Category: News Feeds

Just when you thought that 2020 couldn’t get any worse, we have news that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is battling cancer once again.

Ginsburg has been undergoing chemotherapy for cancerous lesions on her liver since May 19. A medical scan in February revealed the growths on her liver, and she has undergone treatment since then. “Immunotherapy first essayed proved unsuccessful,” she said in a statement. “The chemotherapy course, however, is yielding positive results. Satisfied that my treatment course is now clear, I am providing this information.”

A scan last week, on July 7, showed a significant reduction of the lesions and no new disease. “I am tolerating chemotherapy well and am encouraged by the success of my current treatment,” she said. “I will continue bi-weekly chemotherapy to keep my cancer at bay, and am able to maintain an active daily routine. Throughout, I have kept up with opinion writing and all other court work.”

That’s why we call her The Notorious RBG, folks. But what about her future on the Supreme Court? As usual, she has no plans to retire:

“I have often said I would remain a member of the court as long as I can do the job full steam,” she said in a statement issued by the Supreme Court. “I remain fully able to do that.”

Ginsburg is the senior member of the high court’s four-member liberal wing. This is her fourth bout with cancer, and she’s been hospitalized twice (once in May and once earlier this week) since she was declared cancer free in January 2020.

Remember how President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, was denied a confirmation hearing in 2016 because it was an election year? That’s not going to happen this time around. Senator Mitch McConnell has said that if there were a vacancy on the Supreme Court, ‘Of course we’d fill it.”

Please pray and send healing thoughts to Justice Ginsburg for her health and well-being. We need her voice now more than ever on the Supreme Court.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Cancer Has Returned [New York Times]
Justice Ginsburg Undergoes Chemotherapy for Cancer Recurrence [National Law Journal]

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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.

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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.

After freezing up a bit in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the market for legal talent is starting to warm up. Here at Lateral Link, a national legal search firm, we’re seeing increased activity in multiple markets. My colleague Abby Gordon recently evaluated the state of the Boston market and my colleague Jesse Hyde did the same for the Chicago market, and both noted opportunities in select practice areas.

As a former Biglaw litigator in New York, I work with many litigation candidates, and I have a number of them interviewing with firms right now. I’ll talk about the types of associates who are getting traction with firms right now and the types of partners that firms are seeking.

On the associate side, Biglaw firms aren’t doing much hiring right now, but elite litigation boutiques are quite active. Litigation hasn’t slowed down as much as transactional practice during COVID-19, so many boutiques are busy — and looking to add to their ranks.

The tough part about the elite boutiques is that they’re more selective than many of their Biglaw counterparts. The candidates that I have in play with the boutiques have these credentials:

• Very good grades from a top 14 law school, or excellent grades from a non-T14 law school (e.g., Latin honors or Order of the Coif).
• One or more clerkships with federal district or circuit judges — the more prominent the court or the judge, the better (e.g., S.D.N.Y. or E.D.N.Y. for district judges, SCOTUS feeders for appellate judges).
• Between two and four years of experience at a top Biglaw firm — the more prestigious the firm, the better.

If you have all of these credentials and would be interested in exploring opportunities at boutiques — where you can get comparable or better compensation, greater and earlier responsibility, and better partnership prospects compared to Biglaw — please email me at dlat@laterallink.com.

On the partner side, it’s all about books of business these days. There’s no shortage of seasoned litigators with superb credentials and experience, so mere skills won’t pay the bills. In the coronavirus pandemic, firms are being fiscally conservative and conserving cash, so they aren’t in the mood to invest or take risks. Instead, they want partners who will be accretive, who will improve the firm’s bottom line, and who will take the firm’s average profits per partner up, not down.

If you have at least $3 million in portable business, I have two searches right now that could be of interest:

• An Am Law 100 firm with profits per partner well north of $3 million is looking to add an international arbitration partner or group of partners, in either New York or D.C.
• A superb litigation firm is looking to add partners in Westchester County. If you’re a Biglaw partner who lives in Westchester, works in Manhattan, and is tired of the commute, this could be very appealing.

