Category: News Feeds

It’s the most wonderful time of the Biglaw year! As the day inches closer and closer to quittin’ time (as if that’s even a thing in Biglaw), everyone is desperate for something — anything — to distract them until their (appropriately socially distant) Thanksgiving plans can begin.

Well, we can thank Debevoise for the perfect bonus memo distraction.

Today, Debevoise announced year-end bonuses, in line with the prevailing market rate. The bonus scale is as follows (you can read the full memo on the next page):

Class of 2020: $15,000 (prorated)
Class of 2019: $15,000
Class of 2018: $25,000
Class of 2017: $50,000
Class of 2016: $65,000
Class of 2015: $80,000
Class of 2014: $90,000
Class of 2013+: $100,000

Back in September, Debevoise was among the Biglaw firms to hand 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. So yeah, Biglaw associates have a lot to be thankful for!

As always, we depend on you 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.

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).

The law is slowly catching up to the different forms that families take, including the roles and titles of parents. You might think the designation of “parent” instead of “mother” on a birth certificate wouldn’t make much of a difference. But it was enough for one mother to appeal an Arizona trial court ruling regarding her designated title on her child’s birth certificate.

Breaking Barriers

Last month, the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled in the case of In re Marriage of McLaughlin and Swanson. The case had already made history when, in 2017, the Arizona Supreme Court held that the state’s marital presumption of parentage necessarily equally applied to a same-sex couple as to an opposite-sex couple. After remand to the trial court, nearly all issues were settled. Except one significant one. Appellant Kim McLaughlin accepted that her ex-spouse, Suzan Swanson, would receive parental recognition of the child McLaughlin gave birth to during their marriage. McLaughlin, however, took issue with the trial court’s order designating her as “Parent” on her child’s birth certificate, instead of “Mother,” as she was previously designated.

Are These Our Only Choices?

McLaughlin argued to the trial court that she should continue to be listed as “Mother,” and that her ex should be listed as “Legal Parent” or “Legal Mother.” Ouch. Might as well thrown in “Lesser Parent” or “Lesser Mother.”

The ex, Suzan Swanson, argued that they should both be equally listed as “Mother.” However, because the forms published by the Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) only have the options of “Mother/Father” or “Parent/Parent,” she asked that, in the alternative, both parents be designed at “Parent.” The trial court granted Swanson’s alternative request, noting that in “an ideal world, the field identifiers available for birth certificates should reflect all possible circumstances of the birth of a child.” But, the judge held, because ADHS was not a party to the action, the court could not modify the identifiers used in those forms.

A Constitutional Violation?

On appeal, McLaughlin argued that the court was punishing her for previously being married to a woman — stripping her of her “Mother” designation on her child’s birth certificate in violation of her Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection. The Court of Appeals declined to address whether there had, in fact, been a violation of McLaughlin’s Constitutional rights. Instead, the Court found that the Arizona judiciary was authorized by statute to amend birth certificates, and that that authorization was not limited solely to the names that appear on birth certificates. The Court concluded that even without ADHS as a party, it had the authority to amend parent designators, regardless of the options on ADHS forms. The Court wisely opted to avoid the problematic “Mother/Legal Parent” or “Mother/Legal Mother” option requested by McLaughlin, instead ruling in favor of the equal “Mother/Mother” designation.

I had a chance to catch up with Birth Rights Bar Association President, Indra Lusero, on the importance of legal designators of parent status. Lusero maintains that words used to formally designate someone’s parental identity on legal documents can be extremely important. “This is due at least in part to the history of discrimination against people based on their sexual or gender identity. Being named with dignity, accuracy, and in terms accessible to heterosexual or cisgender people is essential to equality and justice.”

Nice job, Grand Canyon State. And a happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

Ellen Trachman is the Managing Attorney of Trachman Law Center, LLC, a Denver-based law firm specializing in assisted reproductive technology law, and co-host of the podcast I Want To Put A Baby In You. You can reach her at babies@abovethelaw.com.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted everyone. For recent law grads, delays and uncertainty in the bar exam have wrought havoc on the beginning of their professional careers. When it became clear that the July 2020 bar exam would need to be indefinitely postponed in many states, law school graduates, attorneys, and even legislators began to call for diploma privilege – the practice of admitting law students to the bar on the basis of their J.D. alone. Some advocates point to the racist history of the bar exam, and  lack of evidence that the bar exam upholds the interests of the public, as additional reasons to make exceptions for 2020 grads. Following the administration of an online bar exam which involved major technical difficulties in early October, the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law renewed the call for temporary diploma privilege through the duration of the coronavirus crisis, as a matter of racial and disability justice.

