Category: News Feeds

For six-and-a-half years, the hedge fund formerly known as Och-Ziff Capital Management has been rather eager to put its African misadventures—specifically those involving bribes paid to public officials in exchange for some exciting mining rights—behind it. It spent $400 million and had a subsidiary plead guilty. It (eventually) cut ties with its founder. It changed its very name. And still, the scandal continued to hang over its head, in part because—like the Justice Department—the victims of its little scheme would not just go the hell away. At last, however, they have.

* A lawsuit has been filed over the rights to Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “And I said, ‘what about Breakfast at Tiffany’s?’”… [Deadline]

* An Ohio lawyer is facing ethics charges because he allegedly offered to exchange legal services for a client cleaning the lawyer’s home in the nude. [ABA Journal]

* An purported extra-marital affair of the Attorney General of Texas is being connected to criminal allegations against the official. [U.S. News and World Report]

* Check out this article on the latest status of election lawsuits filed by the Trump Campaign. [Fox News]

* The Michigan Attorney General pleaded with residents to stop telling election officials to shove sharpies in their butts. Michigan residents sure are creative. [New York Post]

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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.

A website launched this summer aims to address the justice gap by making it easier for clients to find the right lawyer and by providing lawyers — primarily solos — with free practice management software to reduce their cost of providing legal services.

On the front end, Xira is a lawyer-matching site through which clients can search for lawyers who match their legal issue and budget, and then directly book a consultation with the lawyer they choose and meet with that lawyer in a Zoom video call.

On the back-end, Xira is a no-cost and no-obligation service for lawyers that provides free access to a suite of cloud-based practice management software that includes case management, time management, document management, electronic invoicing, online calendaring and booking, and secure messaging.

It even includes the cost of Zoom audio and video calls with clients, regardless of whether the clients originated through Xira.

The only cost to the lawyer is a fee of $30 for a new client booking, incurred when a client finds, books and meets the lawyer on Xira.

In addition, if a lawyer opts for the ability to receive electronic payments of invoices through Xira, there is a charge for that service of $10 per month.

A lawyer can can also elect to increase document storage from the standard 2Gb that comes free to 100Gb for an additional $10 a month. But these charges are entirely optional.

Founder Reza Ghaffari, who was formerly chief operating officer of telecommunications company Coriant until its 2018 acquisition by competitor Infinera for $430 million, sees Xira as a vehicle to help solo lawyers be more successful by operating more efficiently.

Ghaffari sees a legal market in which a large number of lawyers have gone out on their own, often virtually and many part-time. At the same time, there are large numbers of consumers who are not getting the legal help they need.

“Let’s put these together,” Ghaffari said of his reason for founding Xira. “Let’s provide a product that helps solos expand their practice. We also wanted to create a place to make it simple for users to find the right advice they want.”

Searching For A Lawyer

For clients in search of a lawyer, Xira provides several filtering options to help them find the right match of an attorney who concentrates in their area of need.

They start on the home page by entering the type of legal issue they have and their state. That search opens a results page showing brief profiles of the lawyers who match (or cards, as Xira calls them). These profiles show the lawyers’ rate for an initial consultation, standard billing rate, and next-available meeting time.

The client receives immediate confirmation of the scheduled consultation.

The order in which attorneys appear on the results page is randomized to give a fair shot to all attorneys on the platform. The  client can click through a profile to see a lawyer’s full biography, which includes more details about the lawyer’s practice, experience and fees, as well as an expanded live calendar of available meeting times.

On the search results page, filters enable clients to narrow results in several ways:

• By availability to meet, ranging from immediately to within 30 days.
• By hourly rate.
• By those who offer free consultations.
• By those who offer flat fees or contingency fees.
• By ratings.
• By languages spoken.

Once the client selects a lawyer, the client picks a meeting time from the calendar that shows the lawyer’s availability and receives immediate confirmation.

The platform allows clients to rate attorneys they use and those ratings are available to others who come to the site. For attorneys who are new to the site, Xira will help them import ratings from other sites such as Google, Yelp or Avvo.

