Category: News Feeds

The outgoing president of the United States may well be in need of a new bank upon departing the White House. But he’s definitely going to need a new banker.

* Netflix has defeated libel claims related to The Laundromat, a film about the “Panama Papers.” Maybe the judge was moved by Meryl Streep’s performance… [Hollywood Reporter]

* A lawsuit has been filed over alleged abuse of migrant women in detention centers run by ICE. [NBC News]

* A typo in a Georgia election lawsuit says the lawyer verified the allegations under “plenty of perjury” instead of “penalty of perjury.” [ABA Journal]

* Judges of the Southern District of New York exercised a rarely used power to keep the acting U.S. Attorney in Manhattan on the job until Joe Biden is inaugurated. [New York Times]

* A report alleges that some law firms took Payroll Protection Program money and banked the cash rather than used it on payroll. Don’t think anyone should be surprised… [ABA Journal]

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Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

New Technology Without Adoption Is Worse Than Doing Nothing

New Technology Without Adoption Is Worse Than Doing Nothing

Rohit Parekh – Matter365

Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day!

According to a survey of more than 1,200 partners across law firms of all sizes conducted by Major, Lindsey & Africa, what percentage of equity partners reported they expect their compensation to be affected by COVID?

Hint: The survey was conducted between July and September of this year.

See the answer on the next page.

Over the past decade, the role of legal operations has grown in strategic importance by embracing digital transformation. Legal operations professionals have successfully leveraged digital technologies to bring efficiency and innovation to corporate legal processes. Their efforts have played a critical role in guiding organizations through the disruption and uncertainty associated with the Covid pandemic. As organizations look to the future, legal operations will play a vital role in delivering efficiencies in the delivery of legal services.

According to the 2020 Annual Law Department Operations Survey, the greatest challenge legal operations professionals are currently facing is around delivering measurable business value. The top challenge that survey respondents expect to face over the next three years is “cost containment and savings or managing the budget.” In light of this, selecting technology partners that will deliver what they promise and provide value to the organization has become even more important.

One of the core legal technologies that legal departments invest in to improve efficiency, productivity, and security is document and email management. 37% of the survey respondents will evaluate or implement this solution for their in-house teams in 2021. With so many competing priorities and options in the market, it can be difficult to get started. Here are a few questions that legal operations should ask to ensure they are picking the right document and email management solution for their in-house teams.

Top Questions When Evaluating a DMS:

How does legal document management differ from enterprise solutions?

Modern document management solutions are designed to meet the specific productivity, collaboration, and security requirements of legal professionals. For example, legal DMS solutions organize information by matter, with metadata and security inheritance so that information can be tagged appropriately.

Can your solution help me manage all my emails as well as my documents?

A modern DMS should enable legal professionals to manage their emails as effectively as documents, in the same folder structures and workspaces. The solution should provide a single repository for all communications and documents relating to a matter, enabling professionals to quickly find the information they need.

How does your DMS help improve my ability to search documents?

Finding and applying the right information at the right time is critically important for any legal professional. Modern document management includes more powerful search capabilities that save valuable time, leverage precedent more effectively, and makes more efficient use of information resources.

Download a 15-question DMS Checklist for Legal Operations here: http://imanage.com/legal-ops-checklist

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Clint Crosier is General Counsel and Privacy Officer of iManage, a Chicago-based technology company that transforms how professionals get work done by combining the power of artificial intelligence with content and email management. Prior to joining iManage, he was a corporate attorney at Reed Smith, where he advised clients in transactional and general corporate matters. Clint can be reached at clint.crosier@imanage.com.

Earlier this month, Bob Dylan sold the rights to his 60-year personal music catalog to Universal Music Publishing Group. While the sales price is unknown, his songs have been valued at around $300 million.

By selling the rights, Dylan no longer charges licensing and royalty fees for the use of his songs. In fact, he might have to pay licensing fees to the new owners to use the very songs he created. So it appears that he has opted to get a large cash payout in exchange for giving up future income streams from his music.

What would motivate him to sell his music now?

Some have speculated that it was for tax reasons. It is believed that the Biden administration would push for higher tax rates for high-income individuals. Even if Republicans maintain control over the Senate next year, it is likely they would agree to higher rates in exchange for other concessions.

So by selling his music now, he will take advantage of lower capital gains tax rates while they are still around.

