Category: News Feeds

For folks taking the in-person bar exam today, most states are requiring folks to wear masks — something proctors took all of a couple minutes to stop doing — while sitting uncomfortably close to each other. But what happens at lunch time? You can’t really wear a mask while you’re eating, right? Surely the site of the test would expand the distancing for that, given that they officially feel 6 feet isn’t enough to allow people to remove masks inside the testing area.

Ahem.

That’s from a post by Campbell dean Judge Rich Leonard tagged as “socially distanced lunch at bar exam for Campbell students.” And it’s certainly distanced but I’m not sure this is what the CDC had in mind when they put out their recommendations.

And what’s more troubling is that this probably is a better run lunch than some out there right now. I’d not be shocked to learn of a bar exam that turned its examinees loose on the town to mingle at local restaurants… assuming those establishments could even keep up with the influx of graduates.

Again, please take care of yourselves out there.

Earlier: Bar Exam ‘Socially Distant’ Seating Doesn’t Look Much Different Than Its ‘No Cheating’ Seating
This Is What A Socially Distanced Bar Exam Looks Like… Do You Feel Safe?

A Miami-Dade judge, Circuit Judge David C. Miller, is under fire for the way he handled crowd noise at the courthouse. As reported by Law.com, the incident happened back in January (which tbh seems like a million years ago) when Miller was presiding over a tobacco trial and he said courthouse guests that had gathered in the lobby for Miami-Dade Circuit Judge William Altfield’s investiture disturbed his courtroom.

According to a report from the Judicial Qualifications Commission Chair Krista Marx, after first sending the bailiff and court clerk to quiet the disruption, Miller personally got involved, which included “yelling and waving his arms at the people in the lobby while trying to get them be quiet.” He also admonished a guest, “Do not shake your head at me,” and threatened to hold her in contempt. The ruckus Miller caused actually disrupted another trial in a different courtroom.

Suffice it to say the Commission wasn’t pleased with Miller’s behavior:

“The commission is particularly disturbed by Judge Miller’s repeated threat to hold one of the people in the lobby in contempt for shaking her head in disbelief over Judge Miller’s behavior,” Marx’s report said. “Judge Miller had other options available for dealing with the disruption to his trial, such as taking a recess or calling court administration to ask for assistance. The method he ultimately chose to employ reflected poorly on himself, and the judiciary as a whole.”

The report further said the incident violated three judicial ethical canons: creating an independent and honorable judiciary, promoting public confidence, and being patient, dignified, and courteous with all people a judge comes in contact with in an official capacity.

The report recommends a reprimand for Miller’s behavior. The Florida Supreme Court will review the JQC’s recommendation.

Miller has signed a stipulation conceding his conduct was inappropriate.

Read the Commission’s full report below.

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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).

Well, we’re really doing this. States are beginning in-person bar examinations this week despite persistent warnings from public health officials and we hope everyone comes out of this experience safely. Joe and Kathryn offer a final roundup of what’s going on with the bar examinations this week, from social distancing seating plans to the bogus claim that the bar tests “minimum competency.” And, Joe unveils what the ideal attorney licensure regime would look like.

When you woke up this morning to find that “demon sperm” was trending on Twitter, did you call the cops? Or did you log off in disgust, because you remembered that the First Amendment only protects speech from government suppression, not content moderation by private companies?

If you managed not to call 911, congratulations! You are smarter than the president, who spent part of his evening whining that Twitter’s trending topics are “illegal.”

The rest of the evening he spent retweeting a video of a Tea Party-convened coven of quack doctors spewing lies about a supposed miracle “cure” for coronavirus on the steps of the Supreme Court.

Yeah, it’s hydroxychloroquine again. It’s always hydroxychloroquine with these loons.

After multiple studies showing the drug does more harm than good for COVID patients, the FDA pulled its emergency authorization for use to treat coronavirus. Which these esteemed medical professionals interpret as a deliberate plan to kill more Americans and ensure Donald Trump is defeated at the polls in November. It’s so obvious!

The star of the video is a Dr. Stella Immanuel who inveighed against masks and lockdowns, called double-blind efficacy studies of hydroxychloroquine unethical, and claimed that she and her staff all take the drug prophylactically without danger.

Here she is demanding Dr. Fauci et al submit to a pee test to prove they aren’t taking the drug themselves.

The Daily Beast notes that Dr. Immanuel believes a whole lot of bizarro nonsense.

