Category: News Feeds

After great reflection and study, I am writing to inform you that all of our Fall 2020 classes will be conducted remotely. …

[T]he best course—for the health of those in our community and for our educational program—is to have the Fall semester’s classes be online. Our top priority is protecting the health of our students, staff, and faculty. At the same time, we want to do what is best educationally for our students. …

I am convinced we can provide an excellent education via remote learning this semester and frankly a better education than we can through a limited number of in-person classes taught in a hybrid fashion. I also believe it is the safest course for the health of our faculty, staff, and students.

— Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of UC Berkeley School of Law, explaining in a letter to the law school community all of the reasons why the Fall 2020 semester would be held remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Chemerinsky noted that there were far too many “obstacles to in-person classes” to overcome for the upcoming semester to be held in even a hybrid fashion. Like Harvard, the first law school to announce a fully remote Fall 2020 semester, Berkeley Law will be returning to its traditional grading system. There’s no word yet on whether Berkeley’s tuition structure will change due to holding online classes. Harvard is being sued over its “outrageous tuition” for remote classes.

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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.

In 2015, the American Museum of Tort Law opened its doors, making it the first and only museum dedicated to a practice area within the legal profession. Championed by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, the museum is a veritable personal injury house of horrors, meant to educate the public about all of the benefits of tort law and trial by jury. From exhibits on motor vehicle accidents and defective products to medical malpractice and environmental disasters, this museum has it all.

Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 outbreak that has created a whole new swath of tort claims, the museum has closed for a time, but its website is open, where visitors can take virtual tours and see and read about each case on display. Because the museum is now online, Richard L. Newman, its executive director, is interested in adding supplemental content in video form.

He’s looking for tort law scholars — professors, judges, practitioners — to give short presentations (filmed on Zoom) about the significance of the cases listed below.

• Brown v. Kendall (1850)
• Bryne v. Boadle (England, 1863)
• Sioux City & Pacific Railroad Co. v. Stout (1874)
• MacPherson v. Buick (1916)
• T.J. Hooper et al. v. Northern Barge Corp. et al (1932)
• U.S. v. Carroll Towing Co. (1947)
• Greenman v. Yuba Power Products (1963)
• Canterbury v. Spence (1972)
• Hoffman v. Jones (1973)
• Tarasoff v. Regents (1976)
• Daubert v. Merrell Dow (1993)
• Kline v. 1500 Massachusetts Avenue Apt. Corp. (1970)
• Donald v. United Klans of America (1987)
• McCormack v. Hankscraft Co., Inc. (1967)
• Carol Burnett v. National Enquirer, Inc. (1983)
• Galella v. Onassis (1973)
• Anderson v. Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (1996)
• Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Company (1981)
• Liebeck v. McDonald’s (1994)
• Nader v. General Motors Corp. (1970)
• Cipollone v. Liggett Group, 1992 & Master Settlement Agreement (1998)
• United Novelty Co. v. Daniels (1949)
• Borel v. Fibreboard Paper Products Corp. (1973)

Speakers in these supplemental videos will identify themselves by name and institution, state the name and date of the case, give a summary of the salient facts, and then give a brief explanation of why the case is significant.

If you’re interested in giving your expert assistance to the American Museum of Tort Law, please click here to get in touch with Richard Newman. Thanks!

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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.

“Hey, Legal … quick question.”

– How much can the company pay an employee to get her girlfriend’s name tattooed on her neck?*

– What are the laws around having a snake sleep in an actor’s bed?*

– Is poop performance art legal?*

Legal Madness is currently collecting one-sentence “quick questions.” You know the kind. One casual sentence from a colleague or client, which is surprising, maddening, or leads an attorney down a winding path that likely includes a deep philosophical inquiry into certain life choices.

Submit via the anonymous form at www.legalmadness.party.

What is Legal Madness? Last year, NYU Law School’s Engelberg Center and Sarah Feingold gathered anonymous stories of in-house counsel, turned the tales into scripts, and hired actors to perform the monologues on stage. The first Legal Madness was a sold-out theatrical event that took place in New York City.

* Yes, these are actual questions inspired by a previous Legal Madness submission (and no need to provide answers to the questions).

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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.

The Justice Department needs to stop trying to send Rodney and Ronald Mack back to federal prison for another decade. The brothers have already served 20 years and were released late last year.

