Category: News Feeds

There are over 1.3 million actively practicing attorneys in the United States. Whenever an organization tries to speak on behalf of such a large group of people, there is necessarily going to be a certain level of dissent within the ranks.

Even so, when I unfolded the print edition of the Wall Street Journal this past weekend (yeah, I know, old school), I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow when I learned that the American Bar Association was one of the few remaining groups standing in the way of seemingly important bipartisan anti-money laundering legislation. According to the Wall Street Journal — pretty trustworthy, as to such things — “many illicit-finance experts” say that this legislation would plug “one of the biggest holes in U.S. anti-money-laundering rules.” Could opposition to such a measure really serve the interests of the ABA?

Proponents have sought so-called beneficial-ownership legislation for decades, but had previously been stymied by powerful interest groups, including the ABA and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Under current law, companies are not federally compelled to report the true owners who benefit from business efforts. The new measure would create a registry at the Treasury Department, accessible by law enforcement but not the general public, and would require companies to hand over the true identities of company owners (who had previously been allowed to remain anonymous). The U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently dropped its opposition to the measure, after congresspeople addressed the Chamber’s privacy concerns. The Chamber now supports the pending beneficial-ownership legislation.

Which leaves the ABA as one of the few large advocacy organizations still opposing beneficial-ownership legislation. Now, the ABA has been quick to point out that other groups are opposed to these new reporting rules, namely a number of small business groups. In a 2019 letter to lawmakers, the ABA president pointed out three other reasons why the ABA purportedly opposes beneficial-ownership legislation: it would impose burdensome regulatory requirements on small businesses, it would raise privacy concerns for small businesses and those designated as beneficial owners, and federal beneficial ownership reporting requirements are duplicative and unnecessary (which isn’t, strictly speaking, true).

The American Bar Association doesn’t purport to serve only its members, but also “equally” takes into account the public and the profession as a whole:

Our mission is to serve equally our members, our profession and the public by defending liberty and delivering justice as the national representative of the legal profession.

Any patriotic American waives the small business flag from time to time, but reporting basic details like name, date of birth, and address for the people who are actually reaping the benefits of a business hardly seems like it would be crushing to a local dojo or whatever. And it’s a little confusing to me why the ABA wants to carry on this fight anyway now that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is on board. I don’t see “small business owners” on the ABA mission statement (although surely some ABA members and members of the public are small business owners, advocating for that subset of the groups isn’t the mission any more than it is to promote the interests of dungeon masters, Instagrammers, or any other distinct subsets within the groups the ABA seeks to serve). The ABA has raised a bunch of other concerns with this type of legislation over two decades of opposition, including that it would supposedly impact the confidentiality of the attorney-client relationship, but the latest proposal doesn’t impose any new regulations specifically on lawyers (or even mention lawyers, for that matter).

Could part of the ABA’s concern really be, just maybe, that beneficial-ownership legislation would cost some lawyers some business? Like maybe in setting up businesses that don’t have to tell the federal government who they’re benefiting?

At any rate, Mitch McConnell has promised that the Senate will pass the annual defense bill which contains the new anti-money laundering measure, despite a Trump veto threat. The initial precursor bills passed in both chambers of Congress with bipartisan veto-proof majorities.

There’s not much that Democrats and Republicans can agree on. But if they can agree that money laundering is bad and this measure will help prevent it (and if Trump is apparently opposed, another surefire marker of good policy), perhaps it is the ABA that’s been wrong.

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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.

* A company that makes a law firm performance review platform has hired its first general counsel. Wonder how they’ll track his performance… [Corporate Counsel]

* A new lawsuit alleges that an Illinois funeral home gave out the wrong ashes to family members of the deceased. [Insurance Journal]

* A lawyer for President Trump has been sued for saying that a former cybersecurity chief should be shot for statements made about the election. [Bloomberg Law]

* Check out this New York City lawyer who is dressing up as Santa for the holiday season. [Fox News]

* The New York Attorney General predicts President Trump will step down so that Vice President Pence can pardon him. Sounds like a plot line from House of Cards. [Hill]

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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.

