Category: News Feeds

* President Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen is back in custody over a dispute about the conditions of his early release. Some think Cohen’s dinner out last week may have contributed to his legal woes. [USA Today]

* The Los Angeles City Attorney is accusing a nursing home of “dumping” patients onto the street to make room for COVID-19 patients for which the institution is paid larger sums of money. [Los Angeles Times]

* Disney World passholders have filed suit for being charged for months the park was closed due to COVID-19. These litigants have a lot of chutzpah challenging Mickey Mouse. [Spectrum News]

* A lawyer claims she never received a Zoom link to participate in a housing court matter, and as a result, her client was wrongfully evicted. [Cleavland.com]

* Jacksonville attorneys have filed suit in an attempt to prevent the Republican National Convention from taking place in the city next month. [CNN]

* New York lawyers are concerned over apparent plans to begin reopening courts next week. At least it looks like I’ll see all of my friends in CCP again soon… [New York Post]

Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

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

According to data collected by Law.com, which NLJ 500 firms grew their headcount in 2019, but have laid off or furloughed employees during the economic turmoil caused by COVID-19?

Hint: At these firms, headcounts grew between 2.2 and 7.1 percent last year.

See the answer on the next page.

You think you’ve had skeevy managing partners? PFFFFT. Former SDNY head Geoffrey Berman has got you beat in a walk. Here’s how he described getting fired by Bill Barr in his testimony to the House Judiciary Committee this afternoon.

On June 18, 2020, I received an email from a member of the Attorney General’s staff stating that the Attorney General wanted to meet me the next day at the Pierre Hotel in New York. I was not told the purpose of the meeting.

Summoned to meet your boss in his hotel room? Hello, HR …

During a tense 45-minute lunchtime meeting in which nobody touched the tray of sad sandwiches, Barr told Berman that “he wanted to make a change in the Southern District of New York,” and that change was to promote Berman out of there ASAP.

He said that there was an opening in DOJ’s Civil Division created by the recently announced departure of Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt. He asked me to resign my position and take that job, saying that it would create an opening for SEC Chairman Jay Clayton to be nominated for U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Berman protested that he “loved” his job at SDNY, and Barr assured him that he was “not at all dissatisfied” with Berman’s performance. Nonetheless, it was imperative to replace him immediately with U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Craig Carpenito pending Clayton’s confirmation. A confirmation which would take place never, since it would require the signoff of both Democratic senators from New York, an event slightly less likely than Donald Trump going an entire day without Tweeting.

I told the Attorney General that I knew and liked Jay Clayton but he was an unqualified choice for U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York because he was never an AUSA and had no criminal experience.

It was at this point, after he’d already offered him the job as head of the Civil Division, that Barr asked Berman if he actually had any civil experience, suggesting that the promotion would help Berman “build his book” for when he returned to private practice.

The Attorney General pressed me to take the Civil Division position, saying that the role would be a good resume builder. He said that I should want to create a book of business once I returned to the private sector, which that role would help achieve. He also stated that I would just have to sit there for five months and see who won the election before deciding what came next for me. As part of this exchange he asked if I had done civil work at my prior law firm. I confirmed that I had indeed done civil work but that I did not want to lead the Department’s Civil Division.

But Berman said that he wasn’t leaving until his successor was confirmed by the Senate. He wasn’t going to be shoved out like Jessie Liu, the former U.S. Attorney for D.C. whose career got blown up so Barr could bypass congressional confirmation and put his pal Timothy Shea in there to ratf*ck the Roger Stone and Michael Flynn cases.

The Attorney General repeatedly urged me to take the Civil Division position. At one point I compared his request for my resignation to what happened with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia where the U.S. Attorney resigned and was replaced with someone from outside that office instead of the First Assistant. By referring to that resignation I intended to signal the Attorney General that I was not going to resign so that he could disregard normal procedure and appoint someone from outside the Southern District as acting head instead of our Deputy U.S. Attorney.

Barr offered him several other positions in the administration, but when Berman refused to budge, Barr threatened to fire him and tank his career: “He added that getting fired from my job would not be good for my resume or future job prospects.” Which is better than threatening to break both his knees with a baseball bat … marginally.