I first met the Mack brothers last December in Washington, D.C. The organization I run invited them — and others who had been released early from prison because of reforms in the First Step Act — to meet and thank members of Congress and White House officials who championed that legislation. The Macks had only been out of prison for a few weeks when they, some family members, and two former co-defendants who also were granted early release, traveled to Washington to join us.

More than two decades ago, the Macks went to prison for a drug conspiracy involving crack cocaine. Because of the racially discriminatory disparity between crack and powder cocaine-related sentences, the brothers were sentenced to life in prison. (A change in the sentencing guidelines later reduced their sentences to 30 years.) In 2010, Congress reduced the crack-powder disparity, but didn’t make the change retroactive. The First Step Act finally corrected that injustice in 2018, and the Macks (and more than 2,000 others) finally got justice and were released.

When they came to Washington, Rodney and Ronald were still figuring out how to use their new smartphones, but they sure knew how to use the camera function. They wanted pictures of everything and everyone. They laughed easily. They seemed happy and humbled to be in the nation’s capital and to have the chance to meet the political leaders who made it possible.

Many of our meetings on Capitol Hill were emotional. Offices would turn quiet as former prisoners and their family members choked back tears while thanking lawmakers for giving them a second chance. More than a couple members of Congress were moved to tears, too. For some of them, it was a rare opportunity to come face to face with good people that our justice system nearly threw away.

Then insanity struck. Halfway through our two days of meetings, the Mack brothers found me as our group was eating lunch in an empty congressional hearing room. They looked stricken. They had just received a phone call from their lawyer, who informed them that the U.S. Attorney planned to appeal their release. The U.S. Attorney was arguing that they didn’t qualify for relief under the First Step Act because they had also been convicted of dealing powder cocaine, and those penalties hadn’t changed.

The Macks’ judge, the same one who sentenced them to life in 2002, rejected that argument. She said the verdict sheet made clear that the crack charges were what determined their sentence. Moreover, she lavished praise on the Macks and their co-defendants for their behavior while in prison, which included earning multiple educational degrees and almost no disciplinary infractions.

On the last day to appeal, as the Macks visited Washington, the Justice Department formally announced its intent to send them back to prison for another decade. I told Rodney and Ronald that the government had appealed other First Step Act releases and lost almost all of them. In some cases, the government notified the court of its intention to appeal and then later declined to move forward. We hoped that is what would happen with the Macks, who did their best to enjoy the rest of their trip.

Fast forward from last December and the Justice Department is still moving forward with its appeal. Surely Attorney General Bill Barr knows that now is not the time to be sending anyone to our federal prisons unless it’s absolutely necessary. Approximately 7,000 prisoners and staff have tested positive for COVID-19, and, as of this writing, 1,500 people are still fighting it and 87 have died. Barr clearly knows the risks because he has authorized more than 3,000 people to move to home confinement to reduce the disease’s spread.

Barr also must be aware that Congress and President Donald Trump agreed to reduce crack-related sentences retroactively because the old crack-powder disparity was one of the most indefensibly discriminatory features of a justice system that many black Americans were protesting since long before George Floyd was killed. The Macks, their co-defendants, and tens of thousands of mostly black Americans already served far more time than was necessary for their crimes.

These brothers do not need to spend another day in prison, let alone another decade. They have paid their debt to society. After seven months of reconnecting with their families, finding work, and reintegrating into society, it would be cruel to send them back to prison. And it would be useless from a public safety perspective.

This Justice Department said justice required dropping charges against Michael Flynn. If that is so, then justice is screaming out to leave Rodney and Ronald Mack alone.

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Kevin Ring is a former Capitol Hill staffer, Biglaw partner, and federal lobbyist. He is currently the president of FAMM, a nonprofit, nonpartisan criminal justice reform advocacy group. Back when ATL still had comments, “FREE KEVIN RING” was briefly a meme. You can follow him on Twitter @KevinARing.

Okay friends, this story is a bumpy ride, but it ends with a scorched earth letter of resignation, so you know it’s going to be worth it.

