Category: News Feeds

You wouldn’t be able to guess from the hate mail I’ve received, but I offered a fairly sympathetic account of the St. Louis AR-15-waving couple, Mark and Patricia McCloskey. Their casualwear standoff got a proper lampooning and their decision to ratchet up the stakes with assault weapons was branded, at best, a bad look for the profession. But unlike a lot of articles musing that the couple could be criminally charged with assault, I threw water on that idea, noting that the protesters had entered a private road and the couple seemed to remain on their own property. I even applauded the couple for at least not escalating the situation by apparently bringing in the police, a decision potentially driven by Mark McCloskey’s representation of victims of police brutality.

In fact, the McCloskeys are adamant that they believe in the Black Lives Matter Movement:

“The most important thing for them is that their images (holding the guns) don’t become the basis for a rallying cry for people who oppose the Black Lives Matter message,” [their attorney Albert] Watkins said. “They want to make it really clear that they believe the Black Lives Matter message is important.”

Note that they can actually say the words “Black Lives Matter,” which places them light years ahead of many Biglaw firms and law schools. That’s where we are as a society — the people who brought guns to the protest are more willing to say “Black Lives Matter” than Michigan Law School.

But appearances matter and even if they didn’t intend it, based on my email over the last 24 hours, they’ve absolutely become a rallying cry for people who oppose the Black Lives Matter message. That sucks for them, but this does provide them with a great deal of power right now — far more than the power of an ArmaLite compensator stick — to yank the rug out from the people trying to make them heroes for all the wrong reasons. It’s the kind of turnabout that could really resonate in the social media era. Based on their statement, they might be ready to use that power.

However, let’s take a quick second to check out their attorney, Albert Watkins. Watkins is very much a media relations “fixer” and he’s proud of it. He’s also a pretty funny writer. On the other hand, he’s a conservative media personality in his own right, a curious pick for a couple trying to distance themselves from the people who would make them posterchildren for conservative grievances. Lawyers can certainly take positions contrary to their personal worldview, but if the goal is to credibly distance oneself from the “right-wing rallying cry” image, this might not be the right hire.

His bio includes descriptions of a number of big wins, but all of them include those little details that make you wonder, “Why did he mention that?” Like including “Dominican-born” to describe the former league MVP and entirely recognizable Albert Pujols. Or focusing on a school sexual misconduct claim he beat by focusing on how he defended the “white” principal against “African-American” students. It’s all so unnecessary to describing the cases and comes across to the reader as if he’s pitching to people who want to frame their otherwise standard legal disputes as racial and immigration conflicts — which seems contrary to the McCloskey goal. Maybe that’s not Watkins’s intention, but legal writing is all about eliminating unnecessary words and one would be hard-pressed to see why “Dominican-born” adds anything to the Pujols story.

Then there’s this story that Watkins includes in his bio:

In Hammon v. Harris, Watkins garnered the first verdict of its kind against a young female who falsely accused a policeman of engaging in sexual relations and snorting cocaine with a female patron of a restaurant at which the policeman was working a security shift. When the defendant would not appear for her deposition, Watkins procured an order mandating the woman be brought into custody and held in jail pending her deposition. During the ensuing video deposition, Watkins swiftly got the woman to confess and admit the allegations were false. The video deposition swiftly became an internet sensation. A six-figure judgment was entered in favor of the policeman. The woman committed suicide thereafter.

What?!? Even if a woman’s death didn’t shame Watkins out of including the story in his bio — which it should have! — including the fact as a macabre lagniappe is flat-out horrifying. It reads as if his client pitch is “hiring me could kill your accuser,” which may bring people in the door but plays to a vindictiveness that the whole justice system is designed to elevate people beyond.

Watkins is very good at what he does and he’s very proud of his ability to handle media flaps and that’s exactly what the McCloskeys have landed themselves in. Especially with some outlets taking the bold leap to accusing them of criminality, but sometimes even the best instrument is the wrong tool for the job.

Like, say, an AR-15 for telling people walking down the street to keep moving.

