Category: News Feeds

(Professor David Friedman of Willamette University College of Law, offering advice on how to find a lawyer who will be able to do some light math while telling clients who is the tallest, which train will arrive first, and which day of the week the movie will play. (Gavel bang: Law School Memes for Edgy T14s))

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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.

With the COVID-19 appreciation bonuses sweeping Biglaw, it’s easy to think the legal industry escaped the economic turmoil of the last year unscathed. And, while it is certainly true that, on balance, the legal industry did better than most, it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows.

Indeed, lots of people in the legal industry lost their jobs during the raging pandemic. One firm that made news for their layoffs — not just staff layoffs, but associate ones as well — is Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr. A 2017 merger brought together Saul Ewing and Arnstein & Lehr to create the obviously named Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr, and the firm seemed poised for growth, taking the 15th spot in the Vault ranking of most prestigious Mid-Atlantic firms, and ranking 131st on the 2020 Am Law 200 after raking in $239,077,000 in gross revenue in 2019.

But Above the Law has learned the COVID-19 upheaval hasn’t ended with layoffs at the firm. According to tipsters, the firm has communicated to law students interested in their 2021 Summer Program that they will not be hosting one. From the email students are receiving (available in full on the next page):

Unfortunately, given the uncertain nature surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, the Firm has made the difficult decision not to host a 2021 Summer Program.  The Firm remains committed to hiring excellent law students such as yourself and we hope you will consider keeping in touch and reapplying in the future.

Remember on-campus interviews at most law schools were pushed from the fall to January this year (again because of COVID). So while Saul Ewing is the first we’ve heard doing away with their 2021 summer program (2020 was its own special shit show), who knows what we’ll see before the cycle ends.

We reached out to the firm to ask for a comment on their 2021 Summer Program and a representative provided this statement:

It is not correct that we “canceled” our program. We had not planned to host a summer program in 2021 due to our desire to fully integrate other new lawyers into the firm from the Classes of 2019 and 2020 and the inherent difficulties of running the kind of program that we want in a virtual way. The decision was driven less by “economic upheaval” and more by the genuine desire to focus on our new lawyers, including those who will be first years in the fall, and to avoid a summer program that is in any way less effective than our traditional program because of the remote environment. We fully expect to return to our normal full program in 2022.

If your firm or organization is cutting their summer program, slashing salaries, closing its doors, or reducing the ranks of its lawyers or staff, whether through open layoffs, stealth layoffs, or voluntary buyouts, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Our vast network of tipsters is part of what makes Above the Law thrive. You can email us or text us (646-820-8477).

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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).

Every year or so we hear about another lawyer or law student encountering a curious bit of professional discrimination. When seeking out a new apartment, the landlord will hand over a boilerplate lease with a buried provision right next to “no pets” where the tenant commits to not being a lawyer.

At least that’s the usual, sneaky way that it gets worked in. Sometimes, like in this email a tipster sent us today, the landlord comes right out and says it:

As I said, this company is not unique, but perusing the company website, I came up with this:

That’s the most painfully Boston thing I’ve seen since Marky Mark ate a lobstah roll riding on Wally the Green Monster’s back.

Attorneys are not a protected class and landlords can and do discriminate based on people’s jobs all the time. Usually they’re doing it because they don’t think the tenant can make rent with their current occupation, rather than locking out the prototypical professional.

But why are landlords refusing to rent to legally skilled tenants? Let’s brainstorm some possible reasons!

• Neighbors complain about sight of walking shell of human being.
• Fear that next big bonus might lead tenant to abandon lease for bigger apartment as opposed to servicing $250K debt.
• Constant bing of handheld device registering increasingly insistent partner emails throughout the night.
• Never know when an ERISA lawyer is going to lose it and start screaming in the courtyard about vesting and backloading.
• Tenants coming home at 4:30 a.m. are a real drag for the late night keggers everyone else in the complex likes to throw.
• The recycling hub isn’t built for this much yellow legal pad paper.
• Cascade of gentle sobbing throughout the weekend too much for other tenants.
• Sometimes the rest of the building just wants to discuss Suits in peace without someone pointing out that it makes no goddamned sense.
• The week after the first adverse possession lecture is always a nightmare.
• You can’t get the full deposit back after painting a mural of The Creation of Adam with a naked Antonin Scalia touching the hand of God.