But there are things we do not know. For example, what is the amount of his taxable gain? One way to minimize capital gains taxes is by calculating his cost basis in his music. To do this, we will need to know how much money Dylan spent in connection with creating his songs. Expenses such as studio recording and manager fees to name a few. Or did he purchase his own studio equipment? If he did, how much depreciation did he take on the equipment?

Dylan was not the only one to sell the rights to his songs. Stevie Nicks sold 80% of the copyright interest in her songs, which was valued at $100 million. Taylor Swift sold the rights to her first six albums for $300 million.

By selling the songs now, Dylan will probably avoid paying higher state taxes in the future. Some states, have lost income and sales tax revenue due to the coronavirus. In addition, some will incur more costs, mainly due to unemployment claims. States will make up for this deficit by taxing higher-income people even further.

As for the corporate buyers of the copyrights, they will (at least temporarily) get more-favorable income tax treatment. The income from licensing and streaming will be subject to the lower 21% corporate tax rate. However, this favorable tax rate will likely be on the chopping block. Whether it will return to the old rates or a slightly higher rate remains to be seen.

There could be other, nontax reasons for the sale. Perhaps the income streams from licensing are not as high as they were previously. And money from live concerts are pretty much nonexistent. Or perhaps Dylan just needed the money.

The tax planning strategy of selling assets before a tax rate hike (whether real or proposed) is nothing new. People take this opportunity to sell businesses, key assets, or real estate. If the timing is right, the tax savings can be huge. But selling an important asset like the copyright to your songs is not a decision that should be taken lightly. Because you are taking a gamble and you might end up being wrong.

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Steven Chung is a tax attorney in Los Angeles, California. He helps people with basic tax planning and resolve tax disputes. He is also sympathetic to people with large student loans. He can be reached via email at sachimalbe@excite.com. Or you can connect with him on Twitter (@stevenchung) and connect with him on LinkedIn.

Bill Barr seems to have shambled out the doors of the Justice Department without suffering the indignity of a mean presidential send-off tweet, although the day isn’t over yet. Perhaps Commander Twitterthumbs is saving that one for Christmas — you know, to spread the good cheer since Barr wasn’t able to have his $35,000 annual Christmas party at the Trump hotel this year.

But as Barr enjoys his well-earned ignominious retirement, he leaves behind a crew of lawyers manning the Good Ship Executive Branch as it’s taking on water by the second.

White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, who did more than even Bill Barr to protect Trump during the impeachment, in addition to stonewalling even the most basic congressional oversight for the past two years, is desperately trying to bring this wrecked ship safely to shore. But he’s fallen out of presidential favor for the mortal sin of telling Trump that Rudy Giuliani’s crackpot solutions to losing an election by 7 million votes are patently illegal.

No, Mister President Sir, you can’t just declare martial law in all the swing states. There is no legal authority for Homeland Security to impound the voting machines. And, no, for the love of all that is holy, you cannot make Sidney Powell a special counsel to investigate election fraud.

During a heated, five-hour meeting at the White House on Friday night, Cipollone and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows tried to stop Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, and Overstock nutter Patrick Byrne from taking the president all the way over the crazy cliff with them.

“Trump is fed up with Cipollone, his counsel,” Axios’s Jonathan Swan reports, adding that “Some supporters of Cipollone are worried that Trump is on the brink of removing him and replacing him with a fringe loyalist.”

Would that “fringe loyalist” be a lawyer from Texas with an affinity for animal prints and facially nonsensical conspiracy theories? Could be! The Trump campaign already kicked Powell to curb once, and The Daily Beast reports that Michael Flynn’s attorney is out of the running for special counsel. But that doesn’t mean she won’t be joining the Deep State as Cipollone’s replacement. (Dear God.)

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani is trying desperately to control the narrative, telling everyone that Powell “is no longer part of [our] team. She is on her own.” How long until Trump works out that his pal Rudy and the Elite Strike Force Super Friends Task Team  did a pisspoor job litigating the post-election suits? Powell at least managed to get two of her four Kraken appeals docketed at the Supreme Court, while the Trump campaign’s last, best gasp at overturning the result in Pennsylvania still hasn’t showed up yet.

Back at the Justice Department, Barr’s departure leaves Jeffrey Rosen manning the ship. Rosen, who left Kirkland & Ellis to join this shitshow, will have his work cut out for him trying to contain the fallout from whatever lunatic iceberg we’re about to slam into. Which is the fate of all lawyers in Trumpland, before they are inevitably cast out in a barrage of tweets, with a giant target painted on their backs.

