Category: News Feeds

Even though President Trump’s legal options for undoing the election results are rapidly dwindling — seriously, he’s basically down to a Third Circuit appeal on whether he can amend his complaint or a loophole in whatever Faustian deal he signed to get elected in the first place — the impacts on the legal profession will live beyond his term in office. The lawyers involved in the various election litigations have just gotten blasted from all sides.

District court Judge Matthew Brann wrote a blistering indictment of the lack of evidence and coherent legal arguments in the Pennsylvania case that will long live in the annals of benchslaps:

One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed injunctive relief despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens. That has not happened.

And the Biglaw firms that lent their credibility to the affair, like Jones Day and, for a time, Porter Wright and Snell & Wilmer, have been rightly criticized (and picketed) both internally and by observers. Though the feeling that these representations were outside of the legal norm was prevalent, it was largely anecdotal.  Now, we have some good old numbers to match that sense.

Fishbowl, a workplace social network for verified employees, conducted a survey of 4,546 verified law professionals in the U.S. on their app. They asked a simple, yes/no question: “Would you support your firm if it represented the Trump campaign as it files lawsuits challenging the outcome of the election in several states?”

An overwhelming number — 74.92 percent — answered no. Fishbowl also broke out the results by location, and the place with the highest percentage of “no” answers was Washington, D.C., with 97.44 percent. That was followed by Massachusetts (81.92 percent) and Maryland (81.25 percent). And even the places with the highest percentage of “yes” answers, still, on balance, were resoundingly against the idea of standing behind your firm as it litigates on behalf of the Trump campaign (64.41 percent of lawyers in North Carolina said “no” to the question, which corresponds to the highest “yes” answers).

Now the really interesting data:

Out of the 103 Jones Day law professionals who answered the Fishbowl survey question, only 22.3% (23 in total) responded with Yes, almost 3 points lower than the overall survey average.

I told you folks there aren’t happy. And I guess when the situation isn’t a mere hypothetical, there’s a bit more clarity.

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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).

This one really comes down to the question of whether to cry over the hypocrisy or smile that it’s finally come to an end.

Back in July, when North Carolina boasted around 2,000 new COVID-19 cases every day, the North Carolina bar examiners eschewed the idea of putting off the test to join the ranks of the remote testing states. They’d take a stab at social distancing and maybe occasionally wear masks and call it good. The online exam was too risky they felt, assuming one defines risk as “unreliable results” and not “a state-sponsored superspreader event.”

But today, the North Carolina Board of Law Examiners has changed course and announced that the February bar exam will be held remotely. In their statement announcing the decision, the examiners note:

Current reports indicate COVID-19 cases in majority of states in U.S. are rising. While the future trajectory of pandemic is uncertain, it is predicted that cases may continue to increase, and that pandemic may worsen over the next several months. While it is possible that conditions might permit an in-person UBE in February 2021, with coronavirus cases continuing to increase in North Carolina at record levels and the unknowable path the pandemic may take here in the coming months, there is a substantial risk that an in-person administration may have to be canceled. The Board feels this risk creates an unacceptable level of uncertainty for applicants and could result in significant stress and anxiety.

Indeed. As noted above, back in July, North Carolina added about 2,000 new cases a day. Yesterday, they added 4,500. The current projection from Healthdata.org finds the state with between 9,500 to 16,400 new cases daily on February 14, 2021. Obviously the arrival of multiple vaccines could disrupt that path, but the examiners need to plan based on where we are right now.

Putting aside all the reasons why the remote exam format is also terrible — and they are legion — at least it’s not forcing people to sit in a convention center together. I’m even going to set aside how wildly unfair this was to all the people who risked their health and the health of their loved ones to take it in July because they were told then that a delay was irrelevant because the jurisdiction would never move online.

And let’s not forget the people who didn’t register for this exam before the deadline passed because they were told it was going to be in person and they were already too smart to put themselves at risk. Is there going to be some accommodation for them? One hopes that this could be extended at a bare minimum.

