Category: News Feeds

I knew I had to take the exam. Otherwise I’d have to wait until next July because I have to take the Georgia bar in February. Deferring was not an option. I set up a trash can next to me and I would just puke in between questions. It was one of the toughest things I’ve gone through in my life.

— Johnny Carver, a recent graduate of the University of Miami School of Law, commenting on his experience taking the remote Florida bar exam. The day before the test, Carver was so sick that he had to go to the emergency room, where he tested negative for COVID-19 and the flu. This test experience is almost as bad as that of the fellow who had to sit in his own urine while taking the exam or the woman who had to take the exam while she was in labor.

---

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.

“We sent in the U.S. Marshals, it took fifteen minutes, it was over. Fifteen minutes it was over. We got him. They knew who he was. They didn’t want to arrest him and in fifteen minutes that ended.”

That was President Trump at a rally in North Carolina yesterday describing the shooting of suspect Michael Reinoehl. 

Lawyers on Twitter recoiled in horror at Trump’s apparent admission of an extrajudicial execution of the Antifa supporter sought in the shooting of far-right Patriot Prayer activist Aaron Danielson during protest in Portland, Oregon on August 29.

Although, as The Intercept points out, it’s entirely possible that the “they” who “knew who he was” and “didn’t want to arrest him” are local law enforcement officials in Portland who had taken too long with the legal niceties of compiling an indictment based on actual evidence for the president’s tastes.

On the other hand, Trump did tell Fox’s Jeanine Pirro on September 12 that Reinoehl was shot as “retribution,” so he has been treating this as an execution for a month now.

Two and a half days went by, and I put out, ‘When are you going to go get him?’ And the US marshals went in to get in, and in a short period of time, they ended in a gunfight. This guy was a violent criminal, and the US marshals killed him. And I’ll tell you something — that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this.

Unfortunately, the current president is not a reliable narrator. He could very well be trying to take credit for a gangland-style shooting, but that doesn’t mean it actually happened. Frankly speaking — and how else can we speak after four years of this nonsense — the president talks a lot of shit.

In fact, Reinoehl was shot by local officials deputized by the U.S. Marshal Service. There have been conflicting accounts of the killing, but multiple witnesses told The New York Times that the agents made no real attempt to arrest the suspect, firing off 37 rounds from four guns without announcing themselves as police officers, barely missing bystanders and killing Reinoehl within seconds.

While there were initial reports that Reinoehl threatened officers, it later emerged that his gun was in his pocket when he was shot. Officers claimed he was reaching for it, but they failed to record the encounter on their body cameras, so we’ll probably never know.

Naturally Attorney General Barr, who has consistently maintained that the presence of a weapon on the scene justifies any level of police violence, has blessed this as a clean shooting.

And maybe it is. But if so, it didn’t go down like the president tells it. Because either the police went there for “retribution,” or they went to make a legitimate arrest of a suspect. And the president can maniacally tweet “LAW AND ORDER” ten times a week, but extrajudicial death squad executions amount to anything but.

Trump Boasts About Federal Task Force Killing Antifascist Wanted for Murder in Portland [Intercept]
‘Straight to Gunshots’: How a U.S. Task Force Killed an Antifa Activist [NYT]

---

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

The Florida Bar Exam went this week and was, by most accounts, more successful than the debacle the week before. It’s not really surprising that technology would improve with every run — it’s quite literally why we all asked for a series of stress tests and got laughed at — but it’s nice to see that this one worked a little better. There remains no excuse to run a test that puts anyone in a bind, but we’ll extend the modicum of credit that’s due here.

Because the tests the week before were truly disastrous and no amount of spin can cover that up.

Sam Skolnik over at Bloomberg Law has the numbers from a survey conducted by New York State lawmakers Brad Hoylman and Jo Anne Simon.

More than 40% of law school graduates who took the recent online bar exam in New York said they encountered tech problems during the test, according to a new survey from a pair of state lawmakers who want to let lawyers in training ditch the exam.

The test takers said the tech trouble stemmed from internet issues, test software problems or both. Three in four of the nearly 500 people surveyed also found the experience to be “negative,” including 37% who called it”extremely negative.”