Isn’t that right, Rod Rosenstein?

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

There’s not an obvious choice in my mind. So we’re just working through it.

— Presdident-elect Joe Biden, in comments made about his choice for who will eventually be named as his attorney general. Current frontrunners for the job include Judge Merrick Garland of the D.C. Circuit and Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL). Biden reiterated that his relationship with the Justice Department won’t look like that of his predecessor. “The attorney general of the United States of America is not the president’s lawyer,” he said. “I will appoint someone who I expect to enforce the law as the law’s written, not guided by me.”

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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.

Nine-and-a-half years ago, I finished law school, without incurring any student loan debt. Two-and-a-half years ago, with the clarifying distance allowed for by the passage of time, I started chronicling the strategies I used (and a few I subsequently learned). My manuscript became Your Debt-Free JD: How to Graduate from Law School Without Incurring Student Loan Debt.

When the book was nearly complete, I sent out a flurry of proposals to small publishing companies. I talked to a couple of literary agents. Really thought I actually had a deal with Carolina Academic Press, and was just waiting to sign the paperwork, before I got a disappointing call to let me know things had fallen through.

It was always a small target market. Total JD enrollment has gone up since then, but when I was first pitching my book, there were only about 37,000 students starting their 1L year in law schools across America. Presumably, people who do not intend to go to law school would not be interested in reading a book about how to go to law school without incurring student loan debt. Even within the general category of “law students,” the core strategy described in the book — in a nutshell, courting a full law school scholarship and largely ignoring the U.S. News rankings — is workable for only a small subset of people at the fortunate intersection of “talent” and “open-mindedness.”

So, while I was disappointed, I understood publishers’ reluctance. Eventually, though, I realized I was falling victim to one of the very things I warn against in the book: irrationally enslaving oneself to traditional measures of prestige that have very little to do with real world outcomes in the twenty-first century. It is prestigious to be the author of a book published by a respected publisher. But at the end of the day, I didn’t write Your Debt-Free JD to feel better about myself. I wrote it to help people, particularly those coming into the legal profession without any previous exposure to it. I have a soft spot for those folks, having been one of them when I started law school.

With my signature bad timing, I published Your Debt-Free JD as an e-book on Amazon on February 29, 2020. It was a simpler time, when pretty much only Bob Woodward, President Donald Trump, and a few lucky senators knew that coronavirus was going to be a big deal. Despite the bad timing, demand for tangible paper-and-ink copies of Your Debt-Free JD was so high that I set up a paperback version a little over a month after the Kindle edition hit the virtual shelves. Following an initial spike when I first wrote about Your Debt-Free JD in this column, sales remained slow but steady, until reaching a pretty cool milestone at the end of last week.

Your Debt-Free JD has now officially sold 100 copies. That’s hardly enough to reach bestseller status, but that is a whole lot of people who hopefully gained valuable insight into what they are facing in terms of law school debt. Apparently, some readers found the book useful — my thanks to those who helped it reach a reasonably respectable 4.1-star rating on Amazon.

Although I didn’t write Your Debt-Free JD to feel better about myself, I kind of do, when I hear from readers who got something out of it. Send me an email if you’ve read the book and have any thoughts you’d like to share. Better yet, if you liked it, communicate that to me with a five-star review on Amazon, which will make it easier for other people to find and benefit from the book. Hell, if you leave a five-star review I’ll even talk your law school decision-making process over with you on a call, or at lunch next time I’m in your city if this pandemic ever ends.

And hey, thanks to everyone who already bought a copy of Your Debt-Free JD. Tell your friends. Remember, it makes a great gift for Christmas, Hanukkah, or whatever occasion you’re celebrating. Your Debt-Free JD is also a nice little surprise apropos of nothing for that special heathen in your life (atheists particularly appreciate a little attention this time of year). Happy holidays, everyone.

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

Danske Bank has certainly done a great number of things wrong. Laundering money, mostly, and lots of it, for lots of people on a list of people for whom it should most especially not been laundering money. It was also, predictably and necessarily, given the above, pretty bad at detecting money laundering or listening to those who did. And, of course, it did business with Deutsche Bank, a serious enough lapse in judgement in and of itself, even before you realize that most of that business was—you guessed it—laundering money. But one thing it does not seem to have done wrong is violate U.S. sanctions while doing all of that money laundering.