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The Florida Bar Exam was a complete and utter disaster. They tried to hold it in person, then moved online, then had a string of failures that kept pushing off the date, eventually they fired the online provider, then they went ahead through a wave of technical problems, and throughout it all kept sending contradictory messages about the content of the exam (MBE? No MBE? Florida stuff? Federal stuff? WHO KNOWS?!?!). Every step of the way, the jurisdiction swiped the football like they were Lucy Van Pelt. And now we have the results from the exam.

On October 13, 2020, 3,137 applicants took the online remote Bar Examination. The Supreme Court posted the pass/fail results for each applicant on its website and score reports were mailed or posted to each applicant’s portal today.

The Court approved 1,487 candidates for admission to The Florida Bar on November 20, 2020, and Chief Justice Charles T. Canady has announced that they may be sworn in as members of The Florida Bar. A formal induction ceremony to swear in the new attorneys will be via Zoom on December 9, 2020.

For those reaching for a calculator, we’ll save you the trouble and inform you that’s a 47.4 percent passage rate. But 47 percent passed the July 2019 administration, so this is pretty much par for the course. The first-time pass rate was 71.7 percent. By comparison, the first-time passage for July 2019 was 73.9 percent

In the immediate aftermath of the online tests — in Florida and elsewhere — marred by technical difficulties, delays, and boasting questions that even those who’d taken prior tests thought were off the rails (Florida didn’t do the MBE stuff at least… but they replaced it with some UCC-3 nonsense), oh, and don’t forget the gratuitous racism! We feared this would take a heavy toll on passage rates. Idaho dipped to 29 percent passage, but we were all told that it would be a small sample size outlier. But now we have a massive state delivering results that seem in line with expectations.

But don’t let this flirtation with normalcy obscure that this was all an unmitigated disaster from start to finish. There’s no reason to treat applicants the way they were treated throughout the process. And given that the state used its own test as opposed to the MBE, we can’t really be sure that these results aren’t the result of some heavy scaling to make everything magically come out at the exact numbers they expected.

Here’s the passage percentage breakdown by school:

Ave Maria School of Law 64.4
Barry University School of Law 61.2
Florida A&M University College of Law 61.7
Florida Coastal School of Law 57.6
Florida International University College of Law 89.3
Florida State University College of Law 84.4
Nova Southeastern University College of Law 67.4
St. Thomas University College of Law 66.9
Stetson University College of Law 74.4
University of Florida College of Law 83.9
University of Miami School of Law 72.5
non-Florida law schools 63.8
Admitted to the Practice of Law 72.6

Congrats to Florida International for continuing to kill it on this test, no matter the circumstances.

But still… we can do better than this as a profession.

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.

You don’t always think of securities litigators taking a key role in the fight against sexual harassment, but in the wake of #MeToo, that’s exactly what’s happened. Shareholder derivative lawsuits have sprung up as a response to revelations of sexual misconduct by executives or prominent employees as a way to try to hold companies accountable.

In this episode of The Jabot, I speak with Molly J. Bowen and Julie Goldsmith Reiser of Cohen Milstein about their representation of Alphabet shareholders in a case over the company’s handing of sexual harassment claims that led to a $310 million settlement that’s been hailed as precedent-setting.

The Jabot podcast is an offshoot of the Above the Law brand focused on the challenges women, people of color, LGBTQIA, and other diverse populations face in the legal industry. Our name comes from none other than the Notorious Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the jabot (decorative collar) she wears when delivering dissents from the bench. It’s a reminder that even when we aren’t winning, we’re still a powerful force to be reckoned with.

Happy listening!

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 November 2020 election was chock full of legal controversy, namely the countless arguments the Trump campaign has launched against various jurisdictions with regard to alleged voter fraud. As we continue to monitor the merits of the asserted claims, there are a host of other legal issues, many pertaining to estate planning and administration, that the 2020 election, with COVID-19 as a dark backdrop, have exposed.