So, here’s what you need to know. In the early days of COVID-19, Harris County, Texas district attorney Kim Ogg was criticized for being slow to respond to the pandemic and have her office work remotely and adopt accommodations that would, in short order, become commonplace. But the office did do something in preparation for the coronavirus. As Texas Monthly reports, a division chief emailed a spreadsheet titled “Employees Seriously Ill or Who Have Passed Away Due to COVID-19.” And yeah, that so-called “death chart” didn’t go over too well:

The “death chart,” as it came to be known, was just a template—no names were listed—but it prompted gallows humor among the prosecutors who received it. Were they expected to report their own deaths to the district attorney? One of them took a photo of the spreadsheet with a personal phone and texted it to six fellow prosecutors, some of whom were in different divisions and hadn’t yet seen the document. The photo ended up in the possession of Houston defense attorney Ed McClees, a former prosecutor in the DA’s office who made his name prosecuting organized crime and fraud before moving to criminal defense. McClees had become one of Ogg’s most vocal critics on social media but maintains good relationships with many prosecutors in the office. He thought the spreadsheet was amusing and posted it on his personal Facebook page.

Once the death chart went public, that sparked what some have called a “witch hunt” (a three-week long investigation — amid a pandemic, no less) to find exactly who leaked the death chart. Texas Monthly says the investigation entailed interviews with the seven assistant district attorneys who were the initial recipients of the spreadsheet and demands for their work computers, work phone as well as their personal phones. As you might imagine, the ADAs balked at sharing their personal phones with their employer.

McClees even came forward with a statement to the office that he had not received the email from the seven under investigation:

“I never had the goal of putting anyone in an embarrassing situation—quite the opposite,” McClees recently told Texas Monthly. “I certainly didn’t think the office would conduct a Stalin-style purge to try to find out who took a picture and who or who did not send what ultimately is a public document and is subject to public disclosure anyway.”

Another employee (outside the initial seven recipients) confessed to sending the chart outside of the office (and was promptly fired for her honesty). Despite this, the seven ADAs received letters of reprimand, which were placed in their personal files, for not allowing their employer to have access to their personal phones:

“The failure by all of the involved office prosecutors to allow examination of their personal phones frustrated the investigation and made it impossible to validate any of the prosecutors’ statements. All of the ADAs involved were insubordinate.”

A spokesperson for the district attorney’s office, said of Texas Monthly’s report, “The narrative you shared from partisan sources is incomplete, misleading, and in some instances, outright false; we have no further comment.”

But what is clear, is that one of the ADAs investigated, Cheryl Williamson Chapell, had quite enough of Ogg’s tactics and resigned from her position.  And yeah, this is the resignation letter you have to read. Williamson Chapell says of the investigation into the leaked email, “Your paranoia regarding an innocuous message and blatant disrespect for your employees exposes your true character.” She goes on accuse Ogg of using the murder of George Floyd to advance her career, “At a time when disparities in the criminal justice system are at the forefront of the world’s conscience, you used your office and employees as instruments of unwarranted oppression in a transparent effort to heighten your political stature.”

And it gets even better:

And just last night, you implicitly threatened your attorneys if they chose not to attend a “volunteer” voter registration drive at which you will appear — undoubtedly in a political capacity. Your repeated misused of county resources and inaction in response to extraordinary worldwide crises demonstrates a lack of professionalism and leadership, and shows what is truly important to you. Indeed, you seem to have emboldened dishonesty. I simply cannot work for you any longer.

Boom.

As the criminally underrated Don’t Trust the B– in Apt. 23 noted, “You have to walk away from the past in slow motion as it explodes behind you like in a John Woo movie.”

You can read the entire letter 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).

The question was, “Just to pick one statistic, a black man in the United States, statistically, is far more likely to be shot by a police officer than someone of a different race. Why do you think that is?”

And the answer?

Well, there are 8,000 Blacks who are killed every year. Eighty-five percent of them are killed by gunshots. Virtually all of those are Blacks on Blacks. I think that there are a number of the statistics on police shootings of unarmed, unarmed individuals are not skewed toward the African American. There are many whites who are shot unarmed by police.

Police brutality is caused by Black-on-Black crime, says our distinguished Attorney General in an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep. What an extremely nuanced take!

Let’s go out on a limb and speculate that our fearless Attorney General watches a lot of Fox News. Only a person well-ensconced in Rupert Murdoch’s White Grievance Ecosphere would fail to realize that answer falls squarely into the category of “Racist Sh*t You Do Not Say.”

There’s also the little matter of it being untrue. As The Washington Post points out, African Americans “account for less than 13 percent of the U.S. population, but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans.” And if possession of a weapon is legal for white people, then it’s legal for Black people, and cannot be used to justify disparate levels of police violence.