But even with all that, it’s not what has me miffed right now. No, what bugs me about this announcement is the implicit claim that the examiners have made this move because they’re “taking the virus seriously.”

That’s not how the virus works. It didn’t suddenly get bad in North Carolina. Viruses are exponential actors and today’s outbreak is the result of last week’s policies… and the ones before that… and the ones before that. The “future trajectory of [the] pandemic” isn’t so much “uncertain” as the direct and natural consequence of people’s actions. If one person got COVID from the July bar exam, that has almost certainly created hundreds of cases by now and is still spreading. Even if ZERO people spread the virus at the North Carolina bar exam, it was still a horrible decision that fed the current outbreak. Back in July, North Carolina lent its credibility to the myth that the virus wasn’t anything a little performative distancing and lackadaisical mask-wearing couldn’t fix — precautionary measures that, if done properly, greatly reduce the risk but are still not excuses to take foolhardy actions. If folks want to know why cases are running rampant in North Carolina right now, consider that the state officially acted as if COVID-19 had peaked back in July because they couldn’t envision a world where they didn’t force people to take a test that has next to nil value as a predictor of attorney competence.

But unfortunately there have been too many bad decisions made over the course of this pandemic to go around. So, fine, I’ll just smile that they’ve closed the book on their irresponsibility. Because I know I’m about 48 hours away from learning that some other state has opted to do it in-person in February with no mask mandate because “FREEDOM!”

(Full announcement on the next page.)

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Marissa Mayer has kept an admirably low profile since running Yahoo! into the ground and then improbably convincing Verizon to spend a comically huge amount on a collection of borderline useless properties. But the true Silicon Valley entrepreneurial animal is not dissuaded by one or two or several dozen failures any more than by an idea that no one asked for or wanted. Nor is she kept on the sidelines by matters of good taste. Mayer’s most significant legacy, such as it is, may be her diehard stance against remote work, one which earned her a pre-presidential plaudit from Donald Trump, who tweeted that her 2013 decision to force employees formerly allowed to work from home back into the office was a sign that she was “doing a great job,” a tweet which like all of the president’s other tweets completely at variance with reality. But, anyway, now that she’s been comprehensively proven wrong about WFH, she’s ready to be proven wrong again, as the woman who once threw open the door to hackers to access 200 million e-mail accounts is here to help you deal with the apparently arduous and time-consuming process of clicking “add contact” on your phone when you get a call or e-mail from someone new.

In her job as managing director of innovation and knowledge at the law firm Paul Hastings, Nicola Shaver regularly has to search for technology tools to address needs or tasks within the firm. The problem, she found, is that there is no easy way to do that. As she talked to others around the world in roles similar to hers, she realized this was a global problem.

The realization spurred her to act. Last month, Shaver and her husband, Chris Ford, who is chief marketing officer at the legal technology company ZERØ, unveiled Legaltech Hub, a website that aims to be the most complete global directory of commercial legal tech worldwide. “Our mission is to democratize legal technology,” she told me recently.

As a side project to their day jobs, Shaver and Ford spent six months building the site, scouring every resource they could find to come up with what they believe is the most comprehensive directory anywhere of legal technology. As of today, it lists 1,638 tools.

This was a notable achievement and a much-needed resources. I can attest to that personally, as I’ve endeavored to maintain my own list of legal technology startups, and understand full well the challenge of keeping up with a rapidly accelerating industry.

But good things come in threes, they say, and on the heels of the launch of Legaltech Hub have come two additional sites created to help legal professionals sift through the clutter of competing legaltech products.

Two weeks ago, the law firm Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe announced the launch of The Observatory, a directory of more than 600 legal technology products. Orrick initially developed the directory as an internal resource, but decided to make it public after seeing how its corporate clients struggled to make technology decisions.

