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If you lead an in-house legal department, you know that some periods are busier than others and your needs for certain types of expertise will vary over time. That reality creates a staffing conundrum. If you expand your in-house counsel ranks to handle the busiest seasons and every legal specialty, your team’s workflow will be inconsistent. Conversely, if you run a lean department, you may end up paying high fees to outside counsel for work that could have been done at more reasonable cost in-house.

Happily, there is another option: interim counsel placements. Instead of sending more work to outside law firms or hiring a permanent in-house counsel whom you may not need in six months, you may wish to explore the on-demand counsel model.

In this article, we explain some of the primary advantages of interim counsel placements and bust some myths about this talent model. We will delve into some of the advantages more deeply in future installments.

At the outset, it’s important to understand the level of talent available for interim placements. The typical Cadence Counsel candidate graduated from a Top 20 law school, has Am Law firm experience, and has spent an average of ten years within Fortune 500 law departments. In other words, seasoned talent is interested in short-term legal work.

From the perspective of an in-house legal leader, interim counsel placements have three main advantages: cost containment, customization, and scalability.

Cost containment

The cost advantage is usually what first entices law department leaders to explore interim counsel placements. In short, this model is a way to hire talented counsel for variable engagements at lower rates than you would pay external counsel. Consider a situation in which one of your in-house counsel is temporarily out on FMLA leave. If you send that person’s workload entirely to outside law firms, the bill will add up quickly. An interim counsel placement is both more affordable and a more complete solution. It allows you to bring in a lawyer who has in-house experience and can seamlessly pick up the portfolio of the colleague on leave, at reasonable cost.

In-house leaders who are new to the notion of interim counsel placements often worry that cheaper must mean less talented. If a lawyer is so good, why can’t she secure permanent employment? The reality is that not every highly qualified lawyer wants to work full-time. Many talented counsel value the flexibility that interim placements afford them, either because this model better enables them to balance family responsibilities or because it facilitates their pursuit of other projects outside of the law. This was already true before the pandemic, but in an era when many professionals are reevaluating their priorities, we expect the pool of high-quality interim talent to continue to grow.

Customization

Law departments routinely seek access to a rigorously screened bench of specialized lawyers who are interested in legal work that spans, on average, from 3-18 months. Perhaps the company requires a seasoned counsel with IP expertise. One option would be to call up the external law firms on the company’s panel and ask for a secondment from the IP practice. There’s a good chance that one of the firms will be able to second someone, but there is no guarantee that the lawyer they send will be the best person for the job.

Alternative Legal Services Providers (ALSPs) such as Cadence Counsel are more likely to identify that best person because we draw from a larger pool of potential candidates. The head of the law firm’s IP department will look only at members of her practice group and will send the lawyer who happens to be available for secondment. In contrast, the ALSP will conduct a customized search of the market as a whole.

Scalability

Not every project can be scoped precisely at the outset, especially if it is an unusual one for your department. You may think you need one counsel for a six-month assignment, only to realize you actually need five more on short notice. Or you may bring in ten interim counsel, only to discover that ten was too many and you need to ramp down quickly to seven. A major benefit of interim counsel placements is that you have total flexibility to scale up or down as needs change. If you find that there is less work than you initially expected, you won’t be stuck with a financial burden. 

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If you would like to explore the suitability of interim counsel placements for your organization, we welcome you to contact us to discuss your potential needs. Sometimes companies that have not yet worked with Cadence Counsel fear that the experience will be arduous and worry about the hassle of on-boarding yet another vendor. We are sensitive to that concern, and we have optimized our process to clear away the clutter. If you tell us what you need, we will find the talent, and the talent will start work for you. It really is that simple. 

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Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts from Cadence Counsel’s team of expert contributors. Monique Burt Williams is the Chief Executive Officer of Cadence Counsel, a certified Women’s Business Enterprise and sister corporation to both Lateral Link and Bridgeline Solutions. She is deeply committed to helping corporations and other organizations diversify their in-house legal divisions as they strive to reflect a global economy.

