During an unprecedented pandemic year, personal and professional anxieties can throw even the most seasoned lawyers off their games. If you struggle with lack of confidence, perfectionism, imposter syndrome — or all of the above — you’re not alone. Three experienced attorneys recently sat down to discuss the topic, and strategies for success, in the Practising Law Institute Studio Briefing, Imposter Syndrome in the Legal Community – Fear of Failure and Perfectionism. Here are some key takeaways:
It’s more common than you think. Surveys have shown that up to 70 percent of people may experience imposter syndrome, defined as “The persistent inability to believe that one’s success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one’s own efforts or skills,” according to the program’s moderator, Cameron G. Stout, of Stout Heart, Inc.
Stout, a financial services defense litigator and mediator who has battled major depression, now shares his story of hope and resilient recovery as he coaches other attorneys facing challenging times. While imposter syndrome is not classified as a mental health disorder, it can be a contributing factor in serious conditions like anxiety and depression — so it’s important to recognize and address its symptoms.
Don’t compare. In a field of high achievers like the legal profession, it can be nearly impossible not to look around and compare yourself to others. Joseph Milowic III, an Intellectual Property partner at Quinn Emmanuel and a founder of the Lawyers Depression Project, noted that he has often felt he isn’t at the caliber of his colleagues boasting multiple Ivy League degrees and other impressive backgrounds (including an actual rocket scientist). But in trying to keep up and get ahead on others’ achievements instead of focusing on his own, he said, “I ran to the point of exhaustion and couldn’t run anymore.” Recovering from this burnout required a perspective shift, to “realizing that I am good enough,” he added.
Try vulnerability. Andrea L. Colby, an IP attorney and professional coach with Pro Se, LLC, recalled a time early in her career when she was promoted to a role in which she supervised other attorneys. Struggling with impostor syndrome, she worried that her promotion had to do with her gender, and that she wasn’t as knowledgeable or experienced as the lawyers she was supervising. To overcome the challenge, she said, she learned to make herself vulnerable by asking for direct feedback about where she fell short and how she could serve clients and colleagues better.
While showing vulnerability at work can be daunting, the speakers acknowledged, everyone can benefit from connecting with others. If we’re not showing our authentic, true selves at work, Stout asked, “Aren’t we really being imposters — trying to be the person we think others expect us to be?”
In fact, allowing yourself to be vulnerable and kind at work can help you fulfill your ethical obligations to clients, as you’ll be able to serve them better.
It started out so damn simple. A email went around Magic Circle firm Freshfields, scheduling a BBQ for new attorneys as COVID restrictions are easing up. How nice! The original email contained the line, “In case helpful, a reminder that I am rich in barbecues (there are 2) and so meat will be cooked on one and everything else on the other.” Which is useful information for those on a plant-based diet.
But someone couldn’t leave well enough alone.
An unnamed attorney edited that line to make a “joke” (it isn’t funny, but that was reportedly the intent), and Roll on Friday details the exchange:
The trainee solicitor, whom RollOnFriday will identify as ‘Wedge’, sent the gag to his second year intake this week.
Another trainee, whom RollOnFriday will call ‘Stack’, had emailed the cohort to arrange a Summer social event. Stack wrote, “In case helpful, I am rich in barbecues”.
Wedge changed Stack’s text so it read simply, “I am rich”, and sent it to the group with the message, ‘Now amended below’.
Stack altered the revised text so that instead it read, “I am rich in colleagues and so poor in nothing”, responding to the group, “And now amended for sake of clarity”.
Wedge then smashed the banterbus into fifth gear and circulated a final version to his intake with the message, “Thanks [Stack] – a final amendment below”, after changing the email so it read, “I am rich and the poor are nothing”.
Stack appears to have surrendered, replying, “Great, thanks [Wedge], will send to [a colleague] now if everyone else on the chain is happy with current drafting”.
The line circulated among ~40 colleagues.
Some seemed to give the… attempt at humor the benefit of the doubt, saying it was “so outrageous that it seems to be self-mocking” and was “poking fun at living in an ivory tower.”
But not everyone approved of the joke. A firm spokesperson told Legal Cheek “the comments are not reflective of the firm or its values.” Which, you’d certainly hope not. And the blog from across the pond also reports colleagues aren’t pleased with the unnamed attorney:
The rookie’s tweaks didn’t go down well with some colleagues, with one insider telling us that it was a “shame” they appeared to have chosen to poke fun at people from “working class” and “less privileged” backgrounds.
Which is a powerful reminder for this new lawyer: think before you hit send, especially to such a large group. Not everyone will share your opinions and even things you mean as a joke may not read that way to others, particularly when you’re taking aim at as large a swath of humanity as the “poor.” Also a healthy dose of compassion for people other than yourself goes a long way.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. 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).