But remember, you’ve got to translate a 75 percent disapproval rating into bar examiner speak. For Judith Gundersen of the NCBE that’s, “Overall, the remote exam was a success.”

This is why lawmakers like Simon and Hoylman are so important. Even after this debacle has concluded — for now — they’re continuing to fight the fight to get this class an emergency diploma privilege program to eliminate the rank unfairness we’ve put these applicants through. If you’re in NY, pressure your representatives to join the diploma privilege legislation they’re proposing. If you’re in other states, get your lawmakers to propose comparable legislation. This is thoroughly broken and the bar examiners are shrugging it off as “overall … a success.”

N.Y. Bar Exam Takers Report ‘Negative’ Online Experience [Bloomberg Law]

---

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.

I guess Senator Ted Cruz was getting jealous of Senator Josh Hawley for monopolizing the “I’m a constitutional lawyer who doesn’t understand the 1st Amendment when it comes to internet content moderation” space, and has jumped in as well. He has announced that he’s going to issue a subpoena to get Jack Dorsey to come justify what he falsely claims is “election interference.”

Let’s be clear here. Like Senator Hawley yesterday, Senator Cruz is full of shit. And, like Hawley, Cruz is a constitutional lawyer who knows this is bullshit. Like Hawley, Cruz has now sent silly, laughable letters to Twitter and Facebook.

And, of course, it really was not that long ago when I remember this very same Ted Cruz screaming about the evils of the “government takeover of the internet.” To him, the idea of net neutrality was “Obamacare for the internet” and he decried:

Washington politicians want the money, and they want more and more control over our speech.

That… describes Ted Cruz trying to punish a company for its editorial decisions. That same article has some other choice quotes that can now be thrown back at him:

[W]e must promote growth in the technological sector, a consistent bright spot for the U.S. economy. But we won’t realize more of that dynamic growth unless we keep the Internet free from the kind of unnecessary regulation that is strangling our health-care, energy and banking industries.

And yet, here he is threatening regulations to strangle growth of the technology sector.

In 2012, those who care about Internet freedom were shocked as bills such as the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP acts, which would regulate speech on the Internet under the guise of protecting property rights, started gaining popularity in Washington. Thankfully, online activists were quick to mobilize to protect their free-speech rights. But we must remain vigilant. Intellectual property must be defended, but any threat to quell speech on the Internet must be treated seriously and subsequently defeated.

The same activists who were “shocked” by SOPA and PIPA are the ones pointing out that Ted Cruz’s attacks on Section 230 are an even bigger threat to quell speech on the internet and need to be treated seriously and defeated. It’s just that Ted Cruz is the one now championing these efforts at censorship.

And for anyone trying to defend Ted Cruz right now, here’s a basic question: how would you respond if a Democratic Senator stood up and said he or she was going to subpoena the CEOs of Fox News or Breitbart to discuss their “bias” in covering the election? People would be throwing an absolute and total shitfit about how unconstitutional that is. And yet, here we have a Republican Senator threatening a company for its own editorial decisions. Ted Cruz’s grandstanding on this issue is, itself, a violation of the 1st Amendment. It is an attempt to punish a private company for its own 1st Amendment protected editorial discretion. And no one should let a grandstanding Cruz get away with this nonsense.

Ted Cruz Once Insisted That Net Neutrality Was The Gov’t Takeover Of The Internet; Now Demands That Twitter Host All Nonsense

More Law-Related Stories From Techdirt:

We Interrupt This Hellscape With A Bit Of Good News On The Copyright Front
Take-Two Opposes Trademark For An Entertainment Company Running An Axe-Throwing Facility
Blatant Hypocrite Ajit Pai Decides To Move Forward With Bogus, Unconstitutional Rulemaking On Section 230

If you thought, after hearing that Wells Fargo’s profit had fallen by more than half in the third quarter and it had stockpiled $14 billion for the upcoming epidemic of coronavirus-related loan losses, that you needn’t pay any attention to it for the rest of the week, as it had undoubtedly fulfilled its weekly quota of bad news, well, you haven’t been paying attention. And were also wrong.