Or, as the tipster put it:

No doubt the reason must be because they don’t want to hear constant arguing over originalism vs natural law, and not at all because a law student/lawyer would be able to notice illegal things they’re up to.

Yeah, it’s probably all the originalism and not serious concern that a tenant with a basic grasp of building codes will eat into a profit margin inflated by putting off required upgrades. Definitely the originalism.

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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.

In the wake of dozens of executive orders from President Biden, the Unitary Executive Theory party is begging for a little unity. How very dare the new president exercise the power they themselves enshrined as gospel over the past four decades!

We are old enough to remember when the president governed by using a Sharpie and Twitterphone to declare an emergency so he could seize congressionally allocated military funds to build a border wall — a massive usurpation of Congress’s spending power that provoked nary a whisper on the right. Because we are exactly two years old.

And if memory serves, there was a time when it was perfectly acceptable for the White House to freeze the defense allocation to an Eastern European ally whose leader wouldn’t knuckle under pressure to announce an investigation of a presidential candidate.

But those days are over. And while Sen. Blackburn suffers from regular bouts of Constitution, How Does It Go?, she’s hardly the only politician inventing new standards for presidential conduct with a Democrat in the White House. Now the president’s job is to tie his own hands behind his back and work with congress in the name of “unity.”

“The scale of Joe Biden’s executive orders and their impact on Americans is stark,” tweeted Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR). “The president preached unity from the inaugural stand, yet he signed an immigration EO in the Oval Office that would put American workers last.”

“President Biden’s inaugural address focused heavily on unity, bringing the nation together after the division we’ve experienced,” sniffed Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL). “The new EOs he just signed, however, cater to the Left, ignoring the steps necessary to move America forward.”

“President Biden’s blitz of divisive unilateral executive actions yesterday directly conflict with his rhetoric about the need to unify the country,” tweeted Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY), complaining at length about “these executive orders and proposals — bypassing Congress.”

“We face significant challenges that require bipartisan responses. Today’s Executive Orders reverse important policies and impose significant economic cost that will imperil our recovery,” House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) complained.

She’s so close to getting it!

Here on Planet Earth, many of those “important policies” which got reversed were themselves unilateral impositions of the previous president. The ban on transgender people serving in the military wasn’t a “bipartisan response.” Ditto the Keystone XL pipeline permit, or the shutdown of racial bias training in all federal workplaces. Biden’s unilateral return to the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization is exactly as bipartisan as Trump’s pullout.

Which is to say that the previous occupant of the Oval Office exercised his constitutional authority to run the executive branch as he saw fit, as will his successor. And it’s clanging hypocrisy for the party that banged that unitary executive drum all these years to decry the very use of presidential authority they themselves supported.

They wanted a president who could fire inspectors general and FBI directors and Senate-confirmed agency heads at will, all while turning the ship of state on a dime. And now they’re complaining because they’ve got one.

Cue the tiny, tiny violins.

The GOP’s oversimplified pushback on Biden’s executive actions [WaPo]
GOP Lawmakers Decry Joe Biden’s Executive Orders in Swift Bipartisan Split [Newsweek]

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Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

I don’t care what an attorney has done, a senior partner sending a firmwide email with the express purpose of embarrassing other attorneys — especially junior attorneys — at the firm is never a good look. Yes, in this instance, the attorneys subjected to the partner’s wrath were — initially, at least — in the wrong, but the partner is the one who comes out with egg on his face.