In fact, the whole interview was full of recycled nonsense from Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. Asked about the Justice Department’s multiple statements blaming Antifa for organizing the protests when no arrestees have been connected to the group (because it’s not a group!), Barr insisted that it was simply obvious from watching protest video.

You don’t see agitators in hoodies with earpieces, you know, distributing things to throw and things like that? You don’t see that? You don’t see people walking through districts with high-end stores, methodically breaking out the windows with sledgehammers or skateboards? Who are they?

Earpieces? Does he mean AirPods? More to the point, if he doesn’t know who these purported skateboarders are, how does he know they’re antifa?

He just does, okay? The same way he knows racism is totally over, since we elected a Black president and African Americans were really starting to “participat[e] in the economy.” Which couldn’t possibly be an invocation of racist tropes about lazy welfare queens, could it?

I mean, we elected Barack Obama as president. I think the economy was becoming more inclusive. And I think Blacks were participating more in the economy and at record numbers. But I do think that there are some impediments to the advancement of African Americans in society. The principal, one of the principal ones, not the principal one, is that they are being deprived of equal opportunity to attend good schools. And that’s, I think that’s one of the civil rights issues of our time. I think that they should we should essentially give these inner-city families the buying power to send their kids wherever they want to send them.

Racism would just go away and the playing field would be level if “Blacks” could just get their kids into charter schools. Take it from a 70-year-old white shoe lawyer with an Ivy League education, it’s “one of the civil rights issues of our times!”

Barr staunchly defended his intercession to reduce punishment for Trump’s allies Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Michael Cohen.

“I mean, do you think someone, do you think a 68-year-old man, with no prior criminal history record, should have gone to prison for a decade for what happened?” the author of “The Case for More Incarceration” said of Roger Stone, who was convicted by a jury on seven counts of lying to congress, obstruction, and witness intimidation.

Barr had thoughts on the Founding Fathers: “They were Christians and so if you’re talking about them, they were Christians.” (They weren’t.)

Also, the Attorney General has proof that mail-in balloting, which was the pre-COVID standard for the 7 percent of Americans living in Colorado, Utah, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii, is inherently dangerous: “I know people move, a very high percentage in the United States, people move all the time. And I also know that you can easily take things out of mailboxes.”

Will Barr be dropping the Durham report about unmasking “abuses” and the supposedly defective predicate of the “Russia hoax” investigation as an October surprise during the election?

Well, as I’ve said a few times, no one under investigation in the Durham matter is running for president. And I’ve said publicly that neither President Obama or Vice President Biden are under investigation. And I’ve also said I’m committed to having the American people have a free choice in this election between the candidates and I don’t want the Department of Justice to be interfering in that.

So, that’s a “yes.” Quite a credit to the profession, eh?

Transcript: NPR’s Full Interview With Attorney General William Barr [NPR]

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

The title really says it all. We’d heard about the Florida judge who had to sternly remind attorneys to dress up for Zoom hearings and claimed to have seen attorneys appear from under the covers and wearing a cover-up poolside, but frankly we didn’t believe it was really as bad as the judge made it out to be. Honestly we figured someone showed up without a properly styled coif and the judge let the slippery slope take over because there’s no way attorneys would really show up to what qualifies as open court in a state of undress. We’re professionals here.

We were wrong.

During a recent California court hearing, viewers were treated to this split screen:

Alright…

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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.

COVID-19 and the resulting stay-at-home orders put an unexpected halt to hiring at many law firms and in a number of practice areas. However, not all firms and practice areas put lateral hiring on hold.

Take the Boston market, where a handful of firms are still pushing full-force ahead. And even among those that have slowed or ceased associate hiring, most are still hiring at the partner level. We will take a look at the numbers for the Boston lateral market now that we are three months into this unchartered pandemic era to see more concretely where lateral hiring is headed.

Associate Hiring: An Overview

On the associate hiring side, firms generally fall into one of three categories:

1. The firm conducted layoffs or furloughs and/or reduced associate salaries. If they are hiring at all, they are hiring only extremely selectively in COVID-specific practice areas, such as bankruptcy and restructuring, insurance coverage litigation, general litigation, labor and employment, and healthcare law.
2. The firm avoided layoffs and salary cuts but is playing it very safe. They are hiring only for COVID-specific practice areas.
3. The firm is busier than ever and confident as to its financial stability. The firm recognizes that this uncertain time offers a unique opportunity to seek out top talent with less competition than usual from other firms. They are moving forward with pre-COVID hiring needs, conducting Zoom interviews and even onboarding remotely. But even these firms are less likely right now to consider more “opportunistic” résumés, i.e., for practices or seniorities not covered by a concrete job opening.

