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Winning Deals, Cases And Clients
 With Legal Data

Powerful legal data products hold the promise of making your litigation arguments truly hit home, or of helping
you skillfully negotiate transactions, or even of growing your firm’s business pipeline.

But how can you ensure you’re accurately discerning the stories these enormous bodies of data can tell? And what pitfalls should you be on the lookout for in leveraging data to bolster your practice?

Join this webinar to learn how — and how not — to skillfully integrate data analytics into your day-to-day, ultimately increasing your negotiation, litigation and business development prowess.

The discussion will feature:

• An overview of how law firms of all sizes can use legal data to improve numerous aspects of their operations.
• Pitfalls to look for when analyzing data for use in a variety of contexts.
• An in-depth look at data-driven tools to refine your practice in state courts.

Presenters:
Rick Merrill, Founder and CEO, Gavelytics
Justin Brownstone, VP of Sales and Litigation Counsel, Gavelytics
John DiGilio, Firmwide Director of Library Services, Sidley Austin LLP
Jason Nittel, Director, Litigation Technology & Support, Allen Matkins

Moderator:
Bob Ambrogi – Founder of LawSites blog, Technology Columnist at Above the Law

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Just before Halloween, we asked our readers to submit their legally themed costumes to us for our annual contest. We got a great crop of entries, and there are a lot of pets and babies involved this year thanks to the pandemic and the lack of socially distanced parties going on. We think you’re going to like them a lot.

We’ve got five awesome finalists for you to choose from, and voting starts today. Who will be the winner of the eleventh year of our competition?

Let’s start off with this strong submission. Our finalist explains his costume thusly:

Section 404 of the Clean Water Act requires a permit for any discharge of dredged or fill material into “waters of the United States.” Not properly procuring one results in a procedural error. Assuming the actual Schitt’s Creek is a tributary of a navigable water, it is a WOTUS under both Rapanos v. United States, 547 U.S. 715 (2006) and the Navigable Waters Protection Rule (2020), and any discharge (schitt) going into it would therefore require a Section 404 permit.

Next up, we’ve got a contestant with some learned paws. This adorable kitty is dressed up as a WUSTL Law tax professor, and his costume is handmade.

Our next finalist needs no introduction. It’s Ruth Baby Ginsburg, and she’s precious!

But wait, here’s another Ruth Baby Ginsburg, and this little cutie is only five days old!

Last, we’ve got Ruth Bader Ginspurrrrrrrrrg. She will always be the cat’s meow.

You’ve seen the finalists, so now it’s time to vote. Who wore the best law-related Halloween costume this year? It’s all up to you! Polls close on SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22, at 11:59 P.M. (Eastern time), so tell your friends to vote ASAP.

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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.

For the past almost-four years, the Trump administration’s politically appointed leadership has essentially vandalized the immigration agencies. Just under 50% of the American people trusted them to run agencies that grant visas, naturalize new Americans, run the immigration courts and apply asylum law. That trust has been repaid with abject cruelty, open prejudice, outright lies, and blatant violations of federal and international law, implemented by people who can barely even bother disguising their racism.

None of this was an accident, or the actions of rogue officials; they had every intention of doing more. So I’d be a fool to expect them to leave quietly. I haven’t seen any specifically immigration-focused coverage of how they might set more fires on the way out the door, so in this column, I’m taking a stab at it.

Deporting The Witnesses

Remember in September when everyone was briefly outraged that an ICE prison in Georgia was sending immigrant women for unnecessary hysterectomies that the women didn’t consent to or even realize were happening? The DHS inspector general has that paperwork and Congress is trying to investigate, but suddenly the victims, especially those who’ve agreed to testify, are being deported. One of them was literally taken off a plane after members of Congress made a fuss.

Similarly, asylum seekers from Cameroon who allege they were physically assaulted, pepper-sprayed and threatened into signing their own deportation orders are being fast-tracked for deportation, using travel documents that the government of Cameroon denies issuing.

