York Times, made a similar mistake recently. Except instead of accidentally inviting another firm partner to lunch, he sent his adversaries a private strategy presentation. All the news that’s fit to print doesn’t stop for management’s confidentiality concerns!

Tech workers for the Times are unionizing and rather than voluntarily recognize the union like a reasonable entity, the newspaper demanded a vote to buy management time to undermine the effort before election day.

Right now, the paper is fighting over the scope of the possible union. As the Daily Beast reports:

In one slide, titled “Operating Principles,” the lawyers discussed management’s potential goals, including ensuring supervisors are not involved in the union, seeking the “smallest bargaining unit that is justifiable,” or seeking “the bargaining unit where we are most likely to win an election” that would effectively defeat the unionization effort.

The larger potential union might actually allow the paper to “win” the election by expanding the pool of voters and increasing the chance that enough senior workers might sell out junior workers by rejecting the union. On the other hand, a smaller union would almost certainly have the votes to form, but would cabin the impact on management. Proskauer advises the latter strategy.

This isn’t hugely surprising. The Daily Beast spoke with an organizing member of the union who found it valuable that counsel advised the paper to more or less concede the union as inevitable and work to limit its size as opposed to risking a larger unit in a fight to defeat the effort wholesale. Though, honestly, the workers probably sussed this out as a likely strategy before getting this slide deck. It’s not like union busting is a new industry — the tactics are well-established.

But what might actually muck up Proskauer’s client from this presentation is a slide purporting to show union support among the workers. The graph breaks down workers into different departments and shows the level of backing for “leans yes, leans no, on the fence, and unknown.” This suggests management is polling employees on their thoughts about the union which happens to be totally illegal. The union has filed complaints with the NLRB.

Which all goes to show how important it is not to get careless with your carbon copies, lawyers! Every email is a time bomb for your clients — unless you’re emailing lunch plans — so don’t skimp on the protections. To be extra careful, you can even create a rule that holds all sent messages for 30 seconds (or more) to give the sender enough time to have an “OH CRAP” moment before the message actually hits the ether. There are a ton of bells and whistles in the software that lawyers can use to stay safe.

And if Proskauer has trouble figuring out how to implement any of these tech fixes, I’m sure there’s a tech staffer at the Times more than willing to demonstrate how valuable they are.

NY Times Lawyers Accidentally Send Private Strategy Memo to Staff Union [Daily Beast]


HeadshotJoe 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.

How Courts And Litigators Are Making The Best Of Remote Practice

For Allison Brown, a nationally recognized trial lawyer who is a partner with Skadden in New York, the past year and a half has led to scenarios no one could have imagined before the pandemic.

Her first virtual jury trial was out of Alameda County, California, during a wildfire crisis. “There were rolling blackouts,” Brown said. “Some people participated from their cars because they had no power.”

Not exactly ideal conditions, but given the backlog of cases faced by most courts, to shut down for the duration of the national emergency wasn’t an option. People have a right to their day in court.

“I certainly appreciate that courts are trying to innovate and I appreciate the pressure on the system,” Brown said.

Of course, litigation practice has probably undergone more dramatic changes than any other field of law.

“Everything is in flux,” said Zoe Salzman, an experienced trial attorney with Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP in New York who recently led the Current Trial Issues in Federal Civil Practice panel for the Practicing Law Institute. “We are constantly changing to our new normal.”

Salzman said that when the lockdowns first happened in March 2020, “litigation in New York fell to a standstill for a couple months.” 

Federal courts adapted first, Salzman said, followed more slowly by state courts. For the last year, her firm’s litigation practice has been almost entirely remote.

“I would say at least 90 percent of our practice, if not more, has switched to virtual or phone. That’s talking about a firm that was in court almost every day of the week before the pandemic.”

Brown said she was about to begin trial in upstate when the courts shut down. Her first virtual trial did not get underway until October 2020.

“They had to get the technology up and running and put the wheels in motion to make this work.”

Judges who tried to power through their cases had to bow to reality. Lauren Aguiar, a partner with Skadden in New York who works in complex litigation — and serves as the faculty chairperson for PLI’s annual program on federal civil practice — said she had a trial in federal court last year with a judge who wanted pretrial motions argued in-person.

“But enough people were uncomfortable that he had to walk it back,” she said. “The situation has been so fluid the judges have continually had to change their plans.”

Virtual Trials

Eventually, virtual trials happened. Aguiar described a conference room set-up at her firm, where she saw her partner Allison Brown “at the podium in her full lawyer gear under these bright lights. It looked like a television studio, with a massive wall-sized screen.”

The screen held about 12 different video boxes. “Everyone was there,” Aguiar said. “The judge, jury, court reporter, witnesses, and attorneys.”

While it’s fortunate that such technology exists, Brown said it “remains a challenge. I think trying a civil case virtually is not ideal for anyone. Not for jurors, for parties, or witnesses. It’s tough to connect with people in that format.”

After Brown’s second virtual jury trial, her team interviewed the jurors. Technical delays were their biggest complaint.