Managing Clients and Cases

For attorneys using Xira, their starting-off point is a dashboard where they can manage their cases, billing, messaging, and other activities.

Lawyers manage their cases and consultations through a dashboard.

When a new client books a consultation through Xira, the client receives confirmation immediately and the appointment appears immediately in the lawyer’s Xira calendar. Xira can synchronize with calendars in Office 365, Google and iCloud. The attorney clicks on the calendar appointment to see the client’s details.

Xira allows the attorney to control the timing of bookings. The attorney can set a minimum amount of advance notice and set breaks or buffers between meetings.

When the time comes for the meeting, both the attorney and client are put in a lobby until the meeting starts. At the scheduled time, they can each join the meeting.

Xira’s platform includes a document vault for each case.

If the client retains the attorney, the attorney can then open a new case case in Xira and manage its activity and billing through the platform. For each new case, a document folder is also created. The client gets access to this folder and is notified whenever the attorney adds a document. The client can read and download documents, but cannot delete them.

Each case also includes secure messaging where the lawyer and client can exchange text messages.

Xira also provides a mobile app in which all of these features are available.

Future Development

Xira formally launched in July in California, and so far that is where it has centered its marketing to consumers and where most of the listed lawyers are located. Later this year, it will expand its marketing to New York and Florida, and plans eventually more broadly.

In the meantime, lawyers in any state are free to register for the site, which costs nothing and takes less than 10 minutes.

Xira also plans to build out the ecosystem of legal professionals who use the platform so that attorneys could associate with each other for temporary assignments or refer cases to each other. The plan would also provide lawyers with access to paralegals through the platform.

The company is currently seeking angel funding to help finance its marketing and development plans.

Bottom Line

It costs literally nothing for an attorney to sign up with Xira. For that nothing, attorneys get a practice management platform, audio and video conferencing, and the potential of new clients. Only if a client books a consultation and meets with the attorney is there a fee, and then it is a relatively minimal $30.

To be clear, Xira’s practice management software is not a full-featured platform that could support a law firm. It is designed for solos. There is no ability to connect one lawyer’s Xira account with that of others in the same firm or to share calendars, tasks or documents with colleagues.

But for a solo, Xira is a platform worth checking out. I’ll repeat that a lawyer can use this to manage all the lawyer’s cases, not just those that come in through Xira. That includes the online scheduling and videoconferencing. Need to schedule a meeting with a current client? Send the client to Xira to book time on your calendar.

“The long-term vision is to make the practice of solos more efficient so they can have more billable hours,” Ghaffari told me. “If they have more billable hours and fewer operating costs, then maybe they will reduce their prices, so many people who need legal advice will be able to get it.”

Alexandra Wilson, a young barrister in London who handles criminal and family law defense matters, experiences the same types of conduct that women lawyers, especially women lawyers of color, are subjected to there and everywhere: being mistaken for a defendant on three separate occasions on the same day, being told by a courtroom clerk to wait outside until her case was called, being chastised by an older white male prosecutor who chided her for wanting to speak with her client and requesting details in court documents. Any issue about failure to zealously represent her client if she didn’t do so? I guess in the mind of the older white male there was no need to vigorously defend her client. In the minds of the three persons who made unwarranted assumptions about her, a woman barrister of color and a defendant look the same.

Outrageous? Of course. The British court issued an apology and said it would be investigating as a “matter of urgency.” While appreciative of the apology, the issue, as Wilson put it, is whether anything would change because of the three separate incidents on the same day. What do you think? Any more credence than the poll numbers in the election?

I have been mistaken for a court reporter on numerous occasions, a social worker and a client, not to mention the number of times I was mistaken for a secretary, a note taker, a copy/file clerk, or coffee Sherpa. What is especially galling is that men (and I call out men on this) don’t seem to see women as equals in the profession. That is changing, albeit slowly, certainly not fast enough for those who are impacted by the discrimination.

Just as here, in England, Blacks compose a majority of the incarcerated population, while representing only a minute percentage of the lawyer population. As Wilson notes, it’s so important for kids to see Black female lawyers; growing up, she didn’t and she wanted to.