Earlier: St. Louis Lawyers Wave AR-15 At Protesters Like Totally Normal, Totally Not Bonkers People
Now THIS Is a Great Settlement Offer Letter

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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.

In 2015, a group called the National African American Gun Association formed with the intention to “promote self-protection.” Since the 2016 election, this organization has seen its membership soar, in some measure due to the concern (I would argue the fact) that the president of the United Sates is a racist who is emboldening racism in our society. The more black Americans embrace or utilize their Second Amendment rights in public, however, the more you see alarm being expressed by people who are traditionally “pro-gun.”

The most recent example came from Sen. Kelly Loeffler. Loeffler recently described Americans who were lawfully, and peacefully, carrying weapons as “totally unacceptable” and an example of “mob rule.” As Scott Shackford points out in his piece in Reason, it is not against the law to carry guns openly in public in Georgia, where Loeffler serves as a senator. In fact, Loeffler never accuses the armed individuals of breaking any laws, and in the very recent past, she has been an outspoken proponent of gun rights and expressed the need to “protect and defend” the Second Amendment. So, asks Shackford, “[w]hat could possibly make a pro-gun-rights senator suddenly take such a dim view of citizens’ rights to bear arms?” The only logical, and rather obvious answer is that in Georgia, the people legally carrying guns in public happened to be black.

It is simply stunning how the narrative around the right to bear arms can still change today, on national television no less, depending on the race of the gun owner. For example, when it was white armed Americans in Michigan who were protesting in their state capitol building, the president offered praise and a message of support. Yet, when the group is Black Lives Matter, even unarmed protests are described by this same president as “hate coming down the street.” Again, the inference for why there is such a difference in reaction between the two protests is absurdly obvious.

One of the most common narratives coming from “pro-gun” rights groups is that the only way to stop a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun. Although I happen to agree, it must also be acknowledged that this narrative can backfire when it’s a good black man with a gun stopping a bad guy trying to harm others. However, as activist Michael Render (otherwise known as Killer Mike) recently argued, such instances of injustice should not dissuade black people from owning guns. In fact, according to Render, it should encourage legal ownership in order to normalize it and to “defend what you care about.” Moreover, gun ownership is a right and, to Render, it is imperative that black Americans embrace all of their rights to use like “tools in a toolbox.”

Of course, gun ownership being viewed wildly different depending on the race of the owner is nothing new. Irrational and downright bigoted fears of black Americans possessing arms to defend themselves was the primary cause of this country’s first gun control laws. Laws, it should be said, that are not applied evenly to this day. Which is why I have argued that gun laws are, as a general matter, destructive, ineffective, and unnecessary.

The good news is that American views on race are increasingly improving, and hopefully, normalization of black gun ownership can inevitably increase. But as Loeffler and the president often demonstrate, there is still a lot of work to be done in regard to viewing black gun ownership in a positive light, or even just a neutral light.

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Tyler Broker’s work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review, the Albany Law Review, and is forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review. Feel free to email him or follow him on Twitter to discuss his column.

The U.S. government may have claimed victory over the coronavirus, but the public health crisis is far from over. Biglaw firms that announced austerity measures are now rethinking them, and one firm has decide to pull the plug on legal professionals whose careers were on life support.

Two months ago, Katten Muchin — a firm that was recently ranked #63 on the Am Law 100 with a 5.5 percent increase in revenue to $669,709,000 and a 10 percent increase in profits per partner to more than $1.8 million — put all of its employees’ salaries on the chopping block while furloughing others, including business administration professionals and staff attorneys. According to a Katten spokesperson, some of those furloughs will now become permanent, but none of the layoffs, slated to begin August 1, will affect attorneys at any level across the firm.

Why does the firm see the need for layoffs now? Because of the success of its remote work environment. Here’s a statement from Katten:

Given this [the success of remote working on workflow] and the realization that our administrative needs are fully supported through new approaches we’ve taken that better fit the remote work model, we have determined that it is in the best interest of the firm to permanently separate from some of our currently furloughed employees as of the end of July. We deeply appreciate the dedication and contributions of these members of the Katten community. This was not an easy decision, but it was necessary in light of the ongoing crisis and our current and anticipated staffing needs.