If you’d like to learn more about either of these opportunities, please email me at dlat@laterallink.com.

Not surprisingly, given what’s going on in the world, the lateral market isn’t nearly as active as usual. But for the firms and the candidates who are willing to look, it’s a time of great opportunity.

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts from Lateral Link’s team of expert contributors. This post is by David Lat, a Managing Director in the New York office, where he focuses on placing top associates, partners, and partner groups into preeminent law firms around the country..

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Lateral Link is one of the top-rated international legal recruiting firms. With over 14 offices worldwide, Lateral Link specializes in placing attorneys at the most prestigious law firms and companies in the world. Managed by former practicing attorneys from top law schools, Lateral Link has a tradition of hiring lawyers to execute the lateral leaps of practicing attorneys. Click here to find out more about us.

Computer hackers “almost certainly” part of Russian intelligence services have a new target: Covid-19 vaccine development efforts.

In a report Thursday, the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre and Canada’s Communications Security Establishment said that the hacker group APT29, also known as “Cozy Bear” and “The Dukes,” had been targeting various organizations involved with Covid-19 vaccine development in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. throughout 2020, likely with the intent of stealing information and intellectual property. APT is a commonly used acronym for advanced persistent threat, a cybersecurity term for hacker groups that are usually sponsored by national governments.

The NCSC and CSE led the report, and they said the U.S. National Security Agency agreed with it, while another U.S. agency, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, endorsed the technical detail and mitigation advice.

The report does not mention any specific organizations that have been targeted. However, vaccine development efforts are underway in multiple countries and by multiple for-profit companies and research institutions. The World Health Organization currently lists 23 vaccines in clinical development and another 140 in preclinical evaluation. The list includes Russian organizations, such as the Gamaleya Research Institute in Moscow and other academic institutions there and in St. Petersburg.

According to the report, Cozy Bear likely seeks to obtain authentication credentials using publicly available exploits. In targeting Covid-19 vaccine research and development, the report states that it did “basic vulnerability scanning” against external IP addresses owned by the organizations and then used public exploits when it found vulnerabilities. In certain cases, it also used custom malware programs known as WellMess and WellMail. WellMess was first reported in July 2018.

This isn’t the first time that government cybersecurity agencies have warned of the risks to organizations involved in the fight against Covid-19. In May, the NCSC, NSA and CISA issued a joint statement warning of so-called “password spraying” attacks – whereby hackers attempt to gain access to accounts with commonly used passwords – against medical research organizations and healthcare bodies, including biopharma companies. The agencies had said in April that attacks related to the coronavirus would likely become more frequent in the coming months. Citing unnamed American and British officials, Reuters had reported that Russian and Chinese hackers were suspected, though governments from both countries, as well as Iran, denied that was the case.

Photo: weerapatkiatdumrong, Getty Images

New York State currently mandates wearing a face covering when people are outside home and unable to maintain six feet of distance from others. Throughout New York, there are simple signs posted and dots on the ground.

Wear a face covering.

Seems clear enough.

Oh, but it’s not.

This weekend, when wondering around Downtown Brooklyn, I noticed various interpretations of New York State’s face covering mandate. I saw ’80s-style sweatbands, chin supports, and several folded mask bracelets.

I was curious as to who was technically complying with the letter of the law. And so, like a good lawyer, I dug into the mandate.

New York State’s mandate is more specific than the public posters. It contains two pages defining a “face covering,” detailing when and who needs to wear one, outlining what the covering may and may not be made of, explaining what needs to be covered (nose and mouth), and providing other best practices.

I wish I had been in the Zoom room when the mandate drafters (likely lawyers) predicted my Brooklyn stroll. During an edit, I envision a senior member of the mandate writing team saying something like, “If we just tell New Yorkers to wear a face covering, they may dangle a paper mask from their ear.”