According to the internal email obtained by Roll on Friday, the attorneys subjected to this public ridicule were lax in entering their billable hours. And I get it, I do, recording hours worked is incredibly important for a law firm. It’s how firms get paid, and in turn pay their employees. It’s annoying as shit (and if anecdotes are to be believed, a major motivation for attorneys moving in-house), but it does *have* to be done. But this senior partner’s reaction to the admittedly annoying, albeit understandable, delay in time entry is beyond the pale.

Gordon Oldham is a senior partner at the Hong Kong based firm of Oldham, Li & Nie. And the missive he fired out is utterly absurd. He starts:

I’ve learnt that you can motivate 90% of people through love, fear or greed. I subsequently learned that you can catch the other 10% though embarrassment or religious guilt.

Oh boy, this is going to be a doozy!

It seems that some of you are not in love with OLN and its success to actually mark your time. You don’t fear any punishment and you are obviously not greedy enough to want to get commissions from the fees that you put in. So I have decided that maybe I can embarrass a few of you by showing you the attached which of course is for your billable time from the 4th to the 8th of January as recorded – or in the case of [Associate 1], [Partner 1], and [Associate 2], not recorded for those four days.

Seriously, embarrassment is the STATED PURPOSE of this email. This is… a terrible leadership technique.

[Associate 1], the last time I asked you about this you promised me you would start using it [timekeeping software] and keep it open on your desk at all times. You haven’t and you still fail to put in your time.

And fellow partners were not immune from Oldham’s anger:

[Partner 2], congratulations, in 5 days you managed to record 1 hour.

But it gets absolutely brutal as he turns his attention to a trainee and another associate:

[Trainee 1], unless you have been in suspended animation where you have absolutely no work, could you please find out how I discontinue a Training Contract halfway through where the trainee refuses/fails to carry out reasonable instructions from his principal!

[Associate 3], I used to criticise you for not putting in bills and you always told me you did but your principals at that time were discounting you. Now, I see that you don’t even put in any time so perhaps before it was just a made up excuse?

And he’s ready for some real consequences:

If at the end of this week there is not a marked improvement in timekeeping then I’m going to have to start issuing formal notices to everybody who fails to do so or who fails to establish a working relationship with Clio [timekeeping software]. Formal notices of this nature will have an impact on bonuses, pay rises, holidays.

If you cannot look after your own affairs, how on earth do you expect to look after your clients matters?

Roll on Friday reached out to Oldham for comment, and while he had some choice words about his opinion on the newsworthiness of the story (and yeah, both billable hour entry and jerk partners are absolutely fodder for legal blogs, so the Venn diagram of this story checks out), he eventually, kinda defends the email:

My dog Tommy who is a very friendly Hong Kong Street stray only took one occasion when he backed into a hot radiator to learn his lesson. It seems that he can learn faster than some people these days who are being pulled kicking and screaming into the age of technology. Illustrating who is using technology and who is not hardly constitutes the shaming of lawyers. Not exactly Game of Thrones. Man up…or is that too gender specific these days.

DUDE! You literally wrote were sending the email in order to embarrass your fellow attorneys, now you’re backing away and trying to claim that isn’t “shaming”? It is EXACTLY what you said you were trying to do. You easily could have sent *private* emails to the offending attorneys, but you went for a public show because you were aiming to shame.

At least those who choose to work with him now know just what kind of toxic work environment they’re walking into.

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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).

For the past 13 years, the annual Blickstein Group Law Department Operations Survey has amassed key trend data concerning the burgeoning discipline of legal ops. The findings of the 2020 LDO Survey reveal a resilient profession that managed very well through the pandemic—
with only 6% saying that it impacted their ability to deliver legal services.

Find out more in our free webinar on February 11th at 1 p.m. ET.
We will share data and provide new perspectives on:

• The Impact of COVID-19 on Legal Operations;
• Diversity and Inclusion;
• The Continued Growth of Professionalism;
• NewLaw Approaches;
• And a look ahead at what we can expect in 2021 and beyond.