Subscribers to Lexis+. the premium legal research platform that LexisNexis launched last year, will now have access to breaking legal news headlines across 76 practice areas with the introduction today of the Legal News Hub.
The Legal News Hub provides subscribers with access to headlines and summaries of current news stories from the LexisNexis-owned Law360 and Law360 Pulse news services. Users can view general legal news stories or stories specific to any of the included practice areas or legal topics.
Stories can also be viewed by practice area.
However, in order to read the full story, a user will also need a subscription to Law360 or Law360 Pulse, and a subscription to only one or the other allows full-text access only to stories from that source.
(Law360 Pulse is the service Law360 launched in January that combines traditional journalism with data and analytics to cover the business of law and the legal industry in general.)
The one exception is content related to access to justice, which Law360 provides free to anyone, both directly through the Law360 site and to Lexis+ subscribers through the Legal News Hub.
Subscribers of Law360 or Law360 Pulse can read stories within Lexis+ or click to open the source story.
But for Law360 and Law360 Pulse subscribers, the Legal News Hub provides the advantage of being able to view stories from directly within the Lexis+ platform.
For those who do not subscribe to either news service, the Legal News Hub at least provides an at-a-glance overview of breaking legal news and analysis.
Users can search news stories and, with one click, expand the search to legal sources.
Last week, I was given a preview of the Legal News Hub by Rachel Travers, vice president and general manager of Law360; Melissa Groman, senior director of the news group product team; and James Oakes, product manager.
The Legal News Hub can be found within the Lexis+ Experience Dock, as its called, and is composed of four sections:
Top stories. A continuously updated and editorially curated list of the 20 most recent legal news stories. Stories appear here simultaneously with their posting to Law360 or Law360 Pulse.
Trending stories. The stories trending as most popular on Law360 are highlighted, giving users insight into what their industry peers consider important.
Practice areas. The 20 most recent stories from the 76 practice areas and legal topics covered by Law360 and Law360 Pulse.
Search. Users can search news stories from Law360 and Law360 Pulse from within Legal News Hub and, with one click, transition the same query to searching news and legal sources on Lexis+. The search spans the full Law360 archive, but will display only the most recent 20 stories that match the query.
Stories span 76 practice areas and legal topics.
Groman said that the Legal News Hub is a current awareness tool that is designed to look and feel like a news site, not a legal research tool.
LexisNexis plans to continue to build out the Legal News Hub, and among its plans are to add additional news sources and to enable users to personalize their news feeds.
If you’re an associate who’s got a major case of the Mondays, there’s nothing that’ll boost your motivation like an announcement that not only will your firm be raising salaries across the board for all associates but it will also be doling out special bonuses (for some).
Kasowitz Benson Torres had a bit of a rough go of it in 2020, having taken out a PPP loan (one which the firm has not yet disclosed if it’s been forgiven), but finished up the year with $219,396,000 gross revenue, landing it in 142nd place in the most recent Am Law 100 ranking. The firm is just now getting around to joining peer firms for special bonuses and commensurate salary increases.
According to a memo sent earlier today, Kasowitz will be moving to a national firm-wide salary scale, and it’s a Davis Polk match. Here’s what it looks like at the firm:
The firm will also be matching the Davis Polk scale for special bonuses, ranging from $12,000 total for the class of 2020 to $64,000 total for the class of 2014 and beyond (plus counsel). These bonuses will be payable in two installments (one in September 2021 and one in January 2022), and apply only to New York attorneys.
As far as we’re concerned, it’s always better late than never when it comes to compensation matters. Congratulations to everyone at the firm!
(Flip to the next page to see the memo from Kasowitz Benson Torres.)
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.
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.
Through a sweeping new executive order, President Joe Biden is taking aim at anti-competitive behavior across the American economy, including in healthcare.
Spanning 72 initiatives, the order signed on Friday aims to tackle competition problems and thereby “lower prices for families, increase wages for workers, and promote innovation and even faster economic growth,” according to a fact sheet released by the White House.
For healthcare in particular, the executive order details four areas where lack of competition increases prices and reduces access to quality care. These include hospitals, health insurance, prescription drugs and hearing aids.
Consolidation among health systems and hospitals is causing an array of problems, especially for rural areas, according to the fact sheet. Research has shown that consolidation drives up prices and has left rural areas without adequate access to care.
The trend has also continued steadily over the past decade, remaining relatively impervious to even the Covid-19 pandemic. Last year, there were 79 transactions involving healthcare mergers and acquisitions, which is within the range of activity seen in the last 10 years.