So Berman left the meeting and immediately called his own lawyer, since he knew he was about to get shivved. And after one more phone call offering to let Berman switch jobs with Clayton and move over to the SEC, Barr tried to force his hand by announcing late that Friday night that Berman was resigning. Which provoked one of the batshittier news cycles in an administration that produces guano by the ton.

And all that was just in Berman’s opening statement! His testimony took place behind closed doors, but it should probably leak right about …. NOW.

Opening Statement of Geoffrey S. Berman Before the House Judiciary Committee [via Politico]

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

LexisNexis is today announcing the launch of a premium legal research service, Lexis+, that it says takes a bold approach to providing legal research, AI-driven analytics and practical guidance within a unified and fully integrated platform.

The company is positioning this new service not as a successor to its current research platform, Lexis Advance, but rather as a higher-end alternative designed for users who want an all-in-one, end-to-end platform that incorporates the latest powerhouse technologies, including several that are unique to this product.

“There will be no phase-out of Advance in the near term,” Jeff Pfeifer, chief product officer, told me during a demonstration earlier this week. “We will see how the market embraces this new solution and then see how that impacts the longer-term life of Advance.”

While Lexis+ is built on the same platform as Lexis Advance, LexisNexis is positioning it as a “bold” and “dramatic” new research service, a theme it emphasizes through the the use of striking colors and imagery uncommon in a legal research platform, highlighted by what the company calls the “insight wave.” The purpose is not just to be visually engaging, but also to use typography and visual styling to establish a clear visual hierarchy and workflow.

But the changes are more than skin deep. Lexis+ incorporates many features that will be familiar to Lexis Advance users, but it also introduces new features and tools that are exclusive to this platform, including:

• “Reinvented” legal research, with new and enhanced features for conducting research and navigating results.
• Brief analysis, with the introduction of LexisNexis’s brief analysis tool.
• Revamped Practical Guidance, with tighter integration within the research workflow.

In the second half of the year, the product will be further enhanced with the integration of Lex Machina analytics, Courtlink, and other tools. Early in 2021, content from Law360 will be incorporated into the platform.

Initial access to Lexis+ is being rolled out this week exclusively to law school faculty members. In August, it will be provided to law students. The product will be made commercially available starting Sept. 1.

(The product was originally slated to be released at the annual conference of the American Association of Law Libraries, which is now a virtual conference starting Monday.)

During the demonstration with Pfeifer earlier this week, in which David Ganote, senior director of product planning, also participated, they told me that Lexis+ was the result of 18 months of development and extensive customer feedback, including some 2,000 direct customer interactions. The overarching goal, they said, was to fully unify legal research, Practical Guidance and brief analysis within a single product.

Legal Research

Research starts at the landing page, where the user can select from three “experiences,” as Lexis+ calls them: legal research, Practical Guidance and brief analysis.

LexisNexis says the search functionality in Lexis+ is designed to set “a precedent in simplicity” and to require virtually no learning curve, especially for anyone already experienced in using Lexis Advance.

At the same time, Pfeifer told me during our demonstration, the search tool is designed to balance two interests — making maximum use of artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities while also allowing researchers to maintain the ability to control and customize their searches.

One way it does this is through a new feature called the Search Tree, which displays visually how the terms in a terms-and-connectors or Boolean search were applied and how those relationships impacted the results. (It does not work with natural language searches.) Whereas in Lexis Advance you would not know how your search terms were applied, in Lexis+ the Search Tree shows you.

In the Search Tree, each part of the search is represented in a box that displays how many results would be retrieved if only that part of the search was run. You can select any of the boxes to refresh the results with those search terms.

The Missing and Must Include feature highlights terms from your search query that are missing and lets you force their inclusion.

Another new feature to give users greater control is called Missing and Must Include. It highlights terms from your search query that are missing from a specific document in the results set, without having to open the document. When you see a “missing” term at the bottom of the search-results snippet, you can select “Must Include” to rerun the search and force inclusion of that term.

Search Term Maps show the location and distribution of your search terms.