Immanuel, a pediatrician and a religious minister, has a history of making bizarre claims about medical topics and other issues. She has often claimed that gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are in fact caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches.

She alleges alien DNA is currently used in medical treatments, and that scientists are cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious. And, despite appearing in Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress on Monday, she has said that the government is run in part not by humans but by “reptilians” and other aliens.

The video went viral, with clips continuing to circulate even after the original post was removed by Twitter, YouTube, and even the notoriously gun-shy mods at Facebook. Trump’s tweet of the video was removed by the platform, and his son Don Jr wound up in Twitter jail for twelve hours for promoting dangerous misinformation during a pandemic.

Or as Republican strategist Andrew Surabian put it, Twitter is “continuing to engage in open election interference — full stop.”

Will Bill Barr and Josh Hawley call for prosecution of Twitter and Facebook for dastardly First Amendment election violations? Not if a higher power gets to them first.

Better watch your back, Zuck! Apparently the man upstairs is as confused about the First Amendment as the man in the Oval Office.

Trump’s New Favorite COVID Doctor Believes in Alien DNA, Demon Sperm, and Hydroxychloroquine [Daily Beast]

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

Last week, Indiana pulled the plug on its planned online bar exam this week, rescheduling to next week in an effort to work out bugs that still plagued the system on Friday. The move got a lot of people wondering about Michigan’s plans, given that the neighboring state planned to hold its own online exam this week. Never fear, Michigan told the world! Unlike Indiana, Michigan employed ExamSoft as its vendor and wouldn’t have the problems plaguing the Hoosiers.

Fast forward…

Of course. A response on Twitter stated, “Can confirm. Examsoft isn’t taking calls either. We were supposed to start the second module 20 minutes ago and there has been no message from the test administrators.”

Michigan, for its part, thinks it’s got a handle on it:

Again, online exams are better than in-person exams, and there’s every reason to believe that this process will be vastly improved by October when more states are eyeing their online exams. But the problem is that the only way to get to October with a working system is to keep forcing applicants to act as unwitting Beta testers during the most important examination of their lives. That’s not a model for effective licensing… it’s just madness.

Sooner or later we’re just going to have to come to grips with the fact that this is an antiquated model of credentialing attorneys and build something new. If the goal is guaranteeing that all licensed attorneys are practicing at a high enough level to protect the public, a one-time exam on subjects that the lawyer never intends to practice simply makes no sense. Blow it all up and start over.

And until then just grant diploma privilege and put a stop to all this.

Earlier: Online Bar Exam Software Still Not Working On Friday, Test On Tuesday

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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.

When I was growing up, my parents were New York City school teachers. Although I admired their level of education and commitment to children, I never thought of their career choice as a brave one, unlike many of my peers whose parents were police officers, fire fighters, and health care workers. My parents were teachers, who worked reasonable hours, had funny stories of their classroom experiences, marked papers, inspired students, coached after-school activities, and were off in the summer, except of course when they worked summer school. It was a mostly safe job, and one that my peers and I were all encouraged to consider.

As an attorney, however, it concerns me, that multiple news outlets are reporting that as a result of COVID-19, teachers are fearing death so much as to write their last wills and testaments. When did teaching become a profession wherein the risk for death was palpable? We have known about certain schools with metal detectors. We also have witnessed mass shootings in schools across the nation. But now, the fear of death from COVID-19 is pervasive.

I am always happy to hear that people want to take responsibility and make a last will and testament. It’s an easy task to complete and, although possibly hard to get started, you will feel calm and content once it is finished. There is a misconception that last wills and testaments are only necessary for the wealthy. Some think they do not need one if they do not have children, or a spouse. More believe that a last will is only needed when you age, and it becomes more likely that you will die. So many individuals put off writing their last will and testaments until they are retired along with their required minimum distribution and move to Florida.

Anyone over 18 needs a last will and testament, regardless of level of wealth, marital state, or number of children. When you die without a last will, the state intestacy laws determine who gets your estate, and that individual may not be whom you want — or even know, in the case of first cousins once removed. If you have children, without a last will, a local probate judge will determine the guardianship of your kids, and while you may hate your in-laws, they may make a lovely case to the judge as to why they should raise your family.