The firm will be offering those impacted by the layoffs one week of pay for each year they’ve been at the firm, with a minimum payout of eight weeks, and those payments will be structured to “maximize earning potential” on top of the unemployment insurance they’re already receiving. Those who are about to be laid off will also have health insurance coverage made available to them through the end of the year, at no additional cost. Last, but not least, the firm will offer their soon-to-be-former staff members employment search assistance at no cost.

As for other employees at the firm, there’s no end in sight for the salary cuts that were announced on April 29. If you recall, those cuts were up to 20 percent for both business professionals and attorneys who make over $100,000. Equity partners who suspended their monthly draws in April and May received a payout in June, but at a 25 percent reduction from previous levels.

Will this be the last round of austerity measures we’ll see from Katten? A firm spokesperson said commenting on that would be “premature.” Yikes.

Best of luck to all those who are affected by the layoffs at Katten Muchin.

If your firm or organization is slashing salaries, closing its doors, or reducing the ranks of its lawyers or staff, whether through open layoffs, stealth layoffs, or voluntary buyouts, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Our vast network of tipsters is part of what makes Above the Law thrive. You can email us or text us (646-820-8477).

If you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Layoff Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the layoff alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each layoff, salary cut, or furlough announcement that we publish.

Earlier: Am Law 100 Firm Slashes Salaries, Furloughs Staff Lawyers And Staff

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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.

The white dudes over at the Federal Reserve have finished crunching the numbers from this year’s stress tests they insisted on administering, and they’ve got good news and bad news.

The Federal Reserve on Thursday said a prolonged economic downturn could saddle the nation’s biggest banks with up to $700 billion in losses on soured loans….

Banks, which will announce their dividend plans for next quarter as soon as Monday, won’t be able to make payouts that are greater than their average quarterly profit from the four most recent quarters.

The Fed also barred them from buying back shares in the third quarter.

* A Long Island gym owner is planning on filing a lawsuit over New York’s plans to delay the reopening of gyms. Guess they call it “Strong” Island for a reason… [Long Island Press]

* Pinterest has hired outside counsel to investigate allegations of a hostile work environment. [Bloomberg]

* The Michigan Attorney General is suing Exxon Mobil and other energy companies over alleged culpability with climate change. [NPR]

Booz Allen has been hit with a sex discrimination and retaliation lawsuit by a former employee. [Bloomberg]

* A New York lawyer who lied about his grandfather’s death to miss a court date and is one of the most disciplined lawyers in the Southern District of New York has been sanctioned $104,000 for conduct in a copyright case. This guy might make a good Above the Law lawyer of the year candidate…[New York Daily News]

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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.

Flatten the Research Curve

Flatten the Research Curve

Wolters Kluwer

Drugmaker Regeneron Pharmaceuticals has said it will “vigorously” defend against allegations by the Department of Justice that it paid kickbacks through a foundation in connection with a drug it markets for macular degeneration in order to cover Medicare beneficiaries’ copays.

On Wednesday, the U.S. district attorney for Massachusetts filed suit against the Tarrytown, New York-based company, alleging that it paid tens of millions of dollars worth of kickbacks for the drug, Eylea (aflibercept), by using a foundation as a conduit to cover copays for the drug. The actions that are alleged would illegal under the Anti-Kickback Statute, which forbids drugmakers from offering or paying any kind of remuneration in order to induce Medicare patients to purchase its drugs.

Regeneron is one of several companies that received subpoenas alleging similar kickback schemes in 2017, along with Biogen, Gilead Sciences, Johnson & Johnson, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Horizon Pharmaceuticals and others.

“According to the allegations in today’s complaint, Regeneron funneled tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks through a third-party foundation to ensure that few Medicare patients paid a copay on Eylea and that physicians who prescribed and purchased the drug did not have to collect Medicare copays from their patients,” U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said in a statement. “Regeneron allegedly paid these substantial sums only after confirming that the foundation needed the money to cover copays only for Eylea and not for competing drugs, and that the company’s payments would generate a handsome return on investment, or ‘ROI,’ in the form of Medicare payments for Eylea.”