Finally, Lexis+ expands the Search Term Maps feature of Lexis Advance from just case law to more than 30 content types, including news, statutes and legislation, administrative codes, secondary materials, administrative materials, and litigation documents.

These maps show the location and distribution of your search terms both within the results list and within the full text of documents. You can use this to identify where in a document are the largest concentrations of your search terms or to navigate to points in document where specific terms appear.

New Shepard’s At Risk

A new feature included within Lexis+ is Shepard’s At Risk. It identifies cases that are at risk of being overruled, even if they have not directly been. It flags cases in which the underlying points of law on which they rely have been negatively treated by other decisions in the same jurisdiction, which would suggest it is at risk.

This appears to be similar in concept to the enhanced citator Thomson Reuters introduced two years ago as part of its roll-out of Westlaw Edge, which likewise identified cases that may no longer be good law, even when there is no direct citation relationship between the case at hand and the case that possibly invalidated it.

In an example provided by LexisNexis, a Georgia case, Durrah v. State Farm Fire & Cas., 312 Ga. App. 49 (2011), shows up in Lexis+ with a red label, “At Risk,” even though the case has not directly been overruled or discussed negatively by other decisions. However, for a specific point of law, the case relies on another decision which has been overruled.

The At Risk feature highlights the text of the passage in question and displays alongside it that cases that give rise to the risk.

Lexis Answers

Pfeifer and Ganote said that Lexis Answers has been completely redesigned for Lexis+. It uses semantic analysis to understand the meaning of what you’re asking. In the demonstration, when a search query was entered regarding facial recognition software, Lexis Answers understood that to relate to the concept of biometric identifiers and returned results accordingly.

The idea of Lexis Answers is to provide on-point answers, with citable authority, to natural-language legal questions, without the researcher having to comb through extensive search results. When you enter a query in Lexis+, it returns the top four answers by default, which you can expand with a click to 10 answers.

Each answer displays text from the case that is relevant to the question, as well as the court where the case was decided, the date it was decided, and the citation. Click on the answer to go to the exact location within the case where the answer text is found.

Code Compare

Another feature included within Lexis+ is Code Compare. This allows a user to compare two versions of any state or federal statute — such as the current version and the immediate prior version — with additions shown in green and deletions shown in red.

When viewing a statute, you would use this feature by clicking on the compare versions button. By default, it will compare the most current version with the most recently archived version, but the user can select to compare any two versions.

As of today’s release, the ability to compare versions back in time will be limited, However, within 30 days, all prior versions back to 1991 will be available.

Brief Analysis

As I wrote in a column last year at Above the Law, for legal research, brief analysis is the new vogue. Following the 2016 launch by Casetext of its CARA brief-analysis tool, other legal research companies followed suit with tools of their own, including Thomson Reuters, which last year unveiled Quick Check, and Bloomberg Law, which released its Brief Analyzer in February.

Now LexisNexis is releasing its brief-analysis tool, incorporated as a feature within Lexis+. Like other such tools, you upload a brief — your own or your opponent’s — and it analyzes the text to recommend cases you might have missed and briefs that you may wish to review as relevant to the brief’s legal arguments. It also performs a Shepard’s analysis of the cases cited in the document.

The analyzer shows its case recommendations inline with your brief, so that recommendations are displayed in the side panel adjacent to the paragraphs to which they relate. This lets you compare the recommended cases with the text of the brief to determine whether it accurately states the point of law.

The analyzer also points to other briefs that may be relevant to the one you are analyzing, highlighting matching legal concepts and cites for each of the recommended briefs.

In analyzing a brief, the tool extracts core legal and factual concepts and displays them on the left. In a future release, the user will be able to click any of these concepts to boost or reduce their influence on the case recommendations and recommended briefs.

Practical Guidance

LexisNexis Practical Guidance is a collection of practice-specific forms, clauses, checklists, articles and practice notes designed to help a legal professional get up to speed more quickly on a particular matter. All subscribers to Lexis+ will get access to one Practical Guidance collection and can add others as desired.

Pfeifer and Ganote said that Practical Guidance is fully integrated within Lexis+, incorporating all of its capabilities. To access Practical Guidance materials, you can select is as an “experience” from the home page, or start a search and select Practical Guidance results, or browse by practice area, content type or other parameters.