COVID-19 has made death a reality for many who never thought about it before. Younger generations are now contemplating their estate plans, as they see their peers succumb to illness. Teachers are especially affected by the pandemic, as their jobs require in-person contact with children, who have been shown to be carriers of the virus. Remember when everyone in your first-grade class got chicken pox? Or half the grade was out because of the flu? School districts around the country are rushing to implement plans for classroom structure during the age of COVID-19. But is it enough? Will the teachers (and children) be safe? Some districts and educational institutions are permitting long-distance learning or some kind of hybrid method. The federal government maintains that a plan for reopening school should be left to states and school districts.

For teachers who have been socially distancing for the past several months and exercising great care, heading back to school is a cause of great anxiety. Not only will they expose themselves, but they can bring the virus into their own home and expose others.

In addition to last wills and testaments, many teachers are also considering supplemental insurance plans, living wills, and powers of attorney. From a professional lens I am pleased to see individuals doing that which they should do, under any circumstance. I cannot deny, however, that in the wake of fear and danger, clients are prompted to take care of their affairs. Often I receive phone calls from scared parents heading out on solo vacations or individuals newly diagnosed with a harmful disease. The COVID-19 pandemic is no different. Individuals are putting themselves in inherently dangerous situations and, therefore, want to prepare for the worst-case scenario, which unfortunately in this case is more than possible. As practitioners, we can take care of the estate planning. It is up to our governments, however, to avoid unnecessary death.

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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.

Have you gotten the impression that some of these state bar examiners, despite everything going on around them, still care less about the risk of spreading a potentially deadly virus than maintaining the integrity of their “process”? Because that’s certainly the impression we’ve gotten when states tout their safety protocols only for it to come out that they didn’t even bother approaching public health officials until a few weeks before the exam.

Montana’s bar exam isn’t the biggest that will take place, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t carry with it a great deal of risk. Indeed, many of these smaller exams carry heightened risk because they do not support multiple testing sites and therefore concentrate applicants from all over the state in one location becoming the hub of a future wheel of outbreaks.

A petition was filed seeking emergency diploma privilege for those planning to take the July exam. The petition, brought on behalf of 63 of the 68 graduates, was also supported by 83 Montana attorneys, including 4 retired state Supreme Court justices.

In response, the bar examiners fought like a rabid dog over a bone to protect their carved out law school trivia fiefdom, arguing that around 25 percent of people fail the exam — neglecting to point out that this is a manufactured number decided upon by the bar examiners. In fact, the whole cut score process should have given us a clue as to how bar exam season would go. It’s not like a driving test, cut scores are set based on the prediction that they will result in a reasonably predictable 20 percent or so of examinees failing. These are people who literally set the scores of their test to justify their jobs — obviously they care more about preserving that role than anything else up to and including a pandemic.

The response also takes a dizzying spin of circular argument roulette:

Taken to the extreme, if we cannot safely administer a bar exam, the
Supreme Court cannot safely sanction jury trials in courts of our state, as many of the same issues exist.

Yes, that would suggest that! You also probably have a terrible plan for administering jury trials right now.

The court rejected the petition, noting that the state eliminated diploma privilege in a 1980 opinion on the grounds that there was no longer a value to encouraging people to attend law school at the University of Montana. What that has to do with the current bid for diploma privilege is unexplained. Regardless, the court accepted the bar examiner position that all applicants “will have 116 square feet of room for their sole use.”

That certainly sounds like a big number. What does it look like?

I dare say you’d get fidgety if someone stayed that close to you in a grocery store for 3 minutes let alone for two 12-hour days. Just like the layout in North Carolina, these estimates of personal buffers sound huge in the abstract but become somewhat terrifying when seen in reality. Or at least they sound huge to people in Montana — here in New York we know exactly what 116 square feet looks like because that’s the size of our dream home.

Still, this doesn’t look like much more than pushing the usual “anti-cheating” distance an extra foot at most. There’s just a complete lack of seriousness on the part of the bar examiners going forward with these tests. There’s exactly ZERO evidence that the test protects the public, it’s just… this thing we do every year.

Good luck everyone. And remember, we depend on your tips to cover bar exams across the country so please let us know what’s going on… good, bad, or indifferent. Reach us at tips@abovethelaw.com.

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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.

Day in and day out, associates slavishly bill their hours at Biglaw firms across the country, wondering if perhaps someday they’ll be able to move in-house where the grass must surely be greener — even during a pandemic. After all, a life without billable hours is, dare we say, actually a life.

As it turns out, the grass there is actually greener for many in-house attorneys as cash seems to grow on trees in this mythical, magical fairy-tale land where money and prestige converge.