It’s just as important for citizens to see people on the bench that look like them. And as part of a full court press (sorry, I couldn’t resist), the Los Angeles Superior Court is establishing a judicial mentoring program. For years, there have been various programs put on by various bar associations under the rubric “So you want to be a judge” or words to that effect. This program will, I think, carry a lot more gravitas because it has the court’s imprimatur and participation. California Supreme Court nominee Justice Martin Jenkins, who has been Governor Gavin Newsom’s appointments secretary, has “guided the Newsom Administration’s efforts to build a judiciary that reflects the people they serve.” Yay!!!

There will be a standing committee composed of a diverse group of judges to identify, encourage, and provide mentors for all individuals considering a judicial career. Here in California, attorneys must have been in practice for 10 years before they can even apply for an appointment to the Superior Court or to run for a judicial office.

The court says that the “…goal of the program is to convey to the legal community the uniform message of Governor Newsom’s commitment to appointing a highly capable bench reflective of the rich diversity of the state.” How diverse? California is a minority-majority state.

No race or ethnic group constitutes a majority of California’s population: 39% of state residents are Latino, 37% are white, 15% are Asian American, 6% are African American, 3% are multiracial, and fewer than 1% are American Indian or Pacific Islander, according to the 2018 American Community Survey. Latinos surpassed whites as the state’s single largest ethnic group in 2014.

A judicial mentoring program is overdue. For years, lawyers, bar associations, and others have wrung their hands over the lack of diversity in the lawyer population and thus, among the judicial population. There have been efforts to fill the diversity pipeline, even starting as early as high school. Did you know in high school that you wanted to be a lawyer?

The American Lawyer Diversity Scorecard for 2020 shows some improvement, but it’s nothing to jump up and down about. The AMLAW scorecard looks at the top 200 firms. Seventy-one firms had at least 20% minority lawyers, so, by my rough calculation, that’s one in three. Seven percent (not a typo) had at least 20% minority partners for a grand total of 14 firms. (Go ahead, check my math.) Not a very impressive track record for those firms who try to position themselves as welcoming diverse professionals.

And if we needed to be reminded yet again of the disparities between men and women, majority and minority lawyers, recent findings of the National Association for Law Placement show that men are still paid more than women (no surprise there), and Black law graduates still have lower levels of success in the job market than other graduates. Also no surprise.

“Shonda” in Jewish usage means “shame,” “disgrace.” Let’s use “shonda” in a sentence: It’s a shonda that the legal profession is still so far behind where it should be in terms of diversity and inclusion. What is so difficult about all this? The lack of progress mystifies me as I am sure it does many others. Race and gender, as Alexandra Wilson’s story shows, still permeate what we do and how we do it. That’s a “shonda.” The Superior Court’s judicial mentoring program will help. Identifying talent is an important first step toward a bench that will look more like California.

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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.

The holidays (and many CLE deadlines) are quickly approaching! While this year’s holiday season will be slightly atypical, Lawline continues to produce an ongoing lineup of great CLE to help you with your practice. With topics ranging from cannabis e-commerce and conducting remote mediations, there’s a relevant program for everyone this November. Check out some upcoming highlights below:

• Cannabis E-Commerce: Legal and Regulatory Problems and Solutions for Online Marketing and Sales. There are many state and federal laws, regulations, and polices, which all restrict cannabis businesses in a number of – sometimes conflicting – ways. This program will review the effects on cannabis businesses of the California Consumer Privacy Act, the Telephone Consumer Privacy Act, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Americans with Disabilities Act – and more. Airing November 10, 2020 at 3:30 p.m. (EST)
• 2020 Post-Election Analysis: State of the Race, Ballot Access, and Election-Based Litigation. The 2020 Election is gearing up to be one of the biggest in our country’s history. This program will review efforts made by officials to ensure safe ballot access in the midst of a global pandemic, highlights of election-related litigation, changes to the voting process, post-election matters, and more. Airing November 16, 2020 at 1:00 p.m. (EST)
• Conducting Effective Remote Mediations. Remote proceedings have defined 2020, and it is becoming increasingly clear that they are here to stay in some fashion, even after the pandemic ends. This program will teach attorneys critical skills for conducting successful remote mediations. Airing November 30, 2020 at 11:30 a.m. (EST)