Wells Fargo human resources head David Galloreese wrote that the bank identified employees whom it believes may have “defrauded the U.S. Small Business Administration by making false representations in applying for coronavirus relief funds for themselves through the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, which is administered directly through the SBA.”

Between 100 and 125 Wells Fargo employees were fired as a result, and an internal investigation is ongoing, a person familiar with the situation told CNN Business.

Though it sometimes feels like the world has stopped for COVID-19, it, in fact, soldiers on. And the law school admissions game has changed to reflect these strange times. That includes the LSAT, which moved to an online model, LSAT-Flex — despite some initial hiccups — to accommodate all the people who still want to go to law school.

The LSAT-Flex is similar to the traditional LSAT but is composed of three 35-minute scored sections instead of five 35-minute sections (four scored and one unscored). It’s an online exam available on any computer with a Windows or Mac operating system, and is proctored through webcam and microphone. All of which is nice — especially if the length of the traditional LSAT was a challenge for you — and the online test is evaluated the same as the traditional LSAT by law school admissions professionals.

And, given the under two hours test time, we’ve yet to hear about anyone having to sit in urine or give birth during the exam — which is a marked improvement over other online exams we know about.

It’s a good thing the LSAT-Flex has turned out alright for test takers, because yesterday, the Law School Admissions Council, the group that administers the LSAT, said the online test is going to be here for a while — at least through April 2021.

What does this mean for applicants? Jeff Thomas, executive director of legal programs at Kaplan, has this advice for wannabe law students:

“Given the current trajectory of COVID-19 cases, it seems more than likely that the pandemic will continue to impact our lives for the foreseeable future. The Law School Admission Council’s decision to extend administrations of the LSAT-Flex through April 2021 adds a degree of certainty to an unprecedented admissions cycle and that’s good news for pre-law students who were wondering about which version of the test they would have to take. While the LSAT-Flex and regular LSAT are relatively similar in content and format, the LSAT-Flex is significantly shorter, so knowing exactly what you will face months in advance should have a calming effect on test takers. Additionally, law schools are telling us that test takers who take the LSAT-Flex — the only version of the exam being offered since May — will be at no admissions disadvantage compared to those who submit scores from the regular LSAT. Just prepare for the exam, get a great score to accompany a strong application, and that will go a long way in helping you get into your top choices.”

So good luck and take the gift of a shorter exam and run with it.

---

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).

Welcome to the latest installment of Cadence Corner. In this occasional series of informal conversations, I speak with Monique Burt Williams — CEO of Cadence Counsel, the in-house division of the Lateral Link consortium of legal recruitment firms — about timely topics in the world of legal hiring and recruiting.

Today’s topic: working with flexible, interim, or ad hoc counsel — also known as “contract attorneys,” but as Monique discusses in our conversation, there has been a rebranding in the space. The rebranding reflects the impressive credentials and experience frequently possessed by interim counsel, many of whom graduated from top law schools and practiced at leading law firms or in-house legal departments before opting for more flexible work arrangements.

At Cadence Counsel, Monique connects in-house legal departments with flexible counsel — and she has been very busy these days. During a challenging time for many companies, when many corporate counsels are forced to do more with less, turning to interim counsel has proved to be a superb solution for many.

What can a general counsel or other in-house lawyer do in order to work most successfully with flexible counsel aka contract attorneys? Check out these excellent tips from Monique Burt Williams, CEO of Cadence Counsel, in the latest edition of Cadence Corner:

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

---

Cadence Counsel is the in-house division of Lateral Link, 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.

For the past seven months, the coronavirus crisis has ravaged the legal profession, leading to salary cuts, furloughs, and in some cases, layoffs. But some firms seem to have remained completely unscathed by the global economic turmoil that’s been caused by COVID-19.
Take Greenberg Traurig, a firm that brought in $1,641,790,000 in gross revenue last year, earning it 14th place in the latest Am Law 100 ranking, for example. Back in April, we reported that the firm had offered “a good deal of transparency about [its] financial position” and assured attorneys that there would be no layoffs. At that time, there had been no word of salary cuts at the firm, and to our knowledge, throughout the pandemic, no such cuts were made. The firm made it quite far without having to take any major cost-cutting measures, but sources have told us that GT has now decided to roll out a voluntary separation program for full-time staff.