While only a small handful of states have granted diploma privilege at this point (Wisconsin already allowed graduates of in-state law schools to practice without taking the exam), many states have adopted a patchwork approach, permitting some grads to begin practicing under supervision of licensed attorneys or expanding student practice orders. A roundup of those approaches is below:

States allowing recent law graduates to apply for admission to practice without taking the bar exam:

• Louisiana (qualified candidates must complete 25 hours of continuing legal education and the Louisiana State Bar Association’s “Transition into Practice” mentoring program by December 31, 2021)
• Oregon (the deadline to request admission via the diploma privilege option was July 6, and applicants who missed that deadline were required to take the online exam)
• Wisconsin (expanded diploma privilege to law graduates from outside of the state)
• Washington
• Utah (requires 360 hours of supervised practice first)

States allowing recent law graduates to practice under the supervision of a licensed attorney:

Jurisdictions that have made no modifications to the admissions process:

Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, West Virginia.

Across jurisdictions, the nuances and restrictions of these categories are distinct, so check the links for the relevant rules for your state.

If you’re a recent graduate needing CLE credits to qualify for admission, review the solutions that will help you become the attorney you set out to be. Lawline supports diploma privilege for law graduates during the pandemic, and we hope to support you throughout your career, as well.

Related Content:

1. Recession-Proof Career Advice for 2020 Law Grads
2. All the States that are Changing their MCLE Rules due to the Coronavirus Pandemic
3. Becoming a Better, Healthier Lawyer: 5 Tips for Staying Sane, Productive & Healthy Today and Every Day

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.

Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and with the way things are going this bonus season, associates sure have a lot to be thankful for (i.e., up to six figures of cash, depending on class year).

Yet another firm has announced bountiful bonuses, and so much money will hit banks accounts soon that it’s almost enough to make lawyers forget there’s a pandemic going on just outside their doors.

Clifford Chance has announced its year-end bonus scale, and it’s the same as Cravath’s. In case you somehow don’t remember what that looks like, here it is:

As promised, the firm is indeed offering special bonuses in addition to its year-end bonuses. Associates will be paid on January 15, 2021. Happy Thanksgiving to all of the U.S. associates at Clifford Chance!

(Flip to the next page to read the Clifford Chance bonus memo.)

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!

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.

A year-and-a-half ago, I wrote about an extremely rare set of fossil specimens dubbed the “dueling dinosaurs,” estimated to be worth more than $7 million at the time. What made this collection of mineralized bones so valuable was not only its exquisite state of preservation (it is thought to contain even remnants of soft tissues), but also the fact that it captures a moment in time about 66 million years ago in which a triceratops was seemingly locked in combat with a tyrannosaur.

Monetary worth aside, it is hard to understate the scientific value of such a find. Yet, despite the discovery of the dueling dinosaurs in the summer of 2006, scientists have been unable to conduct any research. A legal morass kept the dueling dinosaurs locked in storage, and inaccessible to science.

To revisit the state of affairs from the last time I covered this topic, there was an ownership dispute about who could claim the dueling dinosaurs, as there often is with valuable things found under the ground in Montana. There, it is not uncommon for the surface rights and the mineral rights of a particular piece of land to take wildly divergent paths of title. In the dispute over the dueling dinosaurs, the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana found that even though dinosaur fossils may chemically be made out of minerals, they are not, legally speaking, transferred along with the mineral rights to a parcel of land — this is generally thought to be the correct legal treatment of dinosaur fossils by legal experts who have considered the issue. But then, to the shock and horror of the paleontological community (which prefers to keep the subject of its field of study out of the pit-of-despair that is mineral rights litigation), a divided panel of Ninth Circuit judges reversed and found that dinosaur fossils are minerals whose ownership travels along with the mineral rights of the parcel they’re found beneath.