If you can’t attend a live webcast, don’t worry! All of our courses go on-demand within 48 hours after airing (and you can check them out with our free trial). Check out some recent highlights:

• Managing Cyber Risk Through Insurance. Cybersecurity incidents are all too common, and pose a major threat to businesses. This program will provide an overview of the cyber threat landscape, updates on state, federal, and foreign regulations concerning cybersecurity, and how well-crafted cyber insurance can mitigate cyber risk. Originally aired on October 1, 2020
• The Impaired Lawyer and COVID-19: Strategies for Encouraging Attorneys to Seek Help and Responding Appropriately If They Don’t. During the pandemic, attorneys have been at a higher risk of substance abuse due to increased isolation and stress. This program focuses on approaches that law firms and employees should take to encourage attorneys to step forward and seek help, and how leaders can respond to attorneys in need. Originally aired on October 2, 2020
• The Copyright Case of the Decade: Analyzing Google v. Oracle at the Supreme Court. This program dives into the oral arguments and briefs in Google v. Oracle – and the fundamental question the case poses about the ability to copyright widely-used software. Originally aired on October 13, 2020

Related Content:

1. The Top 5 CLE Virginia Attorneys Are Watching Right Now
2. How to Conduct Virtual Arbitrations and Mediations
3. The Impaired Lawyer: A Call for Action

The election post-mortem is going to be filled with hot takes. And I understand, after so much energy expended trying to undo the mess that Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell wrought, it’s important to understand the good and the bad of what happened on the left. Of course, Democrats will always learn the wrong lesson because they’re Democrats, but we still have to try.

Though official results have yet to be announced, it seems likely that Joe Biden will win the presidency. Yay! But, there’s bad news for liberals: it looks unlikely that they’ll wrest control of the Senate from the GOP… which dooms all hope of righting (lefting?) the federal judiciary and locks us all in for at least two years of gridlock. (Yes, if both Georgia runoffs break for Dems this is moot, but, well, we’re playing the odds on this one.) Given this turn of events, there’s lots of finger pointing — polls are forever broken! Court packing proponents scared moderates! Joe Biden’s coattails weren’t big enough!

And all those takes have some measure of truth to them. But I’m more interested in looking at the folks who benefited the most from the very specific way the election turned out. That’s right, it was the never-Trumpers turned political action committee, The Lincoln Project, that really came out on top.

First of all, remember that despite their (welcomed) opposition to Donald Trump, they are still Republicans. The PAC was founded by former Wachtell attorney George Conway, John McCain adviser Steve Schmidt, former Ohio Gov. John Kasich adviser John Weaver, former New Hampshire GOP chair Jennifer Horn, and veteran Republican operative Rick Wilson. Not exactly folks interested in upending the system.

They’re all fundamentally conservative. They didn’t want Elizabeth Warren winning the nomination for fear of a truly leftist agenda. And, it was those exact dreams of courting centrist Republicans that was the motivation behind Joe Biden’s nomination. So, point in their column.

And frankly, they have to be pretty happy that the Senate (likely) stays with the GOP. Sure, they put out a scathing ad against Lindsey Graham, who eventually kept his seat, but that’s not a bad result for them. It’s not like they really wanted Jamie Harrison in the Senate, they just wanted the veneer of congeniality slapped back on their politics. So, even though Graham still has a job, with Trump deposed (knock on wood) and with the memory of the biting attack ads, he’s been properly chastised.

And that conservative, pro-business majority on the Supreme Court that Trump gave them on his way out the door (fingers crossed)? Well, that suits them just fine.

When the history books are written about 2020’s election and the “battle for the soul of the nation,” just remember who actually came out ahead.

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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).