The next time I’m asked why attorneys tend to be verbose when writing policies or contracts, I’ll talk about the Brooklyn fashion statements. Lawyers must contemplate the edge cases. We must remember those who focus on technicalities instead of using good faith to comply with the spirit of the language. In an ideal world, we could keep legal writing as simple as a sign on the street or a line on the pavement; but with simplicity comes vagueness and wiggle room. And that’s not always the best for a client (or for public health).

After all, Americans, New Yorkers, and Baby Unicorns, tend to push boundaries.

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Sarah was the General Counsel / first Lawyer at Etsy and Vroom.  She’s a co-founder of The Fourth Floor, a creator and producer of Legal Madness, an NYU Law School Engelberg Center fellow, a board member, an investor, and a speaker. You can also find Sarah hammering silver, eating candy, and chasing her child. sarahfeingold.com.

Bar examiners striving against all data and common sense to keep their semi-annual raison d’être going like to fall back on how they are necessary to “protect the public.” And while the argument that bar exams protect the public is almost comically weak — so weak that a state supreme court couldn’t even be bothered to articulate even the thinnest defense of the test — the argument it is massively important to protecting the public that states cancel in-person bar exams in states with surging infections is incredibly strong.

In North Carolina, an applicant has retained a law firm who just sent a letter to Governor Roy Cooper imploring him to use his authority to put a stop to this madness.

There was a day when public health officials more or less agreed that in-person events weren’t necessarily dangerous if certain precautions were taken. That day passed several hundred thousand cases ago. At this point, after a breakdown in early testing and no serious contact tracing, bringing a large group of people together in an enclosed space for a prolonged period of time constitutes a superspreader event. Plain and simple.

But so far, the NC bar examiners have refused to heed these concerns. While touting minor safety precautions, the examiners were also quick to insist on liability protections, basically conceding that they are aware of the danger but they just can’t let go. This is the language of the NC Bar’s waiver:

By proceeding to take the examination, each applicant acknowledges and voluntarily assumes all risk of exposure to or infection with COVID-19 by attending the July 2020 North Carolina bar examination, and the possibility that such exposure or infection may result in personal injury, illness, permanent disability, and death.

That is macabre!

And when they’re challenged about any of this, they send their lawyer to scold people for daring to question the Great And Powerful Bar Examiners.

In yesterday’s letter, attorney Kieran Shanahan notes that the North Carolina Supreme Court has determined that it lacks the ability to halt the test and that the bar examiners have attested to coordinating their effort with the state Department of Health and Human Services. Except…

… we received records from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (“NCDHHS”) late yesterday indicating that — while NCBLE was in contact with your legal counsel, William McKinney — the NCBLE did not contact NCDHHS to start planning until June 30, 2020. Although NCBLE’s communications with NCDHHS were sparse, I am enclosing copies of the June 30, 2020 introductory emails that we received from NCDHHS with this letter. Preparing for the Bar Exam with only one month remaining may be typical for applicants, but it is wholly irresponsible for the public officials who decided to hold the exam in-person several months ago. While I understand that neither you nor anyone wants to take responsibility for the crisis that the NCBLE has created, as our courts have recently asked: “[w]ho watches the watchmen?”

Yes, these hyped safety precautions supposedly crafted in consultation with professionals from the state HHS were, per the documents, actually slapped together over the last couple of weeks. And, worse, the NCBLE drafted its waiver language before ever talking to the HHS! As the letter puts it, “This is even more egregious when you stop to consider the fact that NCBLE asked our applicants to assume all of the risks of exposure to COVID-19 before NCBLE spoke to NCDHHS to understand what those risks might be.”