While a great number of people believe that in-house lawyers earn less than their Biglaw counterparts, top in-house attorneys — the general counsel of America’s largest companies — often earn sums that exceed Biglaw partner pay.

How much more are general counsel earning than Biglaw partners? Let’s take a look at Corporate Counsel’s latest survey of the nation’s best-paid general counsel, a ranking that pulls together all the money that GCs make in total cash compensation, which is a combination of base salary, cash bonus, and nonequity incentives.

Here’s how general counsel compensation has changed since last year’s survey:

Salaries for legal execs have remained pretty stagnant over the last several years. The median salary for a general counsel in 2018 was $498,677. Last year, the median salary was $504,434. Only a 1.2% increase. In 2017, the median salary was $500,000.

The median total cash compensation dropped 3.7%, from $988,237 to $951,688. But bonuses were a different story. The median bonus for general counsel jumped from $250,000 in 2018 to $345,302 last year, an increase of about 38%.

What hasn’t remained stagnant is the difference between men’s and women’s salaries on the GC front. The in-house gender pay gap is finally beginning to close.

The average male general counsel’s total cash compensation in 2019 was $1,216,118, while female legal ­executives averaged $1,136,486, a difference of about 6.7%. In 2018, the average cash compensation gap was nearly 16%, with men earning $1,277,971 while women received $1,088,788.

Meanwhile, the median bonus pay for female general counsel was 1.6% higher than males last year. And the median stock awards for women legal executives were 1.9% higher than the median awards for men.

But what about the coronavirus crisis? That surely must have affected GC pay this year, what with the global recession that it’s caused.

[A] growing number of in-house leaders, along with other executives, have already taken salary reductions this year as part of cost-cutting measures, including furloughs and layoffs, amid the coronavirus pandemic.

For instance, Dinh, Fox’s top lawyer, announced in April that he was giving up his entire salary through September. Meanwhile, over at Disney, Braverman’s salary was reduced by 30% this year.

Of course, both Dinh and Braverman, like virtually all legal executives, make the bulk of their money through stock awards, incentive compensation and bonuses.

It’ll be interesting to see what next year’s GC compensation report looks like, but for now, let’s focus on the good news. Here are the top 10 highest-paid GCs in the country. All the GCs present here had total cash compensation of more than $4 million:

Top Paid General Counsels
Rank	Name	Company	Compensation
1	Alan Braverman	Walt Disney	$8,000,016
2	Eric Grossman	Morgan Stanley	$6,938,750
3	Viet Dinh	Fox	$6,000,000
4	Bruce Campbell	Discovery Communications	$5,905,380
5	Thomas Moriarty	CVS Health	$5,671,833
6	C. Allen Parker	Wells Fargo	$4,569,246
7	L.E. Seeger	American Express	$4,525,000
8	Karen Seymour	CBS	$4,500,000
9	Bradford Smith	Microsoft	$4,216,148
10	Michael O’Brien	Omnicrom Group	$4,100,000

Congratulations to those taking home these impressive salaries. It’s certainly encouraging for everyone looking to make the leap in-house.

The 2020 GC Compensation Survey: A New Cash King [Corporate Counsel]
Chart: Who Made the 2020 Top-Paid GC List? [Corporate Counsel]

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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.

They say that a watched pot never boils. That’s not really true, but in legal technology a lot of people spend time waiting with their finger over a button. The wait is over.

I was recently introduced to Toronto-based Rampiva Automate, a business process automation solution that integrates with Nuix’s well-known e-discovery processing engine to automate processing on e-discovery projects. I spent time talking with Rampiva founder Daniel Boteanu recently. Below is a distillation of that conversation.

Mike Quartararo: What is Rampiva Automate and what problem does it solve?

Daniel Boteanu: No one really likes processing data. People like discovering facts and patterns, but extracting metadata and running the next OCR job is a grind. Configuring the next report, picking processing settings, checking output to make sure it was executed correctly, and processing ESI is full of manual activities that have to be executed exactly right every time, as soon as possible, and probably a little different from the last task. Rampiva Automate integrates with Nuix’s data processing engine to automate processing using preset processing templates designed for your project. A processing technician can build expert-level workflows and save them to template library so the rest of us can pick the right workflow for our project, schedule it, and get an alert when the job is done.

MQ: What led to the development of Rampiva Automate?

DB: Like most things worth building, necessity. We realized that the manual workload is just unsustainable. There aren’t enough people who can do the work, the opportunity for user-error is too high, and the administrative layer is too burdensome. If we want to take the lessons we’ve learned from e-discovery and apply them to problems relating to data, we need to automate the processes.