“One witness in my second trial had a terrible echo, the plaintiffs’ witness,” Brown said. “This delayed us for an hour and a half. We tried moving the witness to another room, troubleshooting on the fly. It’s hard on the juries.”

Virtual trials also raise the likelihood of distraction, Brown explained.

“One juror had to be dismissed early on. He had another screen and it looked like he was playing video games,” she said.

Salzman also noted the difficulty of keeping the jury’s attention.

“Practitioners and judges need to be mindful about how many witnesses they really have to call, how many breaks they should have, how they can make the presentation interesting,” she said.

In addition, virtual trials lose some of the gravitas of in-person proceedings.

“A certain ceremony attends going into a court house,” Salzman said. “A judge is sitting there in a robe up on the high bench. There are lawyers in suits. Everyone is in a formal room, everyone stands when the judge enters. All this conveys to the jurors how important their civic duty is.”

Unfortunately, courts sometimes have no choice but to proceed virtually. Salzman pointed to a case that involved voting rights in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

“The judge had to proceed because the election was coming,” she said. “We also had an extensive preliminary injunction hearing on conditions in prison during the pandemic. Again, a time-sensitive issue.”

Generally speaking, she said, New York judges are “prioritizing the criminal cases because of speedy trial rights not at issue in civil cases.”

The Efficiencies of a Hybrid System

While virtual jury trials may be characterized as making the best of a bad situation, some proceedings are better off remote than live.

“One thing I think the pandemic has taught us is that making some portion of the early jury selection process remote led to more efficient ways to do things,” Brown said.

Salzman agreed. “There’s a lot to be said for preliminary voir dire being done virtually rather than filling the courtroom with 100 potential jurors,” she said. “A lot of people are simply unable to serve and are quickly dismissed. Virtual screening makes sense. It’s much less burdensome on prospective jurors.”

The efficacy only goes so far, however. Brown and Salzman both think in-person proceedings might still be best for final jury selection.

“At the end of the day, seeing your potential jurors, seeing them all together, noticing things like what book they are carrying, is helpful,” Salzman said. “You miss that with virtual.”

Some proceedings lose nothing in the translation, however, like routine meetings. Thanks to the now widespread use of remote technology, trial attorneys can spend a lot less time on planes and trains and in cars.

“Even as we recover from the pandemic and things continue to stabilize, everyone is hoping some of the efficiencies we’ve gained can be maintained,” Salzman said. “For example, going down to court for a status conference or a compliance conference . . . can move to phone or video by default.”

In this way, “judges don’t waste time waiting for lawyers to show up, the lawyers can be there at the right time and only devote the time for the actual proceeding,” Salzman said. “The system works well and it’s good for clients.”

Brown also thinks some portions of the switch to virtual should and will continue after the pandemic.

“The days are over of flying across the country for an expert meeting. It’s a terrific thing for parents. That kind of mindless travel is a thing of the past. I think even some depositions, minor depositions, can be done remotely,” she said.

Aguiar finds it interesting that the transition to virtual proceedings, even where they made sense, moved along slowly until the pandemic.

“We went from being an industry that eschewed virtual proceedings to one that completely embraced them,” she said. Before the pandemic, “if you were working on a case where a judge was having a status conference in Phoenix, you would fly there from New York instead of asking the judge if you could attend remotely. If you asked, you’d been seen as not fully participating or not serious about the case.”

Salzman said that if she had to predict, “I would guess that trials and hearings are more likely to go back to being in-person and more routine conferences and limited arguments on motions will go on virtually.”

Given that the country is mired in another wave of Covid-19 courtesy of the Delta variant, jurisdictions are still weighing what’s best for all parties, with some opening courtrooms again. Brown just completed her first in-person trial since the pandemic, in Bellville, Illinois.

“We did voir dire in masks. Every juror had to be vaccinated,” she said. “It was a very welcome experience to connect with people and jurors live.”


Elizabeth M. Bennett was a business reporter who moved into legal journalism when she covered the Delaware courts, a beat that inspired her to go to law school. After a few years as a practicing attorney in the Philadelphia region, she decamped to the Pacific Northwest and returned to freelance reporting and editing.

The 10 Law Schools With The Lowest Acceptance Rates (2021)

(Image via Getty)

How can you measure a law school’s worth, aside from the employment statistics and bar passage rates of its graduates? Another telling sign of its success may be its acceptance rate. Generally speaking, law schools with low acceptance rates masterfully weathered the storm over the past decade, keeping their standards high during a time when applications plummeted and entering students’ qualifications sank, while law schools with high acceptance rates fared quite poorly, admitting almost anyone who applied to keep the lights on.

But which law schools had the lowest acceptance rates? Thanks to the Short List blog of U.S. News, there’s a ranking for that. According to the Short List, the average acceptance rate in fall 2020 was 44 percent. Among the schools with the lowest acceptance rates, the average rate was much lower, at 14.5 percent. As you may have guessed, the law schools with the lowest acceptance rates are some of the usual suspects, the elite schools found at the tippy top of the U.S. News rankings.