We’ll respond appropriately to whatever they do to try to put into question, by hook or crook, the legitimacy of this election that Joe Biden has won.

Perhaps he will get to the Supreme Court somehow on some case like the cases that his team has been losing recently. So they’re just basically wasting time and giving Donald Trump an opportunity to express yet another set of grievances, when in fact the only grief he should be experiencing is over the loss of the election. That’s not a grief I share, but it’s probably a grief that he keenly feels.

— Bob Bauer, one of the top legal advisers to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, commenting on President Donald Trump’s plans to go to the Supreme Court with his election woes. Bauer, expressing confidence that Biden has won the election with votes still being counted, said, “We will respond appropriately to defend the vote. That’s what we’re there to do.”

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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.

What stage of grief is this?

“Plenty of proof – just check out the Media” is perhaps a suboptimal legal strategy. But it appears to be the one the Trump campaign is going with. Here’s the president’s pro bono lawyer Rudy “It Was a Tuck” Giuliani laying it out yesterday in Philadelphia.

Don’t answer that!

The Trump campaign has filed a bevy of small bore lawsuits to try to “STOP THE COUNT!” as Trump has repeatedly demanded. This morning Judge James Bass of the Superior Court of Chatham County Georgia tossed a suit filed by the campaign and the state’s Republican party because a witness who thinks he saw a stack of 53 absentee ballots that may or may not have arrived after the deadline and may or may not have gotten commingled with timely votes is insufficient evidence for an injunction to halt vote tabulation.

The Trump team has had what the president referred to as a “Big legal win in Pennsylvania!” By which he means that a state court ordered elections officials to let poll watchers stand a little bit closer as the votes are counted. The Trump team has pinned its hopes on getting late-arriving ballots tossed with an assist from the Supreme Court. But if Biden winds up with a 100,000 vote lead when Philadelphia and Pittsburgh’s absentee ballots are finally counted, a handful of late votes probably won’t make a difference.

Trump ally Matt Schlapp, a veteran of the original Brooks Brothers riot and president of the American Conservative Union, has been flogging an internet conspiracy that contends poll workers deliberately invalidated Republican ballots by having voters fill them out with Sharpie pens.

Here on Planet Earth, the voting machines read felt tip pens just fine, and this is a totally made up controversy. Nevertheless, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative group, has filed suit to put a stop to the vote tabulation in Arizona.

In Michigan, Donald J. Trump (apparently in his personal capacity) and a poll watcher sued Michigan’s Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to gain access to videotapes of every drop box and to halt the vote count based on vague allegations that this individual poll watcher was at some point improperly excluded from the counting process.

Michigan Court of Claims Judge Cynthia Stephens bounced them out of Zoom court this morning because (a) Secretary Benson already told the individual elections boards to comply with the law, (b) it’s unclear that Benson herself has access to the video feed from every drop box, so the plaintiffs can go ask the individual elections boards for it if they’re that curious, and (c) even if Secretary Benson had all the tapes in her purse, there’s no statutory requirement that she hand them over to the campaign.

Meanwhile in Nevada, the Trump campaign dream team called a press conference this morning to announce a lawsuit challenging 10,000 “illegal voters” in the Silver State.

As the Nevada Independent points out, state law does provide a procedure to challenge the eligibility of a voter. Unfortunately, if the campaign’s legal team bothers to read the fine print of NRS 293.535, they’ll find that “An affidavit filed pursuant to paragraph (a) of subsection 1 must be filed not later than 30 days before an election.”

In the event, former Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell (who initially refused to give his name to reporters, despite wearing a Team Trump “Grenell” sweatshirt to the event) failed to provide proof of any widespread vote fraud. And the one facially credible allegation he made was swiftly debunked by NBC.

There was also this bizarre exchange where Grenell insisted it was the Clark County Board of Elections job to prove that they weren’t clocking ten thousand “illegal” votes, not his job to back up his allegation with evidence.

We were given to understand that “the Media” had all the proof that these lawsuits weren’t just performative garbage meant to stall the count so that the election isn’t called for Biden. So confusing!

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Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.