As a preliminary statement, and to state the obvious, dead people cannot vote. Not only can they not vote, they cannot bequeath or assign their right to vote to someone else. The right to vote is personal to an individual. Neither an executor, nor an administrator, nor any next-of-kin, may vote on behalf of someone who is deceased.

An interesting issue, however, is what becomes of a vote properly cast prior to an individual’s death. What happens if a voter dies between the time she mailed her ballot and Election Day, when it is counted? There is a disagreement among states as to how to address this issue. For example, just a few short weeks ago, in Wisconsin, Amber Pflughoeft cast her first and what would be her last ballot. She died from cancer before Election Day. Wisconsin disregarded her  ballot as their election laws do not permit the counting of a ballot in the event the voter is deceased, even if the death occurred following the proper casting of the vote. Sixteen other states follow that rule.

There are many instances when the voter dies following the casting of the ballot. There are only 10 states which explicitly permit such a vote to be counted, despite the death. Janice Lawrence, who died at the age of 82, in Indiana, mustered up enough strength to cast her final vote before entering hospice for end-stage liver cancer. Sadly, she died prior to Election Day and her vote was not counted.

I do not ever need a reason to preach the importance of executing an estate plan, however, this year’s presidential election has given me quite the soap box. Both presidential candidates reveal, in very different ways, the need for proper planning. President-elect Joe Biden’s family has been riddled by tragedy. By now we have all seen the iconic 1973 photograph of him being sworn in as senator at his son’s hospital bed. His first wife and baby daughter were killed in a car crash, leaving him a widower with two young sons, both hurt from the accident. Decades later one of those children, Beau Biden, who was the Attorney General of the State of Delaware, would die at the age of 46 from brain cancer, leaving a wife and two children. These life experiences exemplify why every adult should have a last will and testament, power of attorney, and healthcare proxy. Fame, power, and prominence do not protect one from death or disease, and planning for one’s incapacity is just as important as planning for one’s death. The Bidens are national reminders of the fragility of life and how we must make certain to have our affairs in order.

Certainly one does not need tragedy to encourage estate planning. Sometimes family complexities and multigenerational wealth are reason enough. President Trump and his relatives have had their share of estate litigation with regard to the real estate empire of his father, Fred Trump. Past embroilment in family  litigation is  reason enough to resolve any unsettled estate or family issues during one’s lifetime. Particular attention should be given to developing a comprehensive estate plan when families are blended, as is the case with President Trump, who has children from different marriages and of different generations.

Finally, no one needs any more reminder of our mortality with COVID-19  continuing to weigh on our collective souls. The pandemic was the lead issue in this year’s presidential election and its impact will be felt for a long time Regardless of the election cycle, pandemic, or one’s personal situation, it is imperative to review one’s estate plan to ensure that all has been done to provide for oneself and one’s loved ones.

Cori A. Robinson is a solo practitioner having founded Cori A. Robinson PLLC, a New York and New Jersey law firm, in 2017. For more than a decade Cori has focused her law practice on trusts and estates and elder law including estate and Medicaid planning, probate and administration, estate litigation, and guardianships. She can be reached at cori@robinsonestatelaw.com.

Everyone has deadline issues, be they work, family, or any other kind. I suffered through life without internet access for the better part of the past week. My modem/router died.

I am sure that my experience with customer service (I won’t name the internet provider) was the same as others.

First, a tech is sent out who doesn’t have the right experience to solve my problems. When he leaves after a futile three hours or so of futzing around, he leaves me in the lurch without any suggestion of who to call next and how to solve the problem, essentially washing his hands of the whole thing. That did not make me happy, and so I called the Office of the President to complain. We lawyers certainly know how to do that.

The next day, a tech arrives who does know how to solve the two problems I have, which he does do and voila, I am back up and running. I love this tech.

The lack of access to the internet made me realize how dependent I am upon it, and I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or not. I couldn’t  stream anything, I couldn’t pay bills or shop, I couldn’t do anything that relies on the internet to make it happen, and yet I know that there are internet deserts around the country. I used my smartphone to get out in the world, at least somewhat, but I think about what the absence of the internet is like, and it hasn’t been pretty. Am I addicted to the internet? What do you think? Is there an Internet Anonymous support group?