SCHOOL NAME (STATE)

FULL-TIME AND PART-TIME APPLICANTS (FALL 2020)

FULL-TIME AND PART-TIME ACCEPTANCES (FALL 2020)

ACCEPTANCE RATE

U.S. NEWS RANK

Yale University (CT) 3,539 262 7.4% 1
Stanford University (CA) 3,807 399 10.5% 2
Harvard University (MA) 7,448 968 13% 3
University of Virginia 5,458 767 14.1% 8
University of Pennsylvania (Carey) 6,148 879 14.3% 6 (tie)
University of Michigan—Ann Arbor 5,417 886 16.4% 10 (tie)
Columbia University (NY) 6,986 1,166 16.7% 4 (tie)
University of Southern California (Gould) 5,327 915 17.2% 19
Wake Forest University (NC) 1,808 322 17.8% 41 (tie)
University of Chicago 4,971 888 17.9% 4 (tie)

Eight of the 10 law schools with the lowest acceptance rates fall within the top 10 of the most recent U.S. News rankings, with USC (#19) and Wake Forest (tied at #41) sneaking in to complete the list. Top 10 schools that didn’t make the cut here were Berkeley, NYU, and Duke, with acceptance rates of 21.53 percent, 21.58 percent, and 22.34 percent, respectively.

Where does your law school stand when it comes to its acceptance rate? Check out your school’s most recent Standard 509 Report to find out.

10 Law Schools That Are Hardest to Get Into [Short List / U.S. News]


Staci ZaretskyStaci 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.

Michael Kors Should Expect An ‘L’ Based On The Use Of New Balance’s ‘N’

(Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images)

It is rare to look at the face of a complaint and make the determination that the plaintiff has a slam dunk trademark infringement cause of action. However, New Balance appears to be in that exact situation with its newly brought case against Michael Kors for ripping off its “N” design.

Early in the complaint, a comparison between a wide range of New Balance shoes with recently created Michael Kors sneakers makes it clear that Kors was not very creative in the selection of the main mark on its footwear. I did not even realize that the mark could be characterized as an “M” instead of an “N” until someone pointed it out to me, and I still think that Kors’s mark looks closer to the “N” popularized by New Balance.

Not only does New Balance have a sincere case for consumer confusion, it also has a clear claim for dilution. Sports business reporter Darren Rovell noted that New Balance’s 327 line featuring a big “N” is one of the biggest surprise success stories in sneakers in the past two years. Kors’s product, if inferior, has the potential to dilute the distinctive source-identifying quality of the “N” marks.

An interesting wrinkle, in this case, is an alleged admission made by Michael Kors (the individual) that he is a fan of the New Balance Brand. A Vogue article from 2016 begins with: “It’s a rare occasion you see Michael Kors out of his trusty New Balance sneakers. Even at this year’s Met Gala he wore glorified trainers with metallic silver uppers and white rubber soles.” In 2012, Harper’s Bazaar published a piece indicating that Kors (the individual) has New Balance shoes custom-made for him and that he probably has “a good 15 pairs of New Balance in black.”

Perhaps the above can play into an analysis of whether the infringement by Kors is willful. If so, then this could be deemed an exceptional case, allowing New Balance, if it is the prevailing party, to also recover its attorney’s fees and costs.


Darren Heitner is the founder of Heitner Legal. He is the author of How to Play the Game: What Every Sports Attorney Needs to Know, published by the American Bar Association, and is an adjunct professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. You can reach him by email at heitner@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter at @DarrenHeitner.

Insider Trade Legally While You Still Can

Whatever their legitimate purpose—and they do have one!—the structure or lack thereof of 10b5-1 executive stock-trading plans is more than a little perverse (even to Jay Clayton), insofar as they seem to offer a shield against any allegations of insider-trading while letting those holding them do things that would definitely be illegal without them. Like, for instance, cancelling a plan to sell a bunch of shares during a blackout period ahead of some sweet earnings, or initiating one to sell shares immediately during a blackout period ahead of some less sweet earnings. Or setting up a whole raft of plans for a whole range of possible outcomes and cancelling all but the most favorable once you know which will be most favorable, thanks to that sweet, sweet material non-public information you’ve got, use of which in any other trading forum would land you in prison.

Morning Docket: 08.13.21

* Ohio conduct board issued new rules of conduct for judges. Also, Ohio is an actual place? I thought that was just a placeholder they put on maps. [Court News Ohio]

* Puff, puff, prison? Court rules the incarcerated can’t smoke weed despite its legality on the outside. [SFChronicle]

* SCOTUS sides with landowners over tenants in COVID moratorium dispute because of course they do. [Reuters]

* Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me again, sanctions: PA lawyer in trouble after believing in a colleague. [ABA Journal]

* Biden’s appointees may have some strings — here are some of their monetary ties. [Business Insider]


Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. Before that, he wrote columns for an online magazine named The Muse Collaborative under the pen name Knehmo. He endured the great state of Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com.