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Cadence Counsel is a boutique search firm that focuses exclusively on the placement of in-house counsel. We specialize in Retained Executive Search, Ad Hoc Counsel Placement, and Diversity & Development Consulting. A certified Women’s Business Enterprise, Cadence Counsel is a leading diversity supplier of in-house legal professionals within the Fortune 500.

With salaries in Biglaw climbing higher and higher, the only way to compete when it comes to attracting and retaining talent is to keep offering raises for associates. One firm knows this all too well, because it’s just sent word out about its third round of salary increases. Yes, you read that correctly. This firm has bumped associate salaries three times thus far in 2021… but it still hasn’t quite reached the $205K starting salary that associates have long been dreaming of. Which firm could it be?

It’s none other than Taft Law (the firm formerly known as Taft Stettinius & Hollister prior to its merger with Briggs and Morgan), a firm where salaries have been on the rise since April. As we noted previously, the firm’s first set of raises weren’t effective until July 1, and their second set of raises won’t come into play until October 1. Associates won’t have to wait a moment longer for their third set of raises, as those will be enacted on October 1 as well. This time around, each of the firm’s Ohio offices got another salary bump.

The firm will not be increasing its 1,850 billable hours requirement in light of these raises, which is even more good news for associates. Congratulations to all. Maybe before the year is out, the firm will finally meet the market.

We depend on your tips to stay on top of this stuff. So when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Matches”). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we’ll also use for salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish.

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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.

Martha McGarry packed up her business and moved over to Mayer Brown this week. But this wasn’t just another move in a red hot corporate market. McGarry had to relocate in order to keep her practice going.

Skadden, like many Biglaw firms, has a mandatory retirement policy at 70. With McGarry facing an involuntary end to her career, she found that she just couldn’t leave her clients and struck out to find a new home.

From Bloomberg Law:

McGarry has been a prolific M&A lawyer for decades and said in an interview with Bloomberg Law she wants to maintain that practice. She has spearheaded deals for American Express Co., The Coca-Cola Co., and The Hershey Co., among other household names. She said she wanted to continue working with her clients, which she will do as co-leader of Mayer Brown’s M&A practice.

“They are part of the daily fabric of my life,” McGarry said of her clients. “And the more I contemplated that all ending, I just decided: No. My energy level is incredibly high. There are lots of things that would be fun to be a part of and to accomplish, and I don’t want to stop.”

A lot of firms have mandatory retirement policies, but should they?

On the one hand, the human mortality rate remains locked at 100 percent, so firms must always plan with an eye to the future. Mandatory retirement sets a predictable timetable for partners to port business to younger attorneys to keep the firm’s revenue stream locked in. It’s also a valuable tool for retaining that young talent that may move themselves if they don’t see a clear path forward. Up and coming attorneys don’t just miracle themselves Coca-Cola as a client, they depend on rising in seniority on deal teams, generating trust, and eventually earning the baton as senior partners retire.

But none of that helps if the retirement policy encourages partners to take their books across the street. Who cares about securing long-term business when it costs the firm those clients entirely? Despite that mortality rate, lifespans are getting longer and a 70-year-old partner today is a lot friskier than a 70-year-old partner from 1985. On balance, senior attorneys likely have years (if not decades) more in the tank these days than partners of yesteryear when firms settled on this number out of a hat.

Unfortunately, that’s also an overarching problem with the whole economy. Boomers refusing to get out of the workforce has created mass stagnation. While late stage capitalism forces older Americans to keep working well past the benchmark for retirement just to stay afloat, one presumes M&A partners with revenue numbers in the tens of millions wouldn’t be hurting to step aside.

And not for nothing, but generally speaking, partners at firms with mandatory retirement ages benefitted from those policies when they were younger when they collected business from their own mentors. To some extent, if a partner takes the front end benefit of the policy, they should give it back on the other side.