Presenters:

• Elizabeth Benegas, General Counsel, NetDocuments
• Kiran Mallavarapu, Sr. VP & Manager, Legal Strategic Services, Liberty Mutual Insurance

Moderator:

• Brad Blickstein, Principal, Blickstein Group

By filling out the form, you are opting in to receive communication from Above the Law and its Partners.

Prospective law students, current law students, and law school alumni are eagerly awaiting the release of the 2022 U.S. News Law School Rankings in March. That seems so far away, doesn’t it? Almost excrutiatingly so. What if we told you that we had a preview of those rankings? Sounds great, right? Let us help you scratch that rankings itch.

The methodology used by U.S. News places a 25% weight on law school admissions in the overall ranking. That category is comprised of three separate components, each with a different weight: acceptance rate (2.5%); median undergraduate GPA (10%); and median LSAT (12.5%) (GRE scores omitted for lack of data).

Last week, Dean Paul Caron of Pepperdine University School of Law provided charts for all of the ABA data for those components, and this week, he’s created two admissions rankings using that data. The first ranking is simple, while the second ranking better approximates the actual U.S. News rankings using Z scores.

Here are the Top 14 schools, using each of Caron’s rankings.

Ranking 1

	Law School	Acceptance Rate Rank	UPGA Rank	LSAT Rank	Weighted Ranks
1	Yale	1	1	1	1.0
2	Harvard	3	7	1	3.6
3	Stanford	2	4	4	3.8
4	Chicago	9	4	4	4.5
5	Virginia	4	3	6	4.6
6	Pennsylvania	5	4	6	5.1
7	Columbia	7	14	3	7.8
8	Washington Univ.	19	7	9	9.2
9	Northwestern	13	10	9	9.8
10	NYU	21	14	6	10.7
11	Cornell	12	9	14	11.8
12	Duke	23	19	9	14.4
13	USC	8	12	18	14.6
14	UCLA	26	22	9	15.9

Ranking 2

	Law School	Acceptance Rate Rank	UPGA Rank	LSAT Rank	Weighted Z-Scores
1	Yale	1	1	1	1.89
2	Stanford	2	4	4	1.76
3	Harvard	3	7	1	1.75
4	Virginia	4	3	6	1.73
5	Pennsylvania	5	4	6	1.71
6	Chicago	9	4	4	1.71
7	Washington Univ.	19	7	9	1.63
8	Columbia	7	14	3	1.60
9	Northwestern	13	10	9	1.58
10	Cornell	12	9	14	1.57
11	NYU	21	14	6	1.54
12	USC	8	12	18	1.50
13	Duke	23	19	9	1.47
14	UC-Berkeley	20	18	14	1.47

We bet Washington University and USC wish that the U.S. News rankings were based only on their admissions profiles right about now, while schools like Michigan and Georgetown are thanking their lucky stars that the rankings are based on more.

We’ll check back in March to see just how close to reality these partial rankings are.

Preview Of The 2022 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Admissions [TaxProf Blog]

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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.

Except to fellow members of the European Union, Germany does not extradite its citizens to face justice outside the borders of the Fatherland. International Man of Mystery and accused hedge fund fraudster Florian Homm knows this all too well, for after having narrowly avoided extradition from Italy—where he’d been arrested at the Uffizi—to the U.S., where he’s been indicted for ripping clients off to the tune of $200 million (and where others are facing the music for him), on a technicality, he quickly returned to the safe embrace of the Reich.

It can be very hard to get Americans to pay much attention to anything going on overseas, excepting, occasionally, when our military first starts blowing up something new in the great vague beyond out there. Still, that’s not going to keep me from trying. Like again and again, even well after I should have learned my lesson.