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

According to seasonally adjusted numbers released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, how many jobs did the legal services sector add in November?

Hint: Despite the gains, the sector is still 33,000 jobs below where it was in November 2019, after losing 68,000 jobs in April.

See the answer on the next page.

The Fox School of Business and Management did not make the only MBA ranking that ever mattered. The shock of exclusion led to some soul-searching, however brief, on the part of some B-schools. But Temple’s knew it was lacking in the reputation department even before that, which is why it resorted to lying to one particularly disreputable league table in an effort to attract students to its online MBA program, which as a consequence of the aforementioned lying managed a number-one ranking.

Still, the current head of the U.S. Department of Education isn’t inclined to look unkindly on schools doing their best to bilk unsuspecting students. And while Betty DeVos can’t be sure who Joe Biden will pick to replace her, she’s pretty sure that person won’t be as understanding of things as she. So before she fucks off back to Holland for good, she’s going to make sure nothing worse than having to cough up the price of a dozen online MBAs happens to Temple.

Many in our industry will agree that the pandemic is setting this planning season apart from those of previous years. As we look to 2021, many of the considerations that organizations took into account for 2020 — including remote work trends, how to connect with clients and consultants, and making the right tools and solutions available to employees — are carrying over into next year as we continue to navigate uncharted territory. As our industry continues to experience seismic shifts in the practice of law, the need for innovation — applying people, processes, and technology to do something better, faster, or more efficiently — has never been more important.

Most Americans are familiar with the story of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the famed leaders of an expedition to navigate a path across the entire North American continent. Shortly after the Louisiana Purchase, Thomas Jefferson commissioned their work with the purpose of finding a path for conducting commerce across the expanding country.

In 1804, when the Lewis and Clark expedition departed St. Louis, the Pacific Ocean and the West Coast of North America were considered “known,” as Spanish explorers had managed to make their way across what is now Mexico, and James Cook had explored parts of the Pacific. Traders and trappers had outposts in areas like the Dakotas and several Native American nations populated the western part of the continent. The unknown factor — and what Lewis and Clark set out to find with the help of Sacagawea — was a reliable route to navigate from the East to the West, innovating not through discovery or invention, but in their search for a better way to do something that would pave the way for the future.

The story of Lewis and Clark provides some great lessons that we can all learn from when it comes to innovation. Here are three.

Innovation timelines aren’t always predictable. Today, if we were to plan a trip from St. Louis to Portland, Oregon, we’d have multiple options and routes to get there by air or on the ground. We could measure progress against our goal in distance or time.

It is not uncommon for leadership to expect a roadmap before engaging in a project — but innovation is often uncertain, and the expectation of certainty where progress can be measured like mile markers on a highway is problematic. Innovation almost by definition requires discovery and trial and error. That said, it can be helpful to map out segments of a project ahead of time (perhaps by weeks or months at a time) to help track progress.

Innovation may require different planning techniques. If we know that we can’t have certainty before starting a project, how then should leadership manage it?

In the case of Lewis and Clark, they learned from others who had chronicled prior explorations.  They prepared by building a keelboat for the journey, recruited men and supplies, and when they had to scale rough terrain, they sent out scouts to determine the best route. Eventually they crossed the Continental Divide and streams began to flow westward and join other streams to form rivers.

What we can learn from this is that when it comes to applying technology in a law firm, leadership should allow some budget for “discovery work” to understand the parameters of a project and what is possible. A list of unknowns can be developed and assessed for risk. Alternatives can be “scouted” for possible solutions. Once those steps have been taken into account, say through a proof of concept, it is then possible to use more traditional project management techniques to estimate project costs and timelines.

Innovation is a process, not an event. Innovation projects typically include risk factors — after all, if the outcome were certain, it wouldn’t really be innovation. We may not have ever heard the story of Lewis and Clark had they not had the serendipity of meeting Sacagawea.