Searches of Practical Guidance lack the semantic analysis parsing that I described above for Lexis Answers, so a search for facial recognition might not pick up biometric identifiers. But Pfeifer said that will be developed for Practical Guidance in the second half of the year.

Pricing and Migration

As noted earlier, Lexis+ is initially being rolled out to law school faculty and students. It will become commercially available to all others on Sept. 1. LexisNexis has not yet set pricing for the product, although the actual cost will vary depending on the configuration a customer selects. The core product offering will include at least one Practical Guidance module and all the other features discussed above.

For those customers who would be migrating from Lexis Advance to Lexis+, Pfeiffer said the migration should be seamless. The product is built on the same core platform as Advance and was designed to be easy for anyone to use.

Bottom Line

Just as Thomson Reuters’ customers have a choice between classic Westlaw and the newer Westlaw Edge, LexisNexis customers will now be able to choose between Lexis Advance and Lexis+.

Pfeifer said that the development of Lexis+ was driven in part by customers’ pleas for legal research products that look more like consumer technology products, with better design and a better user experience.

It was also intended to address what Pfeifer described as the double-edged sword of machine learning technology in legal research — delivering smarter results but at the expense of user control. Lexis+ tries to balance advanced search with user control.

The overarching goal, Pfeifer said, was to create deep integration across the three products of research, Practical Guidance and brief analysis, to produce what he described as “a deeply complementary and integrated product experience.”

Having not yet been hands-on with Lexis+, I can say only that, based on the demonstration, it certainly has a compelling design and introduces a number of useful features. The platform will likely be much more compelling once it integrates other core LexisNexis products such as Lex Machina, CourtLink, and Law360.

All of that said, I have to wonder what customers will think, as they are asked to choose between competing legal research platforms from the same company (just as Thomson Reuters’ customers have had to do).

At no point during our demonstration did anyone describe this as the company’s next-generation research platform, but it sure seems that’s what it is. As such, it appears to be a strong start. The question for many customers will be whether and when to switch.

As I considered what to write this week, I considered not writing anything at all. Though I have a lot of things I would like to say and ideas to discuss, lately, I find myself struggling to do more than what is absolutely required on any given day. However, it strikes me that to publicly acknowledge this may be beneficial, so I write to you.

Without question 2020 has been the most stressful year of my life. I often wonder if this is due to the awareness that comes with growing older, or if there is truly something about 2020 that is vastly different. As the adage goes, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Still, I think there is something about life in 2020 America that feels weightier than years past. The combination of coronavirus threats, economic uncertainty, racial upheaval, and the mental and emotional impact of social distancing and physical isolation is not like the average hand of ups and downs we are dealt each year.

Moreover, as 2020 unfolds, it seems that each new incident we learn about is generally more upsetting and disturbing than the last. And the rapid rate at which the updates are unveiled is enough to push many people to the edge. Just this week alone we have seen: (1) America’s continual abdication of its role as an international leader with the announced departure from the World Health Organization; (2) a 50% increase in the number of U.S. coronavirus cases (to 3 million from 2 million) in one month, as many national and state leaders continue to downplay the severity of this crisis; and (3) rap artist Kanye West’s presidential campaign announcement. And, as I write this, it is only Wednesday.

Yet, amid all of this chaos and societal unrest, I have noticed on the news a prevailing attitude of “business as usual” where, despite acknowledgement from some leaders that the world is absolutely not operating in a normal, functional manner, there remain others who continue to ignore the impact that the outside world is having on their employees. In fact, there are even some political or corporate leaders who appear to be engaging in hyper-productivity, perhaps as a means to distract themselves or to quell the fears of economic instability.

If you rewind a few months to the initial onset of the pandemic, you may remember a large outpouring of compassion from businesses to consumers, companies to employees, even individuals to one another. “We’re in this together” was the message that resounded throughout the nation. But this was four months ago when there were hopes of a swift return to normalcy by summer. Fast forward to today, and you might agree that the compassion appears to be wearing off as impatience and general frustration bubble up to the surface.