Though maybe that’s just outdated thinking! There may have been a day when clients stuck with firms through multiple generational handoffs, but that’s not how most in-house counsel operate today. If a partner they trust steps down, the next lawyer up at the firm may get a crack at the business, but the client is likely to open it all up to see what’s out there. In a world where business isn’t a rubberstamp transfer, succession planning is less important than keeping the attorney with the established relationship front and center and generating revenue.

So do firms waste potentially lucrative years from senior partners at the peak of their careers or waste (and potentially lose) younger talent waiting around for an opportunity to grow into a long-term business generator? Difficult question.

That’s probably why the divide on this question is roughly 50-50.

Skadden’s First Female M&A Partner Says No to Forced Retirement [Bloomberg Law]

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Even for lawyers who have largely made the switch back to the office, remote work elements remain a part of their tech stack.

Here, we visit Michelle Browning Coughlin, the GC and VP of legal affairs at the advertising technology company El Toro, who discusses her remote and on-site setups.

Our “Real Property” series includes the distractions, hobbies, and other activities that make up today’s workplace, to benchmark your own setup while gathering a few tips from your peers.

Want to share how you’ve adapted? Click here to participate.

Describe your office decor in one sentence.

Casual and warm, welcoming, with exposed brick, hanging ivy, cute lights, and fun(ny) artwork. (My favorite is a framed quote that says, “Relax. We’re all crazy. It’s not a competition.”)

What office equipment do you use to complete your day-to-day work

Laptop, wireless mouse, iPad with Apple pencil, cell phone, office chair, desk … Basic stuff! One really important thing for me — an ergonomic keyboard. I type so much that I started getting some carpal tunnel symptoms, but the ergonomic keyboard made a huge difference. Recently I started using the Apple pencil and I love it for taking notes in meetings and commenting on contracts. I also have to have my wireless mouse — I hate the built in tracker pad on laptops.

What key pieces of office furniture do you use?

Obviously a comfortable supportive office chair is important, but I spend a ton of time walking around the office and in meetings, so comfortable shoes are just as important!

In their 1985 single, “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg,” punk rock band The Ramones departed from their usual sardonic humor and joined the uproar among American Jewish communities over President Ronald Reagan’s visit to a German cemetery whose 2,000 World War II dead included 49 members of the Nazi Waffen-SS. But while Reagan’s offense seems due more to tone-deaf insensitivity than malice, the same can’t be said of Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s excursion this week to Budapest.

Carlson, arguably our generation’s answer to Father Coughlin, was photographed conversing with Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, using his show to promote the country’s racist and xenophobic regime and planning on Saturday to speak at a far-right training center designed to export Orbán’s illiberal vision abroad. So his trip deserves no less an uproar, as the most important takeaway is that he has made as searingly apparent as a shot of pear pálinka the threat that he and the rest of the increasingly authoritarian American right pose to our country’s democracy.

Far from going to the Hungarian capital to admire its elegant architecture while washing down spicy gulyás with sweet Tokaji and gaze upon the blue Danube flowing beneath the splendid Széchenyi Chain Bridge, Carlson went to Budapest to forge and deepen ties between American fascists like himself and their European counterparts.

But oddly enough, admiration for Hungary’s officially sanctioned bigotry and authoritarianism and the aspiration to emulate them in the US appears to be the quiet part that American fascists like Carlson and writer Rod Dreher – a Walter Duranty-like admirer of the Orbán regime who has lived there for several months – really, really don’t want to say out loud.

Broadcasting live from Budapest, for example, Carlson exhorted his viewers to pay attention to what’s going on in Hungary “If you care about Western civilization and democracies and families” and in a subsequent broadcast pointedly denied that Orbán is a fascist.

Dreher’s April 4 column defending Carlson’s visit in The American Conservative, complete with a chummy selfie of the two, is even more illustrative.