The trouble with all this is that, as the team of lawyers trying to find the separated children’s parents has discovered, deportation makes it tough to find someone. This is especially true for people who were seeking asylum, which applies to 100% of the Cameroonians and I’d guess more than zero of the ladies with the stolen uteruses. When someone’s trying to kill you, you don’t publish your home address. I strongly suspect this factored into ICE’s decision making.

Making Administrative Rules

Sure, the Trump administration just lost an election, but that’s no reason not to keep crapping all over American institutions! U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced on November 13 that it was putting up yet another roadblock to naturalized citizenship: doubling the size of the civics test. Instead of answering six out of 10 questions correctly, applicants must now answer 12 out of 20 questions correctly. The person giving the test also won’t stop once the applicant passes, but ask all 20 questions, presumably to maximize the applicant’s suffering.

Another recent proposed rule would change the rules for granting H-1B visas, which go to skilled temporary workers. The proposal is complex, but it would make it harder for employers to get H-1B visas for entry-level jobs. The right wing wants this because they believe H-1B visa holders take jobs that Americans are entitled to.

Unfortunately for them, it’s not clear that USCIS has the authority to make this rule under the authorizing law. So they’re probably going to get sued, even if they manage to make the rule before Joe Biden is inaugurated (which would be fast by administrative rulemaking standards). In general, you can expect most administrative rules under USCIS to be met with lawsuits for the next three months, thanks to recent rulings that Chad Wolf and Kevin McAleenan were illegally appointed.

There are other things, like ICE raids on “sanctuary cities” and political interference in the U.S. Census, but they’ve been doing that stuff all along. There are also some possibilities that remain speculation, like craven toady Bill Barr issuing more AG opinions about immigration law on his way out the door. But he and the people like him will eventually leave. Our job for the next few months is to keep paying attention, so they will be at least accountable for whatever they do on the way out.

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Lorelei Laird is a freelance writer specializing in the law, and the only person you know who still has an “I Believe Anita Hill” bumper sticker. Find her at wordofthelaird.com.

They were so close. Even though everyone knew she had no place in the hallowed halls of America’s central bank, even though she apparently didn’t know what a law was, even though she is the most manifest of hypocrites, even though approving a nominee to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors appointed by a lame-duck president during a lame-duck session of Congress is unprecedented, they were so close to giving Judy Shelton a voice in the nation’s monetary policy for the next three years. Even though they called her “very dangerous” and fatally attracted to “nutty ideas” and expressed “concern” about her ideas like devaluing the dollar and returning to the gold standard and such, as with all ill-considered (and worse) decisions of the Trump administration, his lackeys in the Senate (eventually) lined up behind her (including the three senators who made the above remarks). After all, to not do so would be to give Joe Biden (and Gary Gensler) an extra body at the Fed, and surely confirming a certifiable lunatic, a woman every bit as unfit for the job as everyone else Trump had picked for it, is preferable to that.

When it comes to Biglaw bonus memos, shorter is better. Just let folks know how much they’re getting (hopefully at least market rate) and when they’re getting it and… that’s it. That’s all folks really want to know. The longer the announcement, the more conditions on the bonuses — like the number of billable hours or the time frame to enter said hours in order to qualify for the money.

The bonus memo at Goldberg Segalla, 171st on the 2020 Am Law ranking with $150,000,000 in gross revenue last year, was released yesterday, and it is an astonishing 15 pages long. (Available in full on the next page.)

Yikes.

The majority of it is dedicated to describing the leadership and “professional hygiene” components of the bonus formula which is an attempt to put some criteria on functionally discretionary factors. Listen… the Biglaw gold standard is lockstep bonuses. Besides being impervious to subjective impressions of associates which can reflect personal bias, lockstep gives associates a measure of certainty about their compensation and allows for apples to apples comparisons across peer firms. This is… not that.

In any event, the leadership and “professional hygiene” components can enhance the production component of the bonus, and that’s where Goldberg Segalla lays out the hard numbers. First we’ll note that associate production bonuses are based on “realized hours” meaning the firm has to actually collect from the client to get a bonus on that time, which… is not great for associates. It’s hardly a young associate’s fault if the firm is unable to collect on the work that they did. Of course there’s always a risk that a firm won’t get paid, but floating that should be the responsibility of the partnership, not the rank-and-file associates that have little control over whether clients pay, especially when they rarely have autonomy over which matters they’re assigned in the first place.