For many in the workplace, the novelty of working from home is wearing off, parents (particularly working mothers) are reaching their tipping points, and we are seeing some business leaders begin to revert back to imposing pre-pandemic expectations of productivity and responsiveness on their colleagues. Of course, we all understand that work must continue to be done, and done well. As I have previously observed, the significance of retaining a job during an economic recession is not lost on anyone. But let us take a moment to sit with empathy and acknowledge that everyone is doing the best they can under very difficult circumstances.

I find it concerning that as 2020 continues to spiral, there appears to be a greater push to encourage the adoption of this “business as usual” mindset. I think it is fair to say that we are collectively exhausted by 2020 and ready to move to the next phase. But, our collective desire for something to be different is not always a sufficient precursor for instantaneous change. In life, we are not always able to have the control we desire. We cannot simply will away the ills of 2020 by ignoring reality. To operate under self-imposed fantasies is dangerous.

Having crossed the halfway mark of this year, I would like to encourage business leaders to take a temperature check of your teams. How you manage during this continuously difficult time will impact morale in both the short and long term. We can no longer afford to suffer under leadership that is lacking in courage and untethered from reality. Indeed, we all see the fruit America is reaping at the hands of a select group of individuals whose cowardice has previously prevented them from standing for what is right and true and good and just. The country is in a constant state of unrest and panic, and American morale is the lowest it has been in half a century. To be clear, I wholeheartedly believe that the current state of the country is a prelude to better times. America has long operated with an impressive amount of cognitive dissonance and now is undergoing a painful and therapeutic reckoning of what it has really been. But America is also wrestling to determine what it wants to be. As the citizenry reflects and decides the country’s fate, I am hopeful America will emerge from this season of trials with a renewed sense of identity and purpose, and an unwavering commitment to erase doublespeak and align actions with professed values.

But will the same be said for Biglaw, or will we exit out of this period only to return to office buildings, carrying on with “business as usual”? As many firms have embraced new operational methods, we have seen the implementation of a number of virtual events to foster connections: regular check-ins between partners and associates, firmwide talent shows, and team workout classes, just to name a few. These events are demonstrative of a tangible effort from Biglaw leaders to connect with their teams. I am encouraged, but this earnest effort at connection must continue — and not subside simply because the pandemic is lasting too long, and we want things to return to normal. We have a moment to meaningfully reconsider the status quo of the Biglaw attorney experience — for partners and associates alike. I think that the crux of meaningful change has started with firms’ underscoring everyone’s humanity — and the acknowledgment of this fundamental truth should continue. Even for the most motivated among us, at the end of the day, we are only human — a truth far too often trivialized. Continuing to acknowledge the difficult realities of this ongoing season will be a step toward improving the lives of all within the industry. Do not lose this opportunity. Continue to engage colleagues with benevolence, grace, and humility — in 2020 and beyond.

Lauren E. Skerrett is an associate attorney at a large, multinational firm. She graduated with a BA in philosophy from Washington and Lee University and obtained her JD from Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, along with an LLM from Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (“Sciences Po”). All views expressed belong to her and should not be attributed to any organization with which she is affiliated. You can reach her by email at lauren.skerrett@gmail.com.

How did COVID-19 disrupt the legal industry?  In short, it ushered in a new way of doing business.

Join us on July 17th at 1 p.m. ET / 10 a.m. PT and see how the legal profession rapidly evolved in response to the coronavirus pandemic, from client acquistion and new service offerings to mobilizing an entire firm to work remotely.

The landscape has changed quickly, addressing how firms engage virtually with clients and leverage new digital solutions to analyze the business and offer new types of services, while ensuring safeguards to data security and adhering to compliance best practices.

As a result, COVID-19 has brought digital transformation to the forefront of the legal industry, requiring law firms to optimize their business in a digital age, and deliver client services free of traditional brick-and-mortar office visits and paper files.

Key Objectives:

• Ways your law firm can achieve operational efficiency while remaining productive in a work from home environment.
• How to deliver a better client experience with virtual collaboration solutions
• How to differentiate and automate your firm when your practice management software, IT infrastructure, and support arrive in a single solution.

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