The Observatory is intended to allow the potential law firm and legal department buyers of these products to perform a preliminary comparison and analysis, showing which products are available for a given function and what makes each unique in the market.

Then, last week, Thomson Reuters announced the beta launch of its Thomson Reuters Marketplace, an online store where users can research, demo, test and buy products and services. Slated for global availability in February, TR’s Marketplace is an open environment where users can test some 50 products.

So far, many of the products are add-ons or integrations — including from third-party vendors — for two of TR’s own products, its HighQ legal operations and workflow product and its Elite 3E business management product. But TR says it will continue to expand Marketplace, adding products for legal, tax, and accounting professionals as well as for government and regulatory customers.

Among the planned additions are a suite of legal products from global legal services provider KPMG Law. These will include applications that KPMG has built on the HighQ platform; services to help clients properly configure HighQ when accessing Marketplace’s solution templates; and access to services provided by KPMG’s Legal Operations and Transformation Services team, including change management, process optimization, and operating model assessment.

All three of these marketplace debuts follow the formal launch last January of Reynen Court, the platform that has been dubbed the app store of law — and in which the aforementioned Orrick is a principal investor, along with global firms Clifford Chance and Latham & Watkins — and come as Reynen on October 28 announced an additional $4.5 million in funding (and said just today that Japan’s largest firm has invested in the company).

Reynen Court’s mission is to make it easier for law firms and legal departments to adopt and manage modern cloud-based software applications without having to trust firm or client content to the rapidly growing universe of vertically integrated SaaS providers.

Its platform combines a “solution store” for legal technology with a control panel that makes it easier for law firms and legal departments to run cloud-based applications, either on-premise or within virtual private clouds. This enables firms to access cloud-based products while minimizing concerns over security and stability.

Notably, Reynen Court recently launched a new functionality called Test Drive, which founder and CEO Andrew Klein recently demonstrated for me. It allows users, with just a click of a button, to run preconfigured versions of applications and test them out without the formalities of setting up pilots and before committing to licensing them.

The legal technology market these days is characterized by an embarrassment of riches. For legal consumers, that is a double-edged sword. While there are more products and capabilities than ever before to choose from, making sense of them all can be daunting and confusing.

So, yes, good things come in threes. And, here, three is nowhere near a crowd (or four, factoring in Reynen Court). Legal consumers need services such as these to help them sift through the static and make informed purchasing decisions.

While I have grouped these marketplaces together in this article, they are different in what they offer. Where Legaltech Hub and Orrick Observatory aim to be comprehensive catalogs, the TR Marketplace and Reynen Court focus on making it easier to test products in advance and then more seamlessly deploy them.

Note also that all of these directories are targeted at consumers at larger law firms and corporate legal departments. For smaller firms, no comprehensive directory exists, but a good resource is the American Bar Association’s Legal Technology Buyers Guide. Above the Law’s site Evolved the Law also has a directory but nowhere near comprehensive.

But all of these sites help fill a need by organizing and providing access to information about the rapidly expanding universe of legal tech products. As Shaver realized through her own work, that is a global need.

(By the way, if you’d like to learn more, listen to my LawNext podcast episodes with Nicola Shaver, recorded just after ILTA named here Innovative Leader of the Year, and Reynen Court founder Andrew Klein.)

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Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

* The Supreme Court may soon decide if New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo had the power to issue many pandemic-related orders. At least the Supreme Court can’t take Cuomo’s Emmy away… [Wall Street Journal]

* The Trump Campaign is cutting ties with a lawyer who allegedly conveyed false conspiracy theories. [Forbes]

* Former Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland is reportedly on Joe Biden’s list of possible Attorney General picks. [NPR]

* A lawyer, who was disbarred in New Zealand, also had his law license revoked in the State of Oregon. [Bloomberg Law]

* Kentucky’s Attorney General has joined a lawsuit aimed at overturning in-person learning restrictions imposed by the Governor of Kentucky. This might be a little awkward… [CNN]

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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.