Cooper, who was steadfast enough to kill the Republican National Convention in his state over health concerns has so far turned a blind eye to the prospective attorneys that the NCBLE plans to shove into the state fairgrounds in a few days. But, as Shanahan notes, the governor’s office has asserted its authority over the state executive branch to argue that bowling alleys presented “an immediate danger to public health” but hasn’t weighed in on bringing 750 graduates from across the state into an enclosed location for a couple of days. It’s a fitting contrast because, not to defend bowling alleys, but there are few social activities that involve less interaction with people you don’t know than bowling. If alleys ran with 50 percent capacity there’s almost no risk of bumping into anyone else.

And yet it’s the bowling alleys that have so far garnered official intervention while the bar examiners are left to their own devices.

It’s time to put a stop to this so that maybe, just this once, something to do with the bar exam can actually be about protecting the public.

Earlier: North Carolina Also Demands Waiver In Case It Kills Anyone With Bar Exam
Bar Exam Tells Woman To Stop Worrying About Petty Concerns Like ‘Health’ And Study More

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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.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals is the body which gave hope to convicted insider-traders all across this great land six years ago, when it threw into question whether the crime exists at all. This has led to much learned and not-so-learned debate on the topic, and that debate continues to this day, even though the Supreme Court and the Second Circuit itself have acknowledged that its 2014 ruling freeing two hedge fund managers was wrong. Still, having started the whole thing, and undoubtedly knowing how it will all end, it can’t help but show a bit of patience and tolerance towards a couple of hedge fund managers hoping against hope that Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh will have managed to convince the other seven justices that they were wrong back in 2016.

* The Supreme Court handed down an order yesterday that will make it very difficult for ex-felons in Florida to vote this year. It’s not like there’s an election coming up or anything… [Slate]

* A lawyer for victims of Jeffrey Epstein is claiming that the estate of Epstein is withholding evidence and stonewalling the litigation. [ABC News]

* A court is allowing Mo’Nique’s discrimination lawsuit against Netflix to proceed. [Fox News]

* Weil Gotshal was able to ink four merger deals in a single day recently despite the ongoing pandemic. [Reuters]

* An attorney whose slogan was “been hit, call Flit” has surrendered his law license for withholding settlement funds from clients. Calling all lawyers with a last name that rhymes with “hit”: the slogan is now open… [Daily Report]

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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.

California already signaled that they were interested in an online bar exam to avoid the catastrophe of jamming applicants into a convention hall. But now we finally have word that the state is going remote and the news comes with a bit of an unexpected twist.

First things first, here’s what the California bar examiners are going to be doing now:

The California Bar Exam will be administered online on October 5-6;

The court directed the State Bar to extend registration for the October exam through July 24;

The court permanently lowered the passing score from 1440 to 1390;

The court directed the State Bar to expedite creation of a provisional licensure program under supervision to 2020 law school graduates—effective until they can take and pass a California bar exam, and expiring no later than June 1, 2022.

The decision to lower the cut score — permanently — is a huge victory for common sense. Under the circumstances a temporary reduction seemed prudent, but addressing the problem for the long haul is great news. California’s prior cut score made a mockery of the idea that the exam is about protecting the public. Applicants who could easily serve the public in other states were cut out of the profession by a score that always seemed more about artificially capping the profession than guaranteeing competency. A policy that exacerbated the state’s significant access to justice problem and damaged efforts to diversify the profession with many minority candidates logging scores that would easily pass in New York but left them on the outside in California.

Dean David Faigman of Hastings lauded the decision:

The decision was rather more than I thought that I could hope for, and certainly more than I expected. I am deeply grateful to the California Supreme Court for this decision, which takes into account the needs of the candidates for the bar and ensures protection for the public. It is a sensible and fair outcome.

It is a better result than trying to force an in-person exam in a few months.

But this option is still fraught with peril. Access to reliable internet and locations devoid of interruption will still be substantial problems for applicants. As will unresolved issues over remote proctoring, which could include AI proctoring software that might run afoul of local laws.

There may be many more changes to this process before October.

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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.