Alongside the familiar refrain that Orbán’s regime has “successfully fought against wokeness and other aspects of the liberal globalist agenda,” Dreher mockingly puts the accurate characterization of Hungary as an autocracy in scare quotes, insisting that Orbán allows “free and fair elections” that his Fidesz party is purportedly afraid it might lose next year.

“The key insight about Orban is that he believes that the future of his nation and of Western civilization hangs in the balance. He’s right about that,” Dreher writes in one of the now tiresome platitudes that Orbán’s American fans have repeated as they fawn over his dictatorship.

What Dreher doesn’t bother mentioning is Orbán’s methods, let alone their being the whole reason he is considered an autocrat. These include the Fidesz party gerrymandering Hungary’s electoral districts so that it can’t lose its majority in Parliament, effectively making Hungary a one-party state. Another is Orbán and his loyalists using financial pressure to take over nearly all of the country’s news media. On the economic front, Orbán’s government has tailored policy to enrich his allies in business and punish those who would challenge him. And in what was described as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic but looked more like a dictatorial shot across the bow, Parliament even gave Orbán the ability to rule by decree last March.

One-party rule, de facto government control of the media, instituting corruption and dictatorial powers sure sound like the classic hallmarks of autocracy to me. You’d think Dreher would have some eloquent counterpoint at the ready, but all he can muster is this whopper of a false equivalence: “The United States is in the throes of a left-wing cultural revolution that is turning the country into a soft totalitarian society,” he writes. But however objectionable the “woke” left’s occasional illiberal tendencies, to equate opinionated college professors or screechy Tumblr teens with an authoritarian national government, let alone suggest they’re more dangerous, is intellectual dishonesty bordering on self-parody.

Autocracy’s natural handmaiden is officially sanctioned bigotry, but Dreher doesn’t have much to say about that either.

He does give a shoutout to Carlson’s “quite sensible” desire to find out what Orbán has done to “hold off those like George Soros and the woke leadership of the European Union,” but he doesn’t say anything about Orbán and his party’s antisemitic portrayal of Soros as a Jewish financier plotting for world domination. Nor does he mention Orbán’s racist attacks on Roma, like last year, when he opposed court-ordered compensation for Romani children in the town of Gyöngyöspata over years of school segregation based on race – yes, you read that correctly – and bemoaned “members of an ethnic group” receiving “a significant amount [of money] without doing any work.”

Mind you, this wasn’t some 1950s Dixiecrat US senator, but a European head of government in 2020 talking about schoolchildren from a long-persecuted ethnic minority that has seen a significant rise in racist hate crimes in recent years. And in a country that was complicit in deporting Jews to Nazi death camps.

But don’t mistake Carlson’s absurd suggestion that Orbán’s regime is concerned with democracy or Dreher’s convenient omissions for naivety. Both of these men, along with other American right-wingers heaping praise on Hungary’s autocracy, know exactly what Orbán is and what they’re defending.

To wit, Dreher lets the mask slip perhaps a little more than he intended with this Machiavellian rationalization of Orbán’s totally-not-an-autocracy:
“His various strategies for how to address that existential challenge may be wise or correct, or ineffective or morally wrong, but what sets him apart from American conservative leaders is that he recognizes the nature of the crisis, and is prepared to act boldly to address it.”

Or to translate from the original German: Orbán’s systematic destruction of democracy is perfectly acceptable to maintain Hungary as a preserve of Western – i.e. exclusively straight, white and Christian – civilization. And in April, Carlson endorsed the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which is what neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville in 2017 were articulating when they chanted “Jews will not replace us.”

Dreher lets the mask slip a little more when he compares Carlson’s gulyás gallivanting to Richard Nixon’s visit to China.

“Carlson coming to Hungary opens the door for conservative thinkers to consider what Hungary (and other Visegrad countries) have to teach us about how to resist globalist liberalism,” Dreher writes. “A lot of US conservatives are intimidated by the false idea, propagated by liberal media and Establishment conservatives, that Hungary is a fascist state. It’s preposterous – and now that Tucker Carlson has violated that taboo with his presence, many more conservatives will start asking questions about Hungary, seeking to know more.”