In Boston, there are currently active associate openings primarily for the following practice areas: restructuring, general finance, borrower-side debt finance, general corporate/private equity, life sciences transactional, patent litigation, patent prosecution, insurance/reinsurance and insurance coverage litigation, cybersecurity and privacy, tax, and healthcare. These are all openings that have been posted since March 15^th.

Partner Hiring: An Overview

Economic ups and downs may force firms to reconsider their short- and medium-term strategic needs. So-called COVID-related practices may be more in demand these days. But given the right book of business, law firms will consider partners in any economy if that partner’s practice fits the firm’s strategic needs. Partners look to move in good economies and bad. Billing rate pressures are in fact driving many partners to consider a move these days to a firm where there is more rate flexibility. The lateral partner market is historically much stronger than the associate market during recessions. And our experience to date shows this trend is holding true in this COVID-19 era. 

Partner and Associate Hiring: The Numbers

Let’s take a look at the numbers^[1] to get a clearer idea of what is happening in the current Boston legal market:

• Between March 15, 2020 and June 15, 2020, a total of 33 partners and 62 associates were hired into Boston firms. (The numbers show 22 partners and 39 associates for this time period if we’re looking only at Am Law 200 firms.)

Let’s look at the top three practice areas for lateral hiring:

• Corporate: there were a total of 10 partners and 11 associates hired into Boston firms’ corporate groups between March 15, 2020 and June 15, 2020.
• Litigation: there were a total of 11 partners and 23 associates hired into Boston firms’ litigation groups between March 15, 2020 and June 15, 2020.
• Intellectual Property: there were a total of 5 partners and 11 associates hired into Boston firms’ IP groups between March 15, 2020 and June 15, 2020.

What does this all mean? Not all that much unless we compare it to the same period last year:

• Between March 15, 2019 and June 15, 2019, a total of 29 partners and 102 associates were hired into Boston firms. Of these hires, 5 partners and 30 associates were in corporate, 10 partners and 28 associates were in litigation, and 4 partners and 17 associates were in IP.

So what does this tell us? It tells me that the associate hiring market has slowed significantly, down 39 percent over the same period last year, but the lateral partner market is still strong.

Associate Hiring: New Searches

Hires made between March 15 and June 15 were for the most part already in process before March 15, before we understood the consequences of COVID-19 for the economy. What about new associate job postings?

New associate job postings in Boston (from our internal Lateral Link database, including published and non-published searches) were as follows:

• 82 new jobs from June 15, 2019 to September 15, 2019
• 55 new jobs from September 15, 2019 to December 15, 2019
• 50 new jobs from December 15, 2019 to March 15, 2020
• 32 new jobs from March 15, 2020 to June 15, 2020

Comparing only published active job openings for associates in Boston, we see 33 jobs on March 15, 2019 versus 5 jobs on March 15, 2020.^[2]

These new postings are still not 100% indicative of the state of the market. They do not take into account that most firms will consider résumés where there is not a specific job opening. But as I mentioned earlier, firms’ willingness to consider opportunistic submissions for associates has dropped to close to nil during the pandemic.

I have not included partner openings here as firms rarely publish partner hiring needs. A firm’s interest in a partner candidate often has more to do with a partner’s book of business than a specific need, or where there is a specific need, the firm will often engage a recruiting firm “offline” for a more measured and effective approach to the recruiting process. Here at Lateral Link, we work with many law firms in this way.

Conclusions

The Boston lateral market has been booming in recent years. A number of top international firms have opened new offices in Boston recently, and work in the life sciences and tech arenas in particular is abundant. Firms’ specific lateral partner needs are influenced by economic pressures. But there are always needs, when the book of business is right.

We expect the lateral market for Boston law firm partners to be stronger than ever in the coming months. Firms with the stability and the means are taking advantage of the uncertainty experienced by some other firms to bring on top talent and reach their strategic goals.