MQ: Describe a use case for Rampiva Automate.

DB: The reason people use Rampiva Automate is so that they can build a job queue that will seamlessly execute data processing tasks in Nuix based on priority. This reduces user error, accelerates speed to results, and frees up analysts and project managers to focus on case strategy or other more important tactical tasks. At the end of the day, there’s really only one reason that people use Rampiva Automate — there’s too much data, too many projects, and not enough people to do it right every single time.

MQ: What is Rampiva Automate doing behind the scenes? What technology does it leverage?

DB: Using the Nuix processing engine, Rampiva Automate provides an alternative platform for executing data processing tasks. Like Nuix’s workstation product, Rampiva Automate uses the Java API to manage task execution with the Nuix engine. This provides more granular control of processing events than platforms built using the Nuix RestAPI. Rampiva Automate provides a job queuing system, called Scheduler, that accesses a customizable library of predefined workflows containing a list of tasks to run in Nuix.

MQ: I can imagine other uses for Rampiva Automate. What might they be?

DB: A client might want to monitor a department’s file share to alert business stakeholders of any items that have aged past the appropriate retention period or any new items that potentially contain sensitive data. That client would set up a trigger in Scheduler so that every fourth Saturday, a low-priority job is created in the job queue to execute a metadata scan of that file share using the next available set of Nuix workers, and then filter out any items that do not meet the defined date criteria — say, last accessed more than seven years ago or created in the past 30 days. Items that meet the first [criterion] would be written to a Nuix case as a lightweight metadata profile, and items that meet the second [criterion] would be completely indexed, and a search for known indicators of sensitive information would be executed. When these tasks are complete, an email notification is sent to the business stakeholder providing a link to Nuix case where the stakeholder can review and tag items with instructions.

When that review is completed, the team can then schedule a second job in Scheduler that creates an XML file with move, encrypt, or delete instructions based on policy and the stakeholder’s input. And after each task is executed, Rampiva Automate logs operational and case metrics in a built-in or a SQL database, so that users have a real-time database of all processing activity.

MQ: How else are organizations leveraging Rampiva Automate?

DB: Rampiva Automate can help a regulatory agency to capture their subject matter experts’ knowledge and standardize their internal methodology, including:

• Defining the special processing settings for specific types of forensic files
• Customizing the method for recovering deleted files
• Building custom dictionaries for decryption based on the data in each case, leveraging external brute-force decryption tools and loading the decrypted items back in the case
• Identifying indicators of date tampering and file manipulation
• Identifying known malicious files

These are all technologically feasible steps to execute in any data processing project but can require advanced-user knowledge to execute properly. Rampiva Automate becomes a force multiplier for those experts — allowing the client to support substantially more caseload without overburdening their existing team.

And on an operational level, teams are leveraging Rampiva Automate’s improved metrics tracking capabilities to better integrate their data processing with their Legal Operations objectives. This can be process testing and workflow optimization and billing, but it can also include cross-case analytics, data reuse, and detecting potential risk vectors by flagging unexpected domains and named entities.

Data is data — but, the goals, budgets, complexity, and urgency of processing data projects varies wildly between use cases. Rampiva Automate allows teams to expand their resources in a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective manner.

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Mike Quartararo is the President of the Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists (ACEDS), a professional member association providing training and certification in e-discovery. He is also the author of the 2016 book Project Management in Electronic Discovery and a consultant providing e-discovery, project management and legal technology advisory and training services to law firms and Fortune 500 corporations across the globe. You can reach him via email at mquartararo@aceds.org. Follow him on Twitter @mikequartararo.

A couple of weeks ago, we noted that Bridgewater Associates was having some problems: Not only had an arbitrator ruled that it could neither control its former employees for the entirety of their natural lives and possibly beyond, nor make shit up to further that end in a quasi-legal proceeding, but its two favorite countries are having some problems.

“There’s a trade war, there’s a technology war, there is a geopolitical war and there could be a capital war,” Dalio said on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”

“If you say by law ‘Don’t invest in China,’ or even possibly withholding the payment of bonds that the United States owes payment on in China — these things are possibilities, and they have big implications, such as for the value of the dollar,” he said….

“The things I worry about the most are the soundness of our money,” Dalio said. “You can’t continue to run deficits, sell debt or print money rather than be productive and sustain that over a period of time.”