Except Hungary is a fascist state, albeit one masquerading as a democracy, much as the thugs who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 believed they were defending democracy rather than trying to overthrow it. And anyone familiar with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s creation of the Fascist International in the 1930s will find the idea that right-wingers should flock to Hungary and learn from its 21st century fascist example in order to resist “globalist liberalism” – a phrase with antisemitic undertones – disquietingly familiar.
But while America’s leading right-wing media personality coming out as a supporter of authoritarianism represents a disturbing escalation, in a sense Carlson is doing us all a favor. Because despite Dreher’s futile efforts to prove the contrary, Carlson has demolished whatever plausible deniability may have remained to suggest he isn’t the white supremacist fascist whom anyone paying attention has always known him to be. And it’s a lot easier to oppose an enemy and expose him as a dire threat if he can’t hide anywhere.

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Alaric DeArment is a journalist in New York. Follow him on Twitter at @biotechvisigoth.

Another day, another ranking for lawyers to ogle in a search for meaning as they attempt to get through the day’s billables in this “post-pandemic” world we’re living in. Despite all the unrest and change in the world thanks to COVID-19, this is still the life of a Biglaw attorney, always on the hunt for confirmation that their firm is the best firm, the one that’s hitting all of its essential metrics year after year. If that sounds like you (and you might as well admit it, it probably does), then you should check out the latest offering from the American Lawyer, the annual A-List ranking.

Are you unfamiliar with this ranking? Here are all of the metrics that it measures to determine which Biglaw firms are the best of the best:

The A-List recognizes firms based on a combination of factors, both financial and cultural: revenue per lawyer, pro bono commitment, associate satisfaction, racial diversity and gender diversity (the percentage of equity partners who are women), with RPL and pro bono given double weight. Each metric measures Am Law 200 firms’ relative performance—a firm’s score in a given category is based on its ranking among all 200 firms. Each category, as well as the overall score, is based on a 100-point scale.

With that said, the full top 20 firms and their scores are listed at the American Lawyer. Without further ado, here are the top 10 to satiate your rankings cravings (with the firms’ total scores noted parenthetically):

1. O’Melveney (91)
2. Ropes & Gray (90.9)
3. Paul Weiss (89)
4. Debevoise (88.4)
5. Orrick (88.2)
6. Skadden (87.4)
7. Morrison & Foerster (87.2)
8. Covington (87.1)
9. WilmerHale (86.6)
10. Willkie (84)

Congratulations to all of the firms that made this year’s Am Law A-List.

The 2021 A-List: With Change a Constant, Top Performers Are Always Reevaluating [American Lawyer]

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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.

Batshit litigant and armchair legislator Chris Sevier is back! The man who once sued Apple because he could access porn from his laptop (entendre intended) is still vexing courthouses with his attempts to sue his way back into the good graces of social media platforms after being asked to leave because [taps “batshit” in opening sentence].

The man who believes the only way through his addiction to porn is to sue or legislate it into the ground has filed a lawsuit [PDF] in a Florida federal court that’s full of the insanity we’ve come to know and (well, probably not love) expect from a Sevier lawsuit.

It opens with this presumptuous language:

This is an action for declaratory and injunctive relief that challenges the sole surviving provisions of the “Communications Decency Act of 1996”, 47 U.S.C. § 230 et. seq.,1 (hereinafter referred to as “Section 230”) for namely violating the Petition and Access Clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, as well as the Free Speech, Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses.

Section 230 violates the First Amendment. What an absolutely tired allegation. I mean, even the former president is making that claim, and we all know how incredibly skilled DJT was at sussing out the facts. But this allegation is different! That’s the angle Sevier is taking, hoping the courts will find his assertion credible, rather than just more of the same ridiculousness.