How many times have we heard statements like, “We tried that once, but it didn’t work”? The process of innovation is about learning from prior attempts and trying again. Nobody wants to embark on a big project and fail. A key to managing the process is to create small projects with defined scope, “fail fast,” and learn from the failure in order to create the next series of small projects to move the process forward. If you think about it, the Lewis and Clark expedition was a series of daily projects, determining how far the group should go before setting up camp for the night, or choosing what route they should take across a ridge. By structuring innovation into a series of smaller projects, with some experimentation and an allowance for failure, a firm can be successful in the story of a broader journey and adventure.

Legal professionals are under more pressure than ever to serve increasing demands. By recognizing that innovation isn’t always linear and predictable, and by managing accordingly, we have the opportunity to find better ways to innovate. And by recognizing that innovation is a process that embodies prior failed attempts that can inform new successes, organizations can be ready to embrace the brave new frontiers of serving clients in the world beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Ken Crutchfield is Vice President and General Manager of Legal Markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S., a leading provider of information, business intelligence, regulatory and legal workflow solutions. Ken has more than three decades of experience as a leader in information and software solutions across industries. He can be reached at ken.crutchfield@wolterskluwer.com.

And Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said HOLD MY BEER.

Not to be outdone by Sidney Powell and her many-tentacled Kraken suit debacle, AG Paxton has entered the election litigation arena this morning with a Supreme Court complaint against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin for bad voting.

“Our Country stands at an important crossroads,” he begins somberly. “Either the Constitution matters and must be followed, even when some officials consider it inconvenient or out of date, or it is simply a piece of parchment on display at the National Archives. We ask the Court to choose the former.”

Sadly, this grandiose beginning is the best it gets — the complaint is all downhill from there. According to Paxton, “using the COVID-19 pandemic as a justification” those states “usurped their legislatures’ authority and unconstitutionally revised their state’s election statutes” via “executive fiat or friendly lawsuits, thereby weakening ballot integrity.” Worse still they “flooded the Defendant States with millions of ballots to be sent through the mails, or placed in drop boxes, with little or no chain of custody and, at the same time, weakened the strongest security measures protecting the integrity of the vote—signature verification and witness requirements.”

Leave aside for the moment that the Republican legislatures in every one of those states passed laws allowing for no-excuse absentee voting — wouldn’t want to let a little thing like objective reality intrude upon this very serious complaint filed 35 days after the election when eleventy-seven other garbage suits alleging the exact same thing were tossed out at both the federal and state level.

Although the “statistical analysis” premised on the idea that the partisan make-up of the absentee ballots must be exactly the same as in-person votes is a nice touch.

The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—independently given President Trump’s early lead in those States as of 3 a.m. on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000. For former Vice President Biden to win these four States collectively, the odds of that event happening decrease to less than one in a quadrillion to the fourth power (i.e., 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000).

Here on Planet Earth, Trump spent months railing against mail-in voting, while Democrats raced to collect every absentee ballot. In Pennsylvania, Joe Biden racked up 2 million absentee ballots, to Trump’s 600,000. And Republican legislatures in those states refused to allow absentee ballots to be counted until election night, virtually guaranteeing the “Red Mirage” that would cause those states to “flip” when big, Democratic cities tabulated large batches of absentee ballots on November 4.

But from a legal perspective, Paxton’s argument is even more craven. As indefatigable election suit observer Akiva Cohen notes, the Texas AG wants SCOTUS to find that state officials have unconstitutionally usurped the legislature’s exclusive power to regulate elections. And the solution he proposes is for the court to usurp congress’s exclusive power to “determine the Time of choosing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States” by postponing the December 14 deadline for presidential electors to record their votes.

Onto which he’s grafted a bizarre theory of standing for Texas based on vote dilution because, see, if other states don’t scrutinize voter ID the way Ken Paxton likes, then their crummy electoral votes devalue those of good, honest, Texans.