While associate hiring in Boston has slowed significantly, some firms are still hiring, especially in certain practice areas. This can be a great opportunity to move to a more financially stable firm and work on the most complex and sophisticated matters. We will keep a close eye on the numbers in hopes that the associate market across all firm ranks rebounds soon and quickly.

If you are a law firm or boutique or company of any size considering engaging a legal recruiter to assist with specific searches or for general hiring consultations, I’d love to connect. If you are a partner, counsel or associate who is considering a move, I’d be happy to have a conversation about specific firms that are hiring. I’m also always happy to set up an introductory call if you’re not looking to move in the near future but would like to stay in touch with a legal recruiter for legal market updates and career guidance going forward.

Please reach out to me at agordon@laterallink.com or find me on LinkedIn. I look forward to hearing from you.

[1] All the statistics cited in this post except those specifically noted as coming from the Lateral Link internal database were taken from the Leopard Solutions database. It is possible not all firms report data and that there may be a delay in reporting as well.

[2] Unfortunately, comparable data from our internal database for the March 15, 2019 to June 15, 2019 period is not available.

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts from Lateral Link’s team of expert contributors. This post is by Abby Gordon, Senior Director at Lateral Link, who works with attorney candidates on law firm and in-house searches, primarily in Boston, New York, and Europe.

Prior to joining Lateral Link, Abby spent seven years as a corporate associate with Cleary Gottlieb, focusing on capital markets transactions for Latin American clients in New York and for the last five years for European clients in Paris. A native of Boston, Abby holds a J.D., cum laude, from Georgetown University Law Center and a B.A. in government and romance languages, magna cum laude, from Dartmouth College. Abby also worked with the International Rescue Committee as a Fulbright Scholar in Madrid, Spain. She is a member of the New York, Massachusetts and Maine Bars and is fluent in French and Spanish (and dabbles in Portuguese and Italian). You can view additional articles by Abby here.

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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.

In about two months’ time, law schools across the country will be reopening their doors in some way, shape, or form, welcoming back students after the pandemic forced them to move to remote learning environments. But one school won’t be participating in this joyous reunion with students. In a surprise announcement yesterday afternoon, the administration told students and alumni that the school will never reopen its doors ever again.

Which law school is shuttering under the weight of “financial distress”?

Back in early February, before the pandemic truly took hold, we reported that Concordia University School of Law — one of the only law schools in the country with a perfect ultimate bar pass rate — intended to cease operations, effective at the end of the semester. Thankfully, Concordia was able to find a parent school that would have allowed the school to remain open, but according to Interim Dean Latonia Haney Keith, those plans fell apart. The Idaho Press has more information:

The eight-year-old Boise law school had hoped to stay open through a transfer the School of Law to Concordia St. Paul. The universities in February signed a letter of intent to transfer but were “unable to consummate the transaction,” according to a press release issued Thursday on behalf of the Boise law school.

Latonia Haney Keith, the Boise school’s interim dean, told the Idaho Press that due to pending litigation, she could not disclose many additional details about the reason for the closure. She said the process to transition to Concordia St. Paul was supposed to be complete by the end of the month, but due to “financial distress” at Concordia University-Portland, the process couldn’t continue. She said the closure was out of school officials’ control.

“It’s incredibly disheartening for us today,” Haney Keith said in an interview with the Idaho Statesman. “This was unforeseen and inexplicable in many respects. We were expecting to fully transition to St. Paul, but it unraveled in such a surprising way.”

Upon Concordia’s closure, more than 100 law students will be left without a school. Luckily, the University of Idaho is stepping in to help, and will reportedly admit 145 rising second- and third-year students. This is not the first time Idaho has given aid to Concordia. In 2014, when the school was having accreditation issues, Idaho accepted 53 of Concordia’s students. Now, Idaho hopes to do even more.

“At the time, that was the largest single transfer of law students in the history of education,” Jerry Long, dean at the University of Idaho College of Law, said by phone. “Here, we’re talking about 145 students.” …

“If we can step up and help them out, that’s really what I hope to do,” Long said. “We’ll do everything we can to make it happen, but it’s definitely going to be a challenge.”

Best of luck to everyone at Concordia Law who just found out that they won’t have a law school to go back to come summer’s end.

Boise’s Concordia law school to close [Idaho Press]
Concordia law school hoped to add new affiliate to stay open. That plan has now unraveled. [Idaho Statesman]

Earlier: Law School Left In The Lurch After University Unexpectedly Decides To Close Its Doors

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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.