The Plaintiffs attack this issue from a different angle than the Trump Plaintiffs. Congress, not Twitter, Facebook, or Youtube, made Section 230. If a litigant wants to have a court strike down one of Congress’s laws, the proper party to sue in most cases is the chief enforcer of Congress’s laws, the United States Attorney General. That is what the ACLU did in getting all of the other sections of the Communications Decency Act struck down in Reno American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844 (1997). That is what the Plaintiffs have done here.

Well, I guess Sevier should know. After all, he lists himself as a “de facto attorney general” in his lawsuit, placing his name alongside such luminaries as John Gunter (Special Forces of Liberty) and Richard Penosky (Warriors for Christ).

But let’s scroll back a single page and enjoy this part of Sevier’s first footnote:

Section 230 is vague and not the least restrictive means to fulfill any interests asserted by the government.

I’ve got some news for you, Chris. Section 230 isn’t an imposition. It’s an immunity. So, it’s not about “fulfilling” the “interests” of the government. It’s about protecting online entities from vexatious lawsuits targeting them for the speech of others. I’m no lawyer, but I assume getting everything ass-backwards in the first footnote is generally a bad idea.

As Sevier sees it, there are only two options facing the court he’s chosen to sue in: strike down Section 230 of the CDA for “abridging the right to petition the government for redress of grievances” or allow Florida’s new, blatantly unconstitutional anti-social media law to bypass any and all legal challenges for its First Amendment violations. Once again, IANAL but I can’t tell how being unable to sue Twitter over account moderation is “petitioning the government.”

While still not a lawyer, I can’t help but wonder if using superheated language is the best approach when you have neither facts nor the law on your side. I know the general tactic is to “bang the table” when you lack facts/law but

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

I mean…

Social media websites injured the Plaintiffs by falsely marketing themselves as a place where the Plaintiffs were free to exchange their political and religious views. After inducing the Plaintiffs to create and invest heavily in their user profiles on social media webistes that marketed themselves as glorified digital bulletin boards that were neutral on religious and political expression, the social media websites arbitrarily shifted their standards and were no longer neutral towards religious and political speech, engaging in self-help reprisal actions. The social media websites changed the deal terms in bad faith after having reached critical mass and having successfully created a monopoly on the digital public square to the shock and awe of users like the Plaintiffs. The bad faith censorship in the wake of arbitrary shifting standards that were designed to elevate the religion of Secular Humanism over non-religion and other religions has economically and emotionally injured the Plaintiffs. Social media websites have been permitted to get away with these consumer protection violations because of a Congressional action in making Section 230.

Lot of swipes at the internet in this paragraph. Almost makes it seem as though Sevier doesn’t enjoy being on it. But his lawsuit is all about being allowed to be back on it, which is some supreme sour-graping: the equivalent of “the food was terrible and such small portions.”

According to Sevier (who should never be relied on for legal advice, free or otherwise), the Thing To Do would be to say the new Florida law is cool and legal and unassailable.

In determining the trajectory of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, the public’s interest would likely best be served if the Court goes with the second option presented.

Or, if not, there’s always the compelled speech option Sevier touts in footnote 4.

In this case, the Plaintiffs seek a legal path so that social media websites that were never affiliated with a religious institution or political party from their inception will be forced to keep their promises to consumers to remain neutral on political and religious speech.

From there, the lawsuit moves on to discuss Sevier’s various bootings (along with those of his co-complainants) as well as the shitload of stupid anti-Section 230/anti-First Amendment laws that have been introduced around the nation — some of which are straight-up reposts of Sevier’s bespoke legislation, the “Stop Social Media Censorship Act.” That takes up about five pages and concludes with this:

The Plaintiff, along with hundreds of legislatures, have spent an enormous amount of time, money, and resources working on this issue because it is vital to the strength of our democracy and the welfare of our citizens. The Court could hold that the “cure-all” to the problems presented by this case is the state legislature must be responsive in enacting the Stop Social Media Censorship Act, if they want their constituents to be protected from the deceptive trade practices perpetrated by social media websites.

