Category: News Feeds

We have a president spewing insanity to the world: He’s spewing wild conspiracy theories about the election that have no basis in fact.

Republicans in Congress have refused to condemn this behavior, and many have affirmatively supported it.

Why?

Because they’re afraid they’ll be on the receiving end of a nasty tweet.

Honest to God: We have soldiers around the world risking injury or death to defend America.

And Republican senators are afraid of how they might be hurt by a tweet?

This is breathtaking.

Suppose the very worst happens: A nasty tweet hits its mark. Egad! Instead of being Senator Jarndyce, you lose your election and become former Senator Jarndyce. You retire into serving on a couple of corporate boards and giving speeches for 10 or 20 grand a pop. Is that so terrible?

What are you risking?

Soldiers risk life and limb; you risk being forced into a cushy next phase of your life.

I feel the same way about presidents serving as role models.

When an epidemic hits the United States, and literally thousands of lives could be saved by wearing a mask, the president should wear a mask. I don’t care if a mask is a little uncomfortable or could be turned into a political point: On the one side of the scale is a little discomfort or a political point; on the other side is literally tens of thousands of lives. Which side weighs more?

Lest you fear I’m being terribly partisan, let me be bipartisan in my criticism:  When President Bill Clinton is asked under oath about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, he must tell the truth.  He must model good behavior for all Americans.  (There’s a distinction here between committing perjury and being impeached for perjury. I’m saying only that Clinton should not have committed perjury; reasonable minds could differ over whether perjury was sufficient to justify impeachment.)

As a litigator, I spent decades sternly instructing people that they had to tell the truth under oath. I was occasionally talking to people at risk of losing their jobs if they told the truth. But I told middle-level managers, likely to be fired if they told the truth, that they were obliged to tell the truth. They were under oath.

President Clinton was risking only impeachment: If he told the truth, he might lose a vote in the Senate. He’d be forced into being a former president, thus serving on more prominent boards than the former senators and giving speeches for a hundred grand a pop. A middle-level manager, with kids in school and a mortgage to pay, is at serious risk if he tells the truth; a president is not.

One could, of course, also argue this as a matter of threat rather than principle: When you take an oath to tell the truth, you pledge your immortal soul that you will not lie. At risk of eternal damnation, what is your response to the following question?

I’m not counting on posthumous retribution for our pusillanimous or perjurious politicians.

But I wouldn’t mind a little karma.

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Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.

The 2020 bonus season is as far as can be from being called a dud, what with up to $40,000 of special bonus money that has been tacked on to just about every market bonus, but with a few exceptions here and there, we’ve yet to see a firm step forward to announce truly market-busting bonuses — until today.

Enter litigation boutique Susman Godfrey, a firm that consistently wows associates with bonuses that beat the market into a pulp. The loss of the firm’s founding partner, Steve Susman, due to COVID-19 puts a bit of a damper on this exciting news, but the firm is sharing bonuses with associates that top out at $170,000. Here are this year’s big numbers:

For purposes of comparing Susman Godfrey associate bonuses to those of law firms that base bonuses on law school graduation year, here are the median bonuses for Susman Godfrey associates by graduation year:

• 2012 (or earlier): $170,000
• 2013: $  160,000
• 2014: $  145,000
• 2015: $  125,000
• 2016: $  120,000
• 2017: $  115,000
• 2018: $    80,000

These are the median bonuses, but given that the most junior associates ($80,000) are averaging almost as much as the most senior associates on the Cravath scale ($100,000), you know it’s been a good year at Susman Godfrey. For the sake of comparison, the standard market bonus for the Class of 2018 is $25,000, meaning Susman is giving associates $55,000 more. Even when considering the addition of a special bonus on top of a market bonus, the Class of 2018 would be bringing home $35,000, meaning Susman is still giving associates $45,000 more than even the most prestigious of Am Law firms. That’s a pretty great payday.

Congratulations to both the firm and its associates on a wonderful 2020.