Through the executive order, Biden urged the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission to review and revise their merger guidelines through the lens of preventing patient harm. Further, he directed the Department of Health and Human Services to support existing hospital price transparency rules and to finish implementing legislation that bans surprise billing.
With regard to the health insurance industry, consolidation is limiting consumer choice, and when there is a choice, comparison shopping on the Affordable Care Act exchanges is a challenge, the fact sheet states.
Per the executive order, HHS must standardize plan options in the national health insurance marketplace so people can comparison shop more easily.
In addition to providers and payers, consolidation has a huge impact on the prescription drug landscape.
The high prices of prescription drugs in the U.S. are, in part, due to a lack of competition among drug manufacturers, according to the fact sheet. To combat this, Biden has directed the Food and Drug Administration to work with states and tribes to safely import prescription drugs from Canada, bolstering a Trump administration-era rule. The order also mandates that HHS issue a comprehensive plan within 45 days to curb high prices and price gouging.
Similarly, to tackle the issue of prohibitively expensive hearing aids, Biden has directed HHS to consider issuing proposed rules within 120 days that allow hearing aids to be sold over the counter.
“Today’s historic executive order established a whole-of-government effort to promote competition in the American economy,” the fact sheet states. “Once implemented, these initiatives will result in concrete improvements to people’s lives.”
I recently attended the Comic Book Contract Challenge at the Legal Creatives Academy, where lawyers and legal professionals from different countries used the words “contracts” and “fun” in the same sentence many times.
The challenge consisted of using legal design and visualization to create a comic book contract, a task that helped academy members to increase contract understandability, engagement, and satisfaction.
So, what exactly can you redesign? As it turns out, the answer is “almost everything.”
Here are some inspiring examples.
Allana Garbelini and Marina Paraboni redesigned the contract for the provision of legal services by considering (1) a balance between the seriousness of the legal relationship and innovation, (2) the informality of language and other symbols that characterize comic books, and (3) elements of legal validity.
Initially, they prototyped and built a story for the contract in Miro. Then, they designed the comics using Canva based on their research into language, lettering, colors, balloons, and symbols. Lastly, to create an interactive contract, they automated the contract in Bubble.io, a no-code platform.
Melissa Saucedo’s project was inspired by fashion influencer marketing. Companies in the fashion field hire young people to advertise their products and services through social media, but, sometimes, they don’t even sign a contract — if they do sign, the contracts are often long and complicated. She explained that “comic book contracts would fit perfectly for this type of contract. They would be an alternative to hire young people in a fun and engaging way. The company can insert their corporate culture into those contracts, giving the user a nice vibe since the beginning of the labor relationship.”
Dorra Harrar, founder of Legal D, and Armelle Lemoine-Doudet, founder of Just Design, designed a remote work contract. They explained how COVID-19 has changed our lives, both personally and professionally.
As a result, remote work has quickly become widespread; such work, however, can require the remote worker’s signature on the remote work agreement with their employer or organization. This contract defines their responsibilities and commitments, listing several obligations imposed on the employee.
Speaking on the comic contract, Dorra explained, “We have chosen to work on this type of contract because of its importance in the current circumstances and especially because of its complexity since it is new for the employee who is not always aware of his rights and obligations.”
Armelle further described the project: “Our selection of articles was oriented towards the necessary conditions for teleworking in terms of hygiene and safety of the employee’s premises. It is important for the employee to be aware of these conditions.”
Marty Finestone of Legal Adjacency and Isabel Venegas redesigned the photo release form. They set out to create an accessible and attractive solution for the safe organization of either online or face-to-face company events. The aim is to provide an alternative to a traditional photo release form for obtaining consent to record images, moving footage, audio, comments, and other personal data to be stored and used.
For context, an international footprint logistic company known as Espanada Hyper-Mega-Global-Net Inc., which has offices in Spain and Canada, needs to organize its annual company event taking place in Barcelona. The aim is to break the ice between the employees, acknowledge the previous years’ accomplishments, and set goals for the following years.
To ensure the event will be a complete success, increase the participation rate, and garner comprehensive media coverage, Espanada needs to collect its employees’ consent before they attend the event, especially those who plan to bring their underage children along.
In this project, Espanada doesn’t want to go the traditional route with its release form, since it had always been a hassle in the past to get employees to sign such documents. They wanted something engaging, innovative, and fun that was meant for attendees from Canada and Spain.
Most insurance contracts are hard to read and understand. In fact, they started out with a contract that had 22,965 words, routinely sending the reader to review various attachments.