Dude, you misspelled “wasted.” And I doubt Sevier is really out any real amount of money for the anti-First Amendment fanfic he banged out on his presumably non-Apple computer and thrust into the hands of idiot legislators who couldn’t be bothered to run a perfunctory Google search on their interloping patron.

Since we know this lawsuit is doomed (DOOMED!), let’s just do some WTF-ing at the stuff Sevier has inserted into his litigation for no discernible reason.

After engaging in operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of the members of De Facto Attorneys General and Special Forces Of Liberty joined groups of former Special Forces and FBI to do extractions in the area of sex trafficking overseas.

I’m sorry, but what? Were they just “in the area” of sex trafficking or did they extract sex trafficked people? I mean, this sounds like they parachuted into “an area” to hang out with Gary Glitter before returning home to file baseless litigation.

“…the concerted efforts of manufacturers and retailers of Internet-enabled devices to distribute prostitution websites and pornographic websites in flagrant disregard of obscenity codes and products liability statutes.”

Yes, the major tech companies are very definitely trying to flood everyone with porn and prostititution, especially now that FOSTA is in effect.

Sevier may have given up the porn, but that won’t stop him from masturbating.

In 2021, Rep. Sabatini introduced the Stop Social Media Censorship Act (HB33), and subsequently, for unknown reasons, Rep. Sabatini got into some kind of squabble with Speaker Sprowls, as passions do tend to run high in the legislative branch and there are a lot of opportunities for conflict in the legislative branch. This dust-up caused the members of the Florida House to oppose Rep. Sabatini’s bills simply because of “who he was” and not because of “the meritorious substance of his bills.” In the wake of the Sabatini/Sprowls spat, Governor De Santis got his staff to use the Stop Social Media Censorship Act as a preliminary foundation to draft the monstrosity that became SB7072.

At the risk of sounding snarky, SB7072 – although well-intended – was distorted by ambitions and legal ignorance. Upon information and belief, personal glory might have been prioritized over substance and the rule of law. The judicial branch can help the legislative branch get things right.

To sum up, just completely fucking wrong about everything.

The Plaintiffs challenge every section and every subsection of Section 230, collectively and individually, for having been misconstrued or written to prevent citizens from acquiring relief from the government for the bad faith act of social media websites in violation of the petition and access clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Once again, getting booted from a platform is not government action. Suing social media companies isn’t seeking redress for government-caused harms. If Sevier wants to sue the government over its legislation, he can do so. What he can’t do is sue to stop platforms from exercising this immunity in cases where it’s appropriate. And that includes this case, where Sevier wants Section 230 and the First Amendment ignored because he and his moronic co-conspirators are unhappy about being booted from social media platforms for being their unhinged, bigoted, stupid selves.

Dozens of pages follow this assertion. None of them are worth reading for anything more than comic relief. There’s an inexplicable font change on page 132 of the 145-page filing — one padded by a duplication of the original complaint. And there’s reference to “amici,” suggesting parties other than the plaintiffs wish to express their views on this litigation, but the “amici” appear to be nothing more than Sevier dumping in some arguments from another lawsuit where he’s hoping to be allowed to file an amicus brief.

For no discernible reason, there’s this:

WHAT IS THEIR INTEREST

LEGISLATION

ARGUMENT

And this (quoted verbatim):

Our rights come from God. Our rights

Just like on the dollar bill. [Patriotic music swells.]

There are other moments of pure insanity, like this suggestion that preventing people from suing social media companies over moderation decisions violates both the First Amendment and consumer protection laws.

Section 230(b)(l) asserts that “it is the policy of the United States to promote the continued development of the Internet and other interactive computer services and other interactive media” but that policy must fail if completely blocks aggrieved parties, like the Plaintiffs and the Trump plaintiffs, from having the opportunity to petition the government for redress against social media websites that have engaged in harmful consumer protection violations in view of the FirstAmendment.

And I apologize for quoting this much of a very long footnote, but I don’t even know what to make of the first paragraph’s take on Section 230. And the second paragraph must be read in its entirety to truly comprehend the extent of Sevier’s (and his co-plaintiffs’) delusions.