The brief quotes Bush v. Gore seven times as proof that “the right of suffrage can be denied by a debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen’s vote just as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise.” Close observers will recall that in 2000 the Supreme Court was (in theory) protecting the right of citizens of Florida to have their ballots counted on equal terms — not supporting universal voting standards across all the states. There’s also the small matter that the court stopped the counting in Florida because (in theory) it couldn’t be accomplished before the immutable, congressionally dictated electoral college deadline. But these are minor quibbles!

The entire case is an offensive recitation of debunked theories about excluded poll watchers and nefarious Democrats sneaking in thumb drives of votes. It seems extraordinarily unlikely that there are four votes to hear this stinker, even after Justice Barrett’s confirmation.

But if Mr. Paxton insists on intruding on our timeline, then we feel it is incumbent upon us to point out that the Texas Attorney General is currently under FBI investigation for bribery and abuse of office; that eight of his own employees turned him in to investigators, after which four were fired, three resigned, and one was placed on leave; that he’s currently the subject of a whistleblower lawsuit; and that the most recent salacious allegations involve him leaning on a donor to give a job to a woman Paxton was having an affair with.

But other than that, Ken Paxton is an excellent lawyer and a selfless public servant who can be trusted to carry out his duties honestly and without partisanship or favor.

STATE OF TEXAS v. COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA, STATE OF GEORGIA, STATE OF MICHIGAN, AND STATE OF WISCONSIN

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Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Winning Deals, Cases And Clients
 With Legal Data

Powerful legal data products hold the promise of making your litigation arguments truly hit home, or of helping
you skillfully negotiate transactions, or even of growing your firm’s business pipeline.

But how can you ensure you’re accurately discerning the stories these enormous bodies of data can tell? And what pitfalls should you be on the lookout for in leveraging data to bolster your practice?

Join this webinar to learn how — and how not — to skillfully integrate data analytics into your day-to-day, ultimately increasing your negotiation, litigation and business development prowess.

The discussion will feature:

• An overview of how law firms of all sizes can use legal data to improve numerous aspects of their operations.
• Pitfalls to look for when analyzing data for use in a variety of contexts.
• An in-depth look at data-driven tools to refine your practice in state courts.

Presenters:
Rick Merrill, Founder and CEO, Gavelytics
Justin Brownstone, VP of Sales and Litigation Counsel, Gavelytics
John DiGilio, Firmwide Director of Library Services, Sidley Austin LLP
Jason Nittel, Director, Litigation Technology & Support, Allen Matkins

Moderator:
Bob Ambrogi – Founder of LawSites blog, Technology Columnist at Above the Law

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

(State Sen. Jen Jordan, a Democrat who attended a “sham” election hearing at the Georgia Capitol where Rudy Giuliani was present, maskless, just days before his COVID-19 diagnosis was made public by President Donald Trump.)

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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.

Listen, this year has been weird AF. And I’m sure you’re as tired of reading that sentiment as I am of writing it. But… it’s true! And, COVID has shaded most of the goings-on in Biglaw this year, so it only makes sense to acknowledge that. One bright spot in the year has been the Biglaw COVID appreciation bonuses, which said “thank you” to associates for their hard work during a pandemic in the best way Biglaw know how — with cold, hard cash.

But, particularly for firms that doled out these bonuses in the fall, the question remains, what are firms doing for associates that joined the firm after bonus day came and went. There isn’t a consensus out there — hell, some firms haven’t even had anyone from the class of 2020 start yet — but even at firms with new associates, there’s a variety of treatment. Some tipsters report getting blanked out of bonuses entirely, but not every firm is taking such a harsh stance.

At Debevoise & Plimpton (a firm that announced special bonuses way back in September), tipsters report they’re getting special bonuses, commensurate to their class year (which means laterals get counted too) prorated to their start date. Of course, the proration means it won’t be tremendous sums of money, but it’s nice to see those folks accounted for by the firm. It’s been a challenge for everyone, even if they’re relatively new to the firm. Special bonuses for these folks will be paid on December 20th.

So, how’s your firm handling special bonuses for new associates? As always, we depend on you when it comes to bonus news. 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).