Anyway, as I write this, Russian lawyer and anticorruption activist Alexei Navalny continues his struggle against authoritarian strongman Vladimir Putin from the confines of a Moscow jail cell. If you haven’t been following this, last year Navalny was poisoned with Novichok — a Soviet-era nerve agent that would be very difficult for anyone outside the highest levels of the Russian government to acquire. Navalny almost died, but, once he regained consciousness, he didn’t waste time during his five-month recovery in Germany. Instead, Navalny assumed a secret identity in a clandestine sting operation to trick one of the would-be assassins into confessing his role. Then, rather than staying where he was or going into hiding or just getting out of the dangerous field of criticizing Putin, Navalny ignored the Kremlin’s threats that he would be arrested on bogus charges the moment his plane touched down, and flew right back into Russia, where he was arrested on bogus charges the moment his plane touched down.

Boy, I can’t wait until this comes out as a great critically acclaimed movie that’s ignored by audiences in favor of Fast & Furriest 2029: There’s No Rule That Says Air Bud Can’t Drive. Seriously though, Alexei Navalny is a f*cking hero, and right now thousands of Russians are risking their own freedom to try to ensure that his story, and Russia’s story writ large, has a happy ending.

Last Saturday, thousands of Russians turned out in about 100 cities and towns across Russia’s nearly a dozen time zones to call for Navalny’s release and an end to kleptocratic rule in the country. In Moscow alone, at least 40,000 individuals joined the rally, according to estimates from Reuters. Russia’s Interior Ministry responded with the signature tactic of the Putin administration, lies, and said the Moscow protesters actually numbered only 4,000 — which, if even remotely accurate, would have made the approximately 1,360 arrested by Moscow police pretty impressive. More protests are planned for next weekend.

The protests in Russia stand in stark contrast to the situation with the pro-authoritarian mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol three weeks ago. The U.S. insurrectionists were the ones peddling lies in that situation, not the government, which, except for the president, repeatedly told the truth that there was zero evidence of widespread election fraud. The Russian protesters are calling out for real democracy, whereas the American rioters were demanding that real democracy be overturned so that Donald Trump could remain in office. The crackdown on the Russian protesters was swift, fierce, and unjustified, whereas the response against the American domestic terrorists has been unenthusiastic (weeks after the fact, just 135 have been charged with mostly minor crimes for storming the U.S. Capitol).

Moreover, Navalny led from the vanguard, was the first ready to suffer for his activism, and bravely looked death itself in the face in his efforts to secure a more just society for Russians. Trump, on the other hand, after saying to his Capitol-bound mob (from behind a pane of bulletproof glass) that “after this, we’re going to walk down — and I’ll be there with you,” scurried away and hid at the White House, before later ceding all responsibility, willing to personally risk nothing in his futile attempt to salve his ego at the expense of American democracy.

Sometimes, being an American feels like living in season two of Game of Thrones, when all the Qartheen are blathering on about Qarth being “the greatest city that ever was or will be.” That’s what we sound like when we’re always saying that America is the greatest country in the history of the world. At times, America isn’t that great at all. It’s flawed. It’s always incomplete. The moment we succumb to the temptation to just unthinkingly wave little flags at the expense of constantly doing the hard work of forming a “more perfect Union” is the moment we’ll lose everything that does make America special.

As Americans, it’s important to voice support not just for Navalny, but for the thousands of ordinary Russians reaching out desperately, at great personal risk, for freedom. But it’s also wise to seize upon this as a moment of national reflection, to put recent events in context and to learn from them. Right now, at least, a good number of Russians actually seem to have something profound to teach Americans about true patriotism.

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Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

Giuliani caught himself a billion-dollar headache after telling anyone who would listen that Dominion was fixing the election (they weren’t). Paul Davis is asking a court to junk the federal government and turn it over to the Hobbits (they won’t). And Jeffrey Clark is accused of to trying to convince Trump to pull a coup… now he’s hoping Biglaw will take him back (they shouldn’t).