In response, the drugmaker said the suit had “no merit” and called it “misguided.”

It countered that what the district attorney’s complaint alleges were in fact charitable donations made in 2013 and 2014 that were made in accordance with the law, specifically for poor elderly patients with wet age-related macular degeneration.

“It is unfortunate that the government chose to bring these baseless allegations related to our 2013 and early 2014 patient assistance donations at a time when Regeneron employees have been coming to work in the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic with the goal of providing an effective treatment,” Regeneron general counsel Joseph LaRosa said in a statement. “We look forward to having our case heard and will file a motion to dismiss.”

Photo: Hailshadow, Getty Images

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

According to data collected by the 2020 NLJ 500 ranking, which top 500 law firm lost the greatest number of attorneys from 2018 to 2019?

Hint: 109 lawyers left this firm last year.

See the answer on the next page.

Artificial intelligence software developed to help litigation attorneys get more quickly to the core of a case is now showing promise in helping medical researchers fast-track their inquiries into how to treat COVID-19.

At the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, e-discovery pioneers Maura R. Grossman and Gordon V. Cormack have found a new use for machine-learning technology they developed to help attorneys more quickly sift through large collections of discovery documents — helping medical staff more quickly search massive databases of COVID-related clinical studies.

Meanwhile, data scientists and product managers at e-discovery company Relativity are employing several of their technology tools for the similar purpose of helping medical researchers more quickly review data sets of journal articles and medical literature with the goal of better equipping them to battle COVID-19.

In the Waterloo case, Grossman and Cormack are well known in the e-discovery field for their development of a technology-assisted review tool that uses a continuous active learning protocol. Of the various TAR or predictive coding tools on the market, theirs has been scientifically demonstrated to deliver the best results.

When the coronavirus crisis hit, Grossman, formerly e-discovery counsel at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York and now research professor and director of the Women in Science Program in the school of computer science at Waterloo, and Cormack, professor at the computer science school, had already been dabbling in the use of TAR to research health topics, she told me recently.

They saw a process that had many parallels to law, in that expensive medical researchers were spending large amounts of time reviewing hundreds or thousands of clinical studies, just as expensive lawyers spend large amounts of time reviewing documents in discovery.

Seeing an opportunity to help, they began working with the knowledge synthesis team at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, on behalf of the Canadian Frailty Network and Health Canada, to automate literature searches related to COVID-19.

The goal, as described in an article posted by the computer science school, was to help the team quickly identify clinical studies that have evaluated the effective and safety of various measures to keep nursing facilities safe, as well as treatments for patients with COVID-19.

Using their CAL technology, Grossman and Cormack have been able to help St. Michael’s researchers complete in two weeks reviews that would typically take a year or more.

“Searching and finding studies for systematic reviews has traditionally been a time-consuming and laborious process that uses keyword search, followed by manual screening of abstracts, and finally full papers,” Grossman said in the article. “We are instead training a machine learning algorithm to perform the initial steps in this task.”

Analyzing COVID-19 Data

At e-discovery company Relativity, data scientists and product managers likewise saw a role for their technology and skills in helping in the fight against COVID-19. Recently, I discussed Relativity’s response with Rebecca BurWei, senior data scientist; Andrea Beckman, director of product management; and Trish Gleason, product manager.

They were prompted to act after the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a massive dataset of COVID-19 medical research and issued a call to action to the tech community to develop text- and data-mining techniques to help scientists use the data to answer high-priority questions about COVID-19.

The tech community was encouraged to submit tools through Kaggle, a machine learning and data science community owned by Google Cloud, so that the tools would be openly available for researchers anywhere in the world. Kaggle sweetened the request with a $1,000 award for the tool that best met the project criteria.