The design process involved five steps: understanding the challenge’s situation and stakeholders, designing the empathy map and personas, prototyping solutions, testing with users, and processing the feedback to edit and vet the final prototype.
Over the course of this journey, they used the following tools: a Miro board, social media, Pixton, Powtoon, and Canva. The goal was to create a comic contract that was self-sufficient, understandable, easy to read, and filled with plain language. Ultimately, 75% of the users found the prototype friendly, easy to read, and understandable.
Here is a different prototype of the same life insurance policy, made by Cecilia Ferrari. This is a prototype of a life insurance and funeral expenses contract.
First, she used storytelling to empathize with what families go through when deciding to choose an insurance policy. Then she used visualization to achieve further clarity.
The main objective is to empower and equalize the parties through the use of storytelling, visualization, and plain language!
It turns out that insurance contracts are ripe for innovation. Vanesa López designed a different prototype of the same life insurance policy.
The prototype used a video format to create a comic book contract for insurance. The main idea was to show the process of the contract as if it was something funny, normalizing the decision to get family life insurance.
She decided to emphasize the expressions that show the different emotions during the process — even the scenes and colors were chosen for that purpose.
She wanted the discussion about having family life insurance to be developed in a relaxing and cozy environment, with the intention of giving an atmosphere of security. She set out to provide visual exposition from the insurance’s point of view, where the client asks about the terms and the comic book contract is opened up to reveal them.
From a user’s point of view, she considered it essential to visualize the main clauses, which are most interesting for the consumer. She reduced them to three:
What must I do to benefit from the contract?
What are the reasons the insurance may decline to help me?
What can I do if I need help?
She aimed to explain the emotionally tougher coverages, such as death compensations and funeral expenses, and to draw them out for the users to understand them better.
These are the initial steps! Can they be improved and optimized? Yes, absolutely. But even just these initial steps demonstrate that we can redesign contracts to increase understandability, engagement, and satisfaction. That is why we will continue seeing the words “contracts” and “fun” in the same sentence.
Olga V. Mack is the CEO of Parley Pro, a next-generation contract management company that has pioneered online negotiation technology. Olga embraces legal innovation and had dedicated her career to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive than before by embracing technology. Olga is also an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor, and entrepreneur. She founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to participate on corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. She authored Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board Seat and Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security. You can follow Olga on Twitter @olgavmack.
It’s been a little more than a month since Davis Polk raised the bar on associate salaries, and while the vast majority of top Biglaw firms have already raised salaries in some form or fashion, we’re still waiting for confirmation from several elite firms on what, exactly, they’re planning to do when it comes to associate compensation.
On that note, we’d love to find out what is going on at Greenberg Traurig. With $1,730,230,000 gross revenue in 2020, the firm placed 16th in the most recent Am Law 100 rankings, but from what we’ve heard, the firm has reportedly only raised salaries for associates in New York — but not all associates, mind you.
Sources tell us that sometime between June 21 and June 24, the firm increased salaries for first-year associates to $205K. As far as other class years are concerned, we’ve heard that salaries may be individualized beyond the class of 2020, but with raises comparable to the new Davis Polk scale.
Now, what of associates outside of New York? That’s another story entirely. Insiders at the firm tells us the tale:
“[N]o raises have occurred in a major, non-New York market. The issue hasn’t been discussed, and the firm tends to handle these matters secretively and by office. Same happened with special bonuses: associates were informed on an office-by-office basis with a phone call and nothing in writing, so we don’t know what happens across offices.”
“GT is individually assessing each associate in select offices but it seems like unless there is extreme performance, the vast majority of associates won’t be getting raises. Per usual, GT is trying to keep everything a secret and telling associates not to tell each other anything.
The black box system is worse than Jones Day. At least people know about Jones Day, but GT gets away with murder. GT never puts anything in writing for fear of info being discussed among employees or ending up on Above the Law, so people would only hear about their raises and salaries verbally.”
So, GT associates: what do you think about your raises (or curious lack thereof)? Feel free to sound off by email, by text message (646-820-8477), or by tweet (@ATLblog). A fun or insightful response — we’ll keep you anonymous — could find its way into an update to this story.
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.
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.
Enter your email address to sign up for ATL’s Bonus & Salary Increase Alerts.
South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg struck and killed a man while driving home from a fundraiser at a bar/restaurant held during the height of COVID where they raffled off a handgun with Trump’s name engraved on it. At the time, he claims that he thought he’d hit a deer.
Ultimately, authorities found the man’s glasses inside Ravnsborg’s car, which makes one wonder what kind of prescription he thought that deer needed.