The social media websites shifted their standards in bad faith and censored the Plaintiffs because their Constitutionally protected religious and political speech offended the delicate sensibilities of the employees who happened to work for the social media websites at the time. At the time of each censorship, the Plaintiffs had previously invested a ton of time and money in their user profile accounts. Every time the Plaintiffs have threatened Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube with legal action, the social media websites promise to immunize their deceptive and destructive trade practices by invoking Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This assumption based on the public record that social media websites might have total immunity under Section 230 has given rise to the Plaintiffs cause of action here in which the Constitutional or the parameters of Section 230 are in question.

The Plaintiffs collectively consists primarily of Christ-followers, who served in the United States Military in foreign theaters of war, namely on the rule oflaw mission, which is purposed to better ensure a government’s compliance with their highest Constitutional authority. The Plaintiffs have continued that mission state-side in America even though they no longer officially operating under Title 10 jurisdiction on behalf of the Armed Forces. The Plaintiffs routinely file comprehensive lawsuits across the United States on different controversial and complex issues that typically concern the “culture wars” and First Amendment issues that are too “politically hot” for the government-funded Attorneys General to pursue. In bringing such lawsuits, the Plaintiffs – without apology – often end up converting Article III Courts into their own private legislative research commission. Out of the overflow of the litigation pursued by the Plaintiffs, the Plaintiffs subsequently draft legislation for all 50 states and for the federal government, which is then routinely introduced by a bi-partisan network of sponsors that stretches across the Country before the Article I branch. The legislation authored by the Plaintiffs that gets presented to the members of legislative branch is legally vetted ad nausem and is calculated to survive judicial review, if subsequently challenged once enacted.

Sevier will be laughed out of court again. The clerk won’t be expected to transcribe the judge’s LOLing. This is stupid stuff done by a stupid man who is apparently incapable of learning from his multitudinous mistakes. Twitter is not the government. THE END. Expecting the First Amendment to be abridged and Section 230 to be struck down just because no platform is willing to host your shitty content is the epitome of entitlement. No one owes you anything, Chris (and cohorts). No one owes you a platform. And, given your general output, it’s completely unsurprising no one’s willing to give you one.

Man Who Sued Apple For Failing To Save Him From Porn Now Suing US Attorney General To Strike Down Section 230

More Law-Related Stories From Techdirt:

Olympics Copyright Insanity Rules Again: Gold Medal Winner Blocked From Sharing Her Own Victory
Home Depot Tech Will Brick Power Tools If They’re Stolen. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
FCC Blocks Elon Musk From Getting Millions In Subsidies For Delivering Broadband To Traffic Medians

Japanese authorities, having made their skepticism about matters cryptocurrent already abundantly clear, have gone a step further, suggesting that perhaps those who deal in fake currencies should be subject to the same rules as those who deal in real ones. The U.S. seemed to be moving in the same direction, at least in so far as the radical idea that those who dip in those waters should pay taxes, but, well, you know how the sausage gets made.

* Boogeyman of “CRT” being used to devalue disparate impact claims. If only there were some legal discipline that looked at how race impacts the legal system. [ABA Journal]

* Firms like Cravath and Paul Weiss are enacting COVID-sensitive return policies. Maybe old dogs can learn new tricks. [Reuters]

* Protestor arrested while protecting her people’s land and burial site given trial date. [Arizona Public Media]

* Four for life: Biden nominates four new judges for the federal bench. [White House]

* Don’t you know that he’s toxic? Brittney’s lawyer wants her father ousted. [NBC News]

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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.

NYU Law Prof Caught Up In Cuomo Mess: Not a great look generally, but even more so for an ethics professor.

Law Prof Suing Over Vaccine Mandate: Truly, this is the dumbest timeline.

Bonuses For Counsel: At Troutman Pepper.

Raises Ahoy! At boutique law firm.

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