Relativity responded using its existing AI and text-mining tools. Specifically, it offered four ways in which its technology could assist in facilitating the review of the data:

Elimination of duplicates. Deduplication is a task familiar to any e-discovery attorney, eliminating duplicate and redundant copies of email messages and other documents, in order to enhance the effectiveness of the AI software. When Relativity staff learned from the Kaggle forum that the COVID-19 researchers were seeing the same articles come up repeatedly, they saw a role for their deduplication technology. Using Relativity’s Textual Near Duplicates and Repeated Content Identification tools, they reviewed the dataset and identified over 4,000 duplicate articles and a handful of commonly repeated phrases.

Tagging studies by language. Because the dataset included literature from throughout the world, articles were in many languages. Relativity used its Language Identification tool, which can identify text from 100 languages, and was able to tag over 52,000 COVID-19 journal articles by the language in which they were written. Relativity provided this language-tagged dataset to the Kaggle community, earning praise from a Kaggle community leader for having created a “great dataset.”

Better keyword search of risk factors. Relativity’s Conceptual Analytics uses a machine learning methodology called latent semantic analysis to extract insights and patterns from document data. Based on this technology, Relativity used keyword expansion to find concepts related to cancer and chronic respiratory diseases as risk factors for COVID-19. With those concepts, it was able to find 98 relevant journal articles that would otherwise have been missed.

Identifying pediatric patients. A goal of the Kaggle community’s AI-powered literature review was to auto-fill summaries of COVID-19 journal articles, so that public health experts could decide quickly whether they needed to read the full article. Relativity contributed to this project by identifying and summarizing Spanish journal articles that involved asymptomatic pediatric patients.

Relativity’s data scientists first used regular expression searches to filter down to a small number of relevant articles, then they experimented with new AI techniques not currently available in the e-discovery product, such as modern vectorizers and question-answer techniques, to automatically extract the ages of the study participants.

Rewarding Use Of Tech

For Grossman and Cormack at Waterloo and the product team at Relativity, using their e-discovery skills to help with COVID-19 research has been rewarding.

“What was most rewarding for me was the community angle and being able to help out during this crisis,” said Relativity’s Andrea Beckman. “We have a strong community in e-discovery, but here we got to join a different group and be part of everybody coming together in tackling a critical challenge.”

Grossman drew a contrast with the legal profession’s slow pace of adoption of cutting-edge AI technology such as TAR, due in part to its fear of losing the billable hour.

“Here we’re in an area where the incentives are exactly the opposite, where there is receptiveness to something that will cut time and cut costs,” she said. “It’s refreshing to work in an area where the reception capacity and adoption rate is very different.”

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Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

2020 is a weird year. I certainly never imaged a chair of a Biglaw firm sending out a reminder to all U.S. employees that um, yes, you really do need to hit your billable hours. Usually that “billables before all else” mentality is hardwired into Biglaw, but, like I said, this is a weird year.

Anyway, McDermott Will & Emery Chair Ira Coleman sent out an email letting everyone know that the firm’s planned reopening of their offices, scheduled for post July 4th, was not going to happen. What with the American response to COVID-19 being a terrifying hodgepodge that has, in various jurisdictions, prioritized economy over health leading to a dangerous spike across the country. But then Coleman points out that yeah, things are tough right now but we really have to get back to billing:

However, now that we’ve moved beyond the initial period of disruption, we need to focus on picking up our stride. Schedules from home can be erratic as our family and work responsibilities are blended more than ever, but we must continue to dig deep to hit our hours, reach out to clients (even if just to check in), help out colleagues, engage in BD or marketing efforts, or participate in pro bono projects. These next few months will be critical in helping us bounce forward and accelerate through this crisis, so let’s make them count.

We know that many are taking some well-deserved days off over the nest few weeks — and that’s great. We strongly encourage everyone to make time to rest and recharge so we can surge ahead, This is what star athletes do, and it’s a lesson we can all heed to help our team reach peak performance. It’s not that we won’t stumble, but we will always pick ourselves up, rally together and emerge even stronger.

And Coleman deserves some credit — other folks in Biglaw have made a similar point without the compassion. His email at least recognizes some of the reasons folks may not be billing with the same gusto as in the before-times. But the message remains… you’d best get back to billing. This is the new normal and your hours need to reflect that.

Read Coleman’s full email below.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).