Ravnsborg faces a number of misdemeanors in the case, including “using a mobile electronic device” while driving. Specifically, “Ravnsborg had been surfing the internet on one of the two cell phones he was carrying, reading conservative websites” as explained in a new South Dakota Standard article. This is in no way a defense of texting while driving — which is a horrible thing to do — but sending “omw now thx!” is orders of magnitude different than reading an article. How is there not some higher charge for burying your head in the Daily Caller at 75 miles per hour?
With members of his own party distancing themselves from him, Ravnsborg has dug in and is pursuing an interesting strategy to push back: what if the victim intended to be hit by a car in the middle of the night?
In a court filing Friday, Rapid City lawyer Timothy J. Rensch asked retired Sixth Circuit Judge John L. Brown, who is presiding over the case, to order the release of psychiatric or psychological records “for exculpatory information concerning his suicidal ideation.”
Ravnsborg… wants to see records from Avera St. Luke’s Hospital in Aberdeen, S.D., Avera St. Mary’s Hospital in Pierre, the Avera Medical Group Pierre, and Aberdeen Psychiatric — all of whom filed claims against Boever’s estate — as well as the South Dakota Human Services Center in Yankton. Boever had been committed to the Yankton facility, the defense claims.
Not to begrudge an accused’s chosen criminal defense, but given that he’s only facing relative slap-on-the-wrist charges related to failing to pay attention to the road, the state of mind of the victim doesn’t seem particularly relevant. Assuming that the victim had put himself in danger, that doesn’t change the fact that investigators claim to know that Ravnsborg was surfing his phone at the time. It’s obviously relevant to a hypothetical civil suit and can be litigated there, but seems unimportant at this point. Unless, of course, the defendant is just using this process to launder his political reputation.
But it seems like this is the argument Ravnsborg will be making at his August 26 trial. Even though experts are prepared to testify that the victim was struck while walking on the shoulder and the fact that the victim was logically (if perhaps unnecessarily at that time of night) inspecting his own immobilized vehicle as opposed to randomly seeking out a dangerous stretch of road.
Meanwhile, the state’s top law enforcement official is still on the job.
First, I would like to thank everyone who sent in Debt Testimonials. It was helpful to see how other people are approaching their debts, and I’m sure it will help our fellow readers figure out their strategies.
Some general advice. Multiple people mentioned the disbelief that hit once they realized it was time to repay their loans. One reader shared that they were “physically ill once [they] saw their interest and realize that zero (READ: $0) of their monthly payment was going toward the principal!” Several readers shared that it’s surprising how quickly 5-8% compounding interest, err, compounds. FACTOR THAT IN WHEN YOU LOOK AT YOUR LOAN OPTION(s)!
I saw two responses to debt in the replies: 1) Pay the debt off quickly or 2) Delay repayment to invest elsewhere. Both have their own merits. One reader in the quick payoff camp is on path to pay off their spouse’s and their own debt pretty quickly. They bought a small home and will make repairs to it over time. Folks in the second camp chose to backburner their debt payments in order to do things ranging from buying a nice home for themselves and their family, saving up money for their child’s education, or refinancing their debt and coming to terms with paying $500 or so a month for the next 30 years.
Some advice for 1Ls: Factor price in when you consider which school to attend. Try to graduate with under 100k in loans. Compounding interest hits harder than understanding the Rule Against Perpetuities while sleep deprived. You presumably haven’t had property yet. You don’t know what it is for context. It’s hard. You’ve been told.
Some advice for 3Ls: At this point, you may be in survival mode. Worry less, the sleepless nights you’re having worrying about debt will not help you. Stress less and budget more.
That’s today’s post! I have more responses to comb through, but please send me more at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com with the subject line “Debt Testimonial.” I’ll ask for some advice you would give to 1Ls, graduating 3Ls, and new hires trying to hit a net worth of zero and beyond. All information that is read and shared will be anonymous unless requested otherwise. Let’s figure it out together.
To participate in this series, you must meet these criteria:
You did not receive a full ride, non-merit scholarship to your law school of choice. Partial scholarships are fine. Full-ride merit scholarships are not, unlessyou lost it at some point in your law school experience.
Receiving gifts does not play a large role in your debt payback plans. This means no homes as graduation presents or small loans of a million dollars.
You are in control of your own income. #FreeBritney
You must be at least five figures in debt and have a JD. I don’t care if the debt is from school, GME shorts gone bad, or the like. You just have to be down bad.
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.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of 
Initially, they prototyped and built a story for the contract in Miro. Then, they designed the comics using Canva based on their research into language, lettering, colors, balloons, and symbols. Lastly, to create an interactive contract, they automated the contract in Bubble.io, a no-code platform.
Olga V. Mack is the CEO of 
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 