An internal memo states that while the firm remains in a “strong financial position,” many “roles and responsibilities have inevitably shifted” due to the firm’s remote working environment, and that some employees had allegedly asked if Greenberg Traurig would offer a voluntary separation program so they could pursue “other professional, personal, or academic opportunities” outside of the firm. Ask and you shall apparently receive, GT employees. Eligible staff members for the separation program include legal assistants, administrative assistants, administrative clerks, file clerks, records clerks, and hospitality assistants. Here are the details of the plan’s “enhanced incentive offers” for employees to voluntarily leave the firm:

As noted above, eligible staff members will have until November 15 to decide if they want to take advantage of this program.

(Flip to the next page to see the full buyout memo from Greenberg Traurig.)

We reached out to Greenberg Traurig for comment on the firm’s buyout plan. Here is a statement we received from a firm spokesperson:

We are proud of the fact that our disciplined management, our balanced platform, our committed shareholders, putting our people first, and allowing us to solidly perform thus far in 2020, have allowed us to avoid any across-the-board layoffs or compensation reductions for our lawyers or staff at any levels this year, notwithstanding the pandemic. However, as we now look forward and plan for our future, and what our clients’ and lawyers’ needs are likely to be, we felt remote working has made this program sensible at this time. It is being offered to a majority of our US offices. 

We wish all of the legal professionals at Greenberg Traurig who accept the buyout offer the best of luck should they seek new jobs in the legal industry.

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.

---

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.

Back in March, the sky seemed like it was falling. COVID-19 went from background noise to an all-consuming issue seemingly overnight. Firms were suddenly faced with instantly and safely transitioning their attorneys, staff, and practices to long-term teleworking. The economy sputtered to a stop, and no one knew what next week held, much less next month or next year.

Since then, at least in the legal industry as a whole, things seem to have gone sorta, maybe, possibly okay. Hard recent statistics are difficult to come by, but anecdotally it seems that most midsize and large firms were able to avoid catastrophe. An industry-wide strong Q1 gave most firms momentum to carry them through the initial uncertainty, and many appear to have tightened up their collections timelines to bring revenue in more quickly and cover the gaps caused by COVID-19 in Q2. As the economy reopened in fits and starts across the country, many firms saw their new matter and revenue numbers climb back after a distressing down period.

Looking Closer

But while the 30,000-foot view may suggest the industry experienced a gentle tumble and smooth recovery, as we zoom in we see a vastly more variable experience. Some practices and attorneys have seen their books boom. If Zoom’s outside counsel legal spend hasn’t increased since March, I’ll eat my hat.

Other practices haven’t been so lucky. Lawyers may have seen their biggest clients go dormant, or even out of business. Some entire practice areas are idle. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know 2020 may not be a banner year for hospitality, commercial leasing, and aviation lawyers.

Managing this thrash and variability has been a significant challenge for firm leadership in the past several months, as some practice groups struggle to stay afloat while others rake in the dough. Those issues are set to truly come to a head as we reach the end of many firms’ fiscal years and enter compensation and bonus season.

Dolla Dolla Bills, Y’all

Deciding how to split up the firm pie is a contentious, painful affair in the best of years. 2020’s compensation season is shaping up to be one of the hardest since the Great Recession. While firms aren’t in the aggregate seeing the same revenue contractions they saw in ’08, the volatility and uncertainty of COVID-19 pose a different, but just as tough set of challenges.

Lawyers who had a COVID-driven bad year are in the tough spot of having their book torpedoed by essentially an act of God. No one wants to admit they caused their firm a net loss on the year, much less take a pay cut in the next year. Some might be justifiably expecting a huge bounce back or even a boom period in 2021 as things return to normal. Those attorneys will argue long and hard to keep their comp from getting slashed.