In response, and to its credit, the Montana state legislature immediately (and unanimously) passed a law clarifying that dinosaur bones are not minerals and that fossils belong to the surface estate. This came too late for the dueling dinosaurs, however, a pair of unfortunate combatants who waited 66 million years encased in stone and earth to just miss being removed from the definition of “minerals” by like a month.

After a whole bunch more legal wrangling, the Ninth Circuit granted rehearing en banc, certified the question of whether dinosaur fossils constitute “minerals” for the purpose of a mineral reservation to the Montana Supreme Court, and finally followed the conclusion of the Montana Supreme Court that dinosaur fossils do not constitute “minerals” by affirming the original determination of the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana, in Murray v. BEJ Minerals, LLC, 962 F.3d 485 (9th Cir. 2020). Whew, it’s tiring even to read all that.

What this all meant is that the dueling dinosaurs, more than 14 years after their discovery, were finally able to find a home. With the ownership dispute resolved, the dueling dinosaurs sold for an undisclosed sum to the nonprofit Friends of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Paleontologists are cheering the ultimate destination of the dueling dinosaurs within the scientific community, and are already no doubt fastidiously arranging their various tiny brushes and whirring their little dental drill thingies in eager anticipation of the “literally … thousands” of studies they are saying will be done on these fossils.

As for the legal community, well, I suppose we more or less got this one right, eventually. Maybe the next time we’re responsible for tying up a priceless scientific treasure we could move it along a little bit, maybe try to avoid parties having to pay like a decade of legal fees before getting the thing into the hands of researchers. Anyone with me on this? Hello? At any rate, we can all look forward to seeing the dueling dinosaurs when they are scheduled to go on public display at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in 2022. I know I’ll be taking a trip to Raleigh to have a look.

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.

Since we broke the news of the market bonus scale for associates at large law firms in the United States — a trend that was started by Baker McKenzie on Wednesday, November 11, 2020, and finally followed by Cravath on Monday, November 23, 2020 (with the addition of special bonuses) — many firms quickly fell in line and matched the scale. When will your firm announce its bonuses?

As usual, we are compiling a table of all the firms that have already matched the new bonus scale, whether special bonuses are or were included, the minimum hours required to receive those bonuses (if available), and the date those bonuses will be paid. Today, we unveil that table for your viewing pleasure. We will be updating this table on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times, as news on bonuses is announced. If you see any information here that is incorrect or needs clarification, let us know.

Help us help you now (and if/when you decide to make a lateral move in the future). Let us know what your firm’s minimum billable hours targets are for bonus eligibility and when your firm will pay those bonuses. You generally must remain at your firm until the payout date to receive them, as stated in most memos, which could make it all the more difficult for you to leave your place of employment.

As a little reminder, we love covering the Biglaw bonus season, but we need your help. As soon as your firm’s bonus memo comes out, please email it to us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus”). We always keep our sources on bonus stories anonymous. There’s no need to send the memo using your firm email account; your personal email account is fine. Please be sure to include the memo as proof; we like to post complete bonus memos as a service to our readers. You can take a photo of the memo and attach as a picture if you are worried about metadata in a PDF or Word file.

Don’t forget, if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts, please enter your email address in the box below. 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. Cheers to a happy bonus season, everyone!

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.

* Netflix has settled a lawsuit over the “Choose Your Own Adventure” trademark. Guess Netflix chose the adventure that doesn’t end in a trial… [Hollywood Reporter]

* Two women, who were detained in northern Montana for speaking Spanish, have settled a lawsuit against U.S. Customs and Border Protection. [Reuters]

* A new lawsuit alleges that a 70-year-old worker at the grocery store chain Publix contracted COVID-19 and died as a result of lax policies of his employer. [NBC News]

* Check out this article on the legal prowess of Daredevil and She-Hulk (had no idea She-Hulk was a comic-book character!). [Screen Rant]

* A Texas man is in hot water for allegedly filing a mandamus petition on behalf of two clients even though he is not a licensed attorney. [Bloomberg Law]

* A Pennsylvania lawyer has been found guilty of identity theft and other crimes. So tempted to make a My Cousin Vinny joke right now… [Legal Intelligencer]

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.