So, what HAVE I been doing? Trying to clean up my desk and office, which is always a challenge, since I have never met a piece of paper I didn’t like. Reading books that I previously downloaded to my Kindle, plus a bunch of physical books. Except for the convenience of the Kindle Paperwhite in terms of size and weight, I prefer real books. For me, easier on the eyes (remember my age), and I like the idea of turning pages physically and being able to find something, a note, a name in the index, a map, whatever.

Turning pages, that’s what this year has been, and the pages have not turned fast enough for me and everyone else. We look to 2021 (remember how we were anticipating 2020?) to hopefully get life back on some semblance of what life was like prepandemic. Do you remember those days? Movie, concerts, plays, dinners out, museums, shopping, browsing in bookstores and libraries, and the myriad of other things that we all enjoyed in the days before mid-March. Ability to travel with ease, hang out with family and friends, all the things we took for granted, and I wonder if we ever will experience them again in the same way.

Who remembers Geraldine Ferraro? Only those of a certain age will. For millennials, she is only a name in a history book, if indeed history of the 1980s is being taught at all.

Geraldine Ferraro was the first woman to be nominated as vice president of a major party. Walter Mondale, who had been Jimmy Carter’s vice president, headed the Democratic ticket in 1984, and he selected Ferraro as his running mate. A lawyer and a Congress member, many women were thrilled by her selection as it validated the belief held by many women (and some men) that a woman could be nominated for national office. It was only three years after President Ronald Reagan had nominated Sandra Day O’Connor as the first woman to join the Supreme Court.

The problem was that Reagan was running for his second term, and his popularity doomed the Democratic ticket, along with allegations of questionable financial issues for both Ferraro and her husband, John Zaccaro.

Cut to 2020 and we have the second woman nominated, the first woman of color, as vice president on the Democratic ticket, the ticket that won, challenges to the election notwithstanding. For me, as an old lady lawyer, I didn’t think that such an event would happen in my lifetime. It’s a happy thought for me and many others. When I think of all the changes, way too slow for many of them, it’s such a different world than when I started practicing in the mid-1970s.

Down ballot here in Los Angeles County, we now have the first all-female Board of Supervisors. The Board wields enormous power and influence in this county and to see an all-female Board when not all that long ago, the Supes were all white men of a certain age is exciting. Women here no longer must wait for a seat at the table. They have taken all the seats, finally.

The women on the Board are not cookie-cutter; they each have their own district to represent, to account to, and each geographic district has different needs and wants. I didn’t think that an all-female Board was something that I would ever see in my lifetime. The Board is not lawyer laden, a good thing. Sometimes we lawyers think that we are the only ones who know how to solve problems, and that’s just not true.

Like “good little girls,” we were told to “wait your turn” far too often. Such was the case with Holly Mitchell, the winning candidate for the open supervisor seat, who was told that. I hope that our “waiting your turn” days are over for good. We are no longer willing to wait. Millennial women, you can thank us whenever you’re ready.

Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for over 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.

* A California judge has approved some marijuana delivery services within the state. Guess Pineapple Express can now be expressly delivered, and you can get your weed and munchies delivered at the same time… [Los Angeles Times]

* Joe Biden might be considering Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts, to be his Attorney General. [CBS Boston]

* A new lawsuit alleges that employees at a Waterloo, Iowa, meatpacking plant (a facility hit hard by the pandemic) took bets about how many workers would contract COVID-19. Seems pretty morbid. [CNN]

* A lawyer has been charged with multiple crimes for allegedly luring teenage girls to sleep with him in exchange for being their “sugar daddy.” [New York Post]

* A former Virginia attorney said that “I may have have made a mistake” after losing his law license for allegedly misappropriating millions from a client. Seems like an understatement… [CBS News]

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 Vault’s 2021 rankings, which Biglaw firm gets top marks for employee wellness?

Hint: The firm, founded in California in 1885, has dedicated a lot of resources to making sure it’s the kind of place people want to work for.

See the answer on the next page.