But anyway, here are the bonus amounts for all associates — regardless of class year (the two discretionary components may account for class year differences):

Subject to the professional hygiene component of the bonus program as described on the pages discussed within the body of this bonus memo, the Production bonus component for associates is based upon number of realized hours during the fiscal year (see above).

Hours: Bonus:
1950 $5,000
2000 7,000
2050 8,000
2100 9,500
2150 11,000
2200 12,500
2250 14,500
2300 17,000

each additional 50 realized hours = $2500; there is no maximum production bonus component.

But don’t worry — it gets shittier. Usually year-end bonuses are paid… at the end of the year. Or perhaps at the end of the first quarter the following year. Not at Goldberg Segalla. They drag the process out over the course of the following year:

“Gross bonus” is the cumulative amount determined by adding the gross production component to the leadership component and adding or subtracting the professional hygiene component (if any).

The bonus will be paid in five distributions as follows:

On or before December 31, 2020: 12.5 percent of the gross bonus

On or before January 31, 2021: 12.5 percent of the gross bonus

On or before April 30, 2021: 25 percent of the gross bonus

On or before July 31, 2021: 50 percent of the remainder after write-offs and holdbacks are accounted for

On or before October 31, 2021: remainder of bonus after write-offs and holdbacks are accounted for

Any holdbacks that still exist as of October 31, 2021 will be monitored monthly and released accordingly as the receivable on which the hold back is based is collected by the firm.

And of course, associates only get the bonuses they earned if they’re still employed at the firm at the time of the distribution. That locks associates in at the firm and off of the lateral market if they want to collect the money they’re owed.

Since Baker McKenzie made the first year-end bonus announcement last week, Biglaw has been pretty quiet on the bonus front. Let’s hope whichever firm acts next will do so with the nice, big lockstep numbers we’ve come to expect from the elite in Biglaw.

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!

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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).

* A Florida woman, who allegedly pretended to be a lawyer, has been sentenced to four years in prison. Did she say her name was “Jerry Gallo“? [Tampa Bay Times]

* The FBI is purportedly investigating the Attorney General of Texas for alleged improprieties. [Hill]

* A wrongful-death lawsuit has been filed over the drowning this past summer of an actress on the show Glee. [Deadline]

* The Attorney General of Pennsylvania had some harsh words for Rudy Giuliani upon the latter’s return to the courtroom in post-election litigation after a nearly three-decade hiatus. [Newsweek]

* A lawyer has been found guilty of a misdemeanor for refusing to stop texting in court. Guess the attorney will be texting sad emojis for a while… [Bloomberg Law]

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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.

Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day!

How long was it between when Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced, in a fireside chat, his plan to enlarge the Supreme Court to as many as 15 justices to the plan’s defeat?

Hint: He made the announcement in February of 1937.

See the answer on the next page.

Health / Wellness

I cry at least once a week. Crying is an incredibly healthy way of releasing stress, grief, and anxiety. It’s not weakness, it’s strength. Find a safe spot and let it rip!

By Brian Cuban

at 6:18 PM

Former AIG chief Hank Greenberg and former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer have a lot in common. Both are children of Manhattan, used to getting their way and extremely rich. Oh, yea, and both were forced to resign in disgrace at the pinnacles of their careers. Still, given that Spitzer’s pursuit of Greenberg helped lead to the latter’s resignation (well, retirement) in disgrace a few years before his own, leading to a genuine loathing between the two so fierce that Greenberg has spent the better part of his 80s and 90s litigating his downfall rather than, say, with his grandchildren and beloved dog, it’s a bit gauche to notice the similarities in Greenberg’s presence. But so exasperated was the judge overseeing Greenberg’s defamation suit against Spitzer—who called AIG’s accounting under Greenberg “fraudulent” on television just after his successor as New York attorney general did in a legal settlement Greenberg signed off on—that he went there.