(Flip to the next page to read the Susman Godfrey bonus press release in full.)

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of important bonus updates, 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 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. Thanks for all of your help!

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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.

In the news business, the day before a holiday or a weekend is known as a dumping ground for bad news. If you don’t want something noticed, you generally release it on Friday around 5 p.m. If it’s right before a long, routine-disrupting weekend, even better.

So perhaps it was inevitable that, on the day before Thanksgiving, we’d learn more about the children the Trump administration stole from their parents. In a December 2 joint status report filed in Ms. L v. ICE, the lead case on family separation, we learn that the federal government has found previously undisclosed contact information for some of the parents of the 628 children who are still separated from their parents.

“Because the information was provided on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving,” the filing observed, “the Committee [in charge of finding the parents] has not yet had time to determine the full scope or usefulness of this new information.”

ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt later said that the new information includes phone numbers never before provided to the Joint Steering Committee. That committee, made up of multiple nonprofits plus the law firm Paul Weiss, has been trying for at least two years to locate the parents.

The contact information comes from a database belonging to the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the DOJ subagency that runs the immigration courts. The Steering Committee has also received parental contact information from other branches of the government, as well as at least one government contractor that works with affected families. The information is all over the place because, as the DHS and HHS inspectors general have both observed, the government did not bother preparing for this. It’s almost as if the cruelty was the point!

This news missed me and probably most other pie-logged Americans. It did not miss Judge Dana Makoto Sabraw, who (according to public radio station KQED) ordered the federal government to explain “what happened and why” in writing by January 13. Sabraw called the late disclosure “disturbing in that it does seem to be readily available information.”

Gelernt thinks the disclosure may be related to the fact that family separation came up in the third and final presidential debate in late October. After that high-profile reminder that the issue still exists, he told news outlets, the government said it might have more information about the separated parents. That’s what led up to the November 25 disclosure.

He thinks there may be more, and indeed, DOJ attorney Sarah Fabian says there will be. But don’t worry, you guys; Fabian says nobody was withholding information on purpose! She told the judge the problem is that her team did not understand the processes around the Steering Committee’s searches, and apparently didn’t think to check the databases at every involved agency.

“I don’t believe there was a neglectful or nefarious intent,” Courthouse News quotes Fabian as saying. “We were focusing on the databases in front of us.”

Maybe her team really did just fail to think cross-agency, but I suspect this is actually a side effect of working at the Office of Immigration Litigation under Trump. Bill Barr has made DOJ a wholly owned subsidiary of Trumpistan, and I’d guess Fabian and her colleagues have to do some ridiculous things to make the big boss happy. Remember, this is the same woman who argued before the Ninth Circuit that children in federal custody are not entitled to soap or beds. In this case, she only has to pretend to be dumb, not evil, which might actually come as a relief.

To her, that is. The 628 children who are growing up without their parents or their cultures — and possibly without anybody who loves them — might not feel very sympathetic.

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Lorelei Laird is a freelance writer specializing in the law, and the only person you know who still has an “I Believe Anita Hill” bumper sticker. Find her at wordofthelaird.com.

At this point in the Biglaw bonus season, it’s the little things that make all the difference. Since bonus amounts are generally the same at Biglaw firms, we pay close attention to things like billable hour requirements, disbursement dates, or any other differences in how a firm is doing bonuses.

At Wilson Sonsini they’re giving out full market bonuses — inclusive of special bonuses. Back in the fall, WSGR was mum on the trend of handing out COVID appreciation bonuses. (Those special bonuses range from $7,500 to $40,000, depending on class year, and are in addition to the year-end bonus numbers.) But in their year-end bonus announcements, they account for the special bonus money.

There is, however, a catch. To get the full special bonuses associates have to bill 1,950 hours (the same hours requirement for the regular, year end bonuses). There are smaller bonuses available for those that fail to hit that billable target, which is something at least. We should also note that bonus-eligible hours can include up to 40 hours of pandemic-related emergency paid time off, which, given the state of the world seems like the least they can do.