But every dollar paid to currently underperforming attorneys is a dollar that’s not available to reward those folks who made the firm bank despite, or perhaps because of, the pandemic. Those attorneys will surely want to see bonuses and will be demanding a higher base comp figure heading into next year. Those who don’t get their demands met could credibly threaten to walk out the door to a firm that will be happy to pay them more.

And we can’t forget that COVID-19 demanded a huge amount of firm leadership and staff. Hours upon hours of nonchargeable time were poured into fundamentally reshaping how our firms operate day-to-day. Without that tremendous lift, many firms would have sputtered out. Rarely, if ever, has more been demanded of lawyers and staff on the administrative side of the law. Those efforts to keep the ship afloat have to be rewarded, right?

All of this is happening against the backdrop of some of the most uncertain times in living memory. Many management teams will see that uncertainty and want to trim back the compensation budget to weather any further hits to the economy. Even in cases where this is a prudent move, some leaders will view this as politically untenable and may choose to roll the dice, close their eyes, and hope 2021 ends up better than many economists predict.

Money’s Not The Answer

The entire point of money is that there’s never enough of it. Our markets are built around this scarcity principle. It’s why we’re motivated to work for the Benjamins. Even in the biggest of boom years, where every partner in a practice smashes their revenue records, there will be battles over who gets what share of the pie. The battles will still happen because attorneys will always want to argue their case, do better than their neighbor, and get that much closer to funding their retirement/kid’s college/new sports car/next golf vacation. The basic problem of setting annual comp isn’t something that can be solved with money.

For firm management, the way out of this mess is to find a way to broaden our attorneys’ definition of success to something more than just dollars. There will almost always be an irrational bidder out in the market willing to lure our partners away with more money than we can offer. The firms that will navigate the coming months best are the ones that have long been actively developing their internal culture and sense of camaraderie. By making our current situation a great one, a place we can call home, we both make the day-to-day of firm life better and ensure our teams stay together.

Developing culture doesn’t happen overnight. It requires valuing the contributions of everyone in the firm, from the practice group leaders to the night custodians. It takes knowing who we are and what we’re doing, communicating that mission, and getting everyone bought in.

If we don’t teach our people to value one another, all they have left to value is their paychecks. That’s a losing proposition for any management team.

Care for your people first. The rest will follow.

---

James Goodnow is the CEO and managing partner of NLJ 250 firm Fennemore Craig. At age 36, he became the youngest known chief executive of a large law firm in the U.S. He holds his JD from Harvard Law School and dual business management certificates from MIT. He’s currently attending the Cambridge University Judge Business School (U.K.), where he’s working toward a master’s degree in entrepreneurship. James is the co-author of Motivating Millennials, which hit number one on Amazon in the business management new release category. As a practitioner, he and his colleagues created and run a tech-based plaintiffs’ practice and business model. You can connect with James on Twitter (@JamesGoodnow) or by emailing him at James@JamesGoodnow.com.

Listen, I’ve been pretty up front on my position on the special bonuses that, briefly, swept through Biglaw — if a firm has the money (and a lot of them do) they should share the wealth with their employees, sooner rather than later. It’s a tough time out there and, by their nature, the top of the Biglaw pyramid is better situated to weather that than the lower rungs. That’s true of the comparison of partners to associates and doubly true when it comes to staff.

So, I truly do laud the recent move by Goodwin to make an “additional payment” in “recognition of your hard work during these challenging times” made to “all secretaries” (full email available on the next page). Sure, it’s $1,000 and won’t be made until January, but it ain’t nothing.

We can only hope that COVID appreciation bonuses for staff become even more common in Biglaw.

But still, only last week the same firm came out and refused associate fall COVID appreciation bonuses. As a matter of messaging, that’s… less than ideal. At least associates should be comforted with the firm’s stated commitment to “providing compensation that is competitive with the market.”

But until then, associates are left wondering exactly how much their “significant efforts” will be worth to the firm.

As always, we depend on you when it comes to bonus news at other firms. As soon as your firm’s bonus memo comes out, please email it to us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus”) or text us (646-820-8477). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

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

---

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).