Bonuses will be paid on January 29th. You can read the full memo on the next page.

Remember, we depend on ATL tipsters when it comes to bonus news at other firms. As soon as your firm’s bonus memo comes out, please email it to us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus”) or text us (646-820-8477). 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, 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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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).

If you work at Deutsche Bank, specifically in the “deciding whether to give loans to a putative billionaire who is very clearly lying to us about how rich he is” department, and you thought you’d never again have to set foot in lower Manhattan? Well, Manhattan D.A. Cy Vance has other ideas.

It’s now mid-December, and another Biglaw firm has decided to reward its employees cold, hard cash this holiday season. Not bonuses, mind you, but the salaries they went without thanks to the firm’s COVID-19 austerity measures.

You may recall that back in April, Seyfarth — a firm that posted $717,370,000 gross revenue in 2019, earning it the 60th place on the latest Am Law 100 ranking — rolled out firmwide cost-cutting measures effective May 1, ranging from salary cuts to furloughs of attorneys and staff. Equity partners reduced their monthly draws by 20 percent, all U.S. lawyers had their pay reduced by 10 percent, and staff salaries were cut up to 10 percent based on earnings. The firm also furloughed 10 percent of its U.S. employees, and at the time, sources told us that 180 staff and 50 attorneys were taken out of play.

In September, the firm announced a mix of bad news and good news, specifically, that effective October 1, some of those who had been furloughed — including attorneys — would be laid off, but that all salary cuts would be reversed and everyone’s pay would be restored to their regular compensation levels.

Now, the firm has announced some very happy news for all employees: Seyfarth will be making retroactive salary adjustments for everyone whose salary was reduced in May, and that those payments would be made on December 24, Christmas Eve. Those big fat deposits should make for a very merry holiday indeed.

Here’s a holly-jolly statement from Pete Miller, Chair and Managing Partner of Seyfarth Shaw, who will be figuratively sliding down chimneys to reward employees:

Based on our continued strong performance, we will be making retroactive salary adjustments to all employees whose salary was reduced. Without the commitment and teamwork of our people, the firm’s ongoing success would not be possible.

Congratulations to everyone at Seyfarth on this fantastic news!

If your firm or organization is slashing salaries or restoring previous cuts, 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).

If you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Layoff Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the layoff alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each layoff, salary cut, or furlough 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.

* Dwight Howard is being sued after allegedly stiffing two women who took care of his snake collection. Guess they’re alleging he might be a “snake in the grass”… [New York Post]

* An El Paso attorney, who died of COVID-19, still won her election for a local judgeship. [KSAT]

* Simon Cowell is considering a lawsuit against an ebike manufacturer after purportedly suffering a crash. [Page Six]

* Andrew Cuomo, the current Governor of New York and a contender to be Joe Biden’s Attorney General, is facing sexual harassment allegations. [New York Times]

* A disbarred lawyer, who is charged with shooting seven police officers, is arguing about whether a receiver should be appointed to oversee his assets. [Rochester First]

* A lawyer is facing possible discipline for purportedly alleging that a female judge would be biased towards a wife in a divorce case. By this logic, wouldn’t a male judge supposedly be biased for the husband? [Daily Business Review]

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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.

In 1900, Jacob Trieber became the first Jewish federal judge in the United States, appointed by William McKinley after a successful stint as United States Attorney. In what state did Judge Trieber sit?

Hint: They would ultimately name the federal courthouse in the district after him, in case you’ve ever passed a “Jacob Trieber Federal Building” and remember where you were.

See the answer on the next page.

The 90-Day Known Expert Series rounds into the home stretch. Episodes from week 13 include “Lands of Content Opportunities” and “The Modern Buyer’s Journey.”

Make sure you take advantage of the show’s Q&A feature. You can ask Mike questions about the latest episode and he’ll answer at the end of the next episode. Just submit your